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happy birthday to this

August 26, 2018 by krisis

The Location.

What makes you happy?

It’s a simple question that is deceptively hard to answer, because happiness is a spectrum. There are different dimensions of happiness.

On one side of the spectrum, a picture of a cute animal might bring a smile to your face. It makes you happy in the moment, but seeing a cute animal picture every moment of every day won’t make you feel constantly happy. Eventually that little rush of joy and cheer yields diminishing returns

Fulfillment lives on the other side of the happiness spectrum. The complex set of physical and emotional requirements that comprise your long-term happiness make your life satisfying, but they don’t make you happy in every passing moment. Fulfillment is like a big, beautiful house (and may, in fact, include living in a big, beautiful house): it’s a space that’s only as happy as the things you do within it.

Clouds rolling in over our view of the the harbor.

Long term happiness as a house you build and live inside is a metaphor that speaks to me because it’s more than a little bit literal. Usually, life bends in the direction of trying to attain some level of physical, material comfort. That doesn’t have to mean living in a mansion, but no one aspires to be elderly and hate their doorknob or the color of the wall behind their couch.

Happiness isn’t just how your house is built. As they say in business, it’s location, location, location. Even if you have an uncontainable wanderlust, there are probably aspects of your local life that fall somewhere on that spectrum of happiness. The view out of your window. Being close to your friends and loved ones. Eating at your favorite restaurant. Visiting a museum or historic site. Seeing your city’s skyline as you drive towards it.

Could you tell me what makes you happy if I took all of that away? If the house that your happiness built was transplanted to a faraway location that was alien to you?

That has been the question that I’ve been trying to answer with every day of the past year of my life here in Wellington, New Zealand. I’m living in what is essentially my personal version of paradise with my immediate family and all of my personal belongings, but it’s without all of the constants that existed outside of the walls of our home in Philadelphia.

View from the top of the Wellington Cable Car.

For every local, tangible thing that used to make me happy, I’ve had to find some new therapeutic alternative – from where I like to walk to the food I like to eat. It hasn’t been the easiest process. You can replace walks and foods, but not places and people.

Sometimes I find something that’s far on one side of the happiness spectrum and try to force it to work on the other side.

We’re renting a house that I love with one of the best views on this blue planet, but sitting inside of it doesn’t make me happy in every moment.

Conversely, I finally found a brand of ice cream that I like, and while eating 4 litres of ice cream in a 36 hour period is very filling, it isn’t very good at creating long-term happiness when you do it again and again.

(Mostly, it just helps you gain 10 pounds in a very short period of time.)

This has been the weirdest, hardest, most-exciting year of my entire life. In my efforts to redefine my happiness in ways that don’t necessarily include eating ice cream every minute of every day, I have had one amazing, enduring constant to turn to: this. Crushing Krisis, the central trunk to a myriad of roots and branches of my telepresence on the internet, representing my connections to things and people I love all around the globe. It makes my “local” global.

I don’t think I could have survived this past year without it, which is why I am so happy to be here today celebrating such a massive milestone – the eighteenth anniversary of my first post to Crushing Krisis.

EV6 meets the Tasman Sea.

The Parent.

I am a parent of two offspring: a five year old who is starting primary school tomorrow and a blog that is now old enough to be considered an adult in the vast majority of the world.

Crushing Krisis is old enough to buy alcohol here in New Zealand and to vote back in America – one thing I am totally disinterested in and another I’d be totally into if it wasn’t voter fraud.

When you give birth to a child you usually do so with every intention of keeping them alive for eighteen years. You might love some parts of getting them to eighteen more than others (personally, I wasn’t the biggest fan of Age 4), but you’re in it for the long haul with the hope that they become functional adults at the end of the journey.

We embark across a very precarious suspension bridge.

You don’t tend to have the same intentions for starting a blog. I didn’t. Most bloggers don’t make it through the rough spots if they last any longer than teething does with an infant, let alone the Terrible Twos or whatever other awful long phase most people’s kids go through. Playing “Let It Go” on repeat. Being teenagers.

In many ways, blogs are easier than kids. They survive neglect without any ill effects! They don’t throw a fit if they don’t like the color you’ve dressed them in! The tradeoff is that they take a lot more effort. As kids get older their lives become increasingly independent. They can exist without you. Blogs can’t.

EV6 is getting old enough now that she is starting to fall out of like with some things in her life. It’s a strange phenomenon, because you tend to define your kid by their interests (or, at least, I do) and suddenly that definition isn’t so simple.

All at once, your child isn’t this adorable little button who loves hugs and the color blue. They are their own dynamic person with constantly shifting preferences and opinions.

CK is the same way, although I needed all of these years of perspective to understand that. Like a person in the world, it cannot be entirely defined by what it was interested in the most in the past or at the present moment.

Some of its interests have persisted since it’s first day, like my writing about music. Some aspects arrived later, like my comic guides. Others have disappeared, like bitching about my college classes. Crushing Krisis has grown through its adolescence and its terrible teen years. It has been confused about what and who it wants to be.

Many people would tell you that a child is unlike a blog because the child thinks for themselves. A blog is the opposite of that. It’s like a Schrodinger’s Child. You don’t know what it’s thinking until the next time you decide open up the little white box and start typing in it.

Then, all of a sudden, it’s something new all over again. Just like a child.

The harbor at sunrise, shot by E.

The Lottery.

The best way I can think to describe the past year of my life is this: imagine you won the lottery and the prize was a one-way trip halfway around the world and zero dollars.

I still marvel at the fact that we were invited to immigrate to New Zealand. In that very literal sense, it was winning a lottery (a lottery that happened to involve E being an amazing and highly-employable genius). I was never remotely interesting in living abroad, let alone around the world in a different hemisphere. The entire process happened abruptly within three very tumultuous months of our lives last year.

People love to speculate about what they’d do if they won the prize-money sort of lottery. Financial independence. Splurging! Living your best possible life!

Where would you begin? What would you do? Would you still cook yourself dinner or wash your car on a sunny day?

I’ve asked myself this question many times before our big move. Given infinite time and resources, would I still blog? Would I be interested in the same things I am today, or would I evolve to doing something entirely new?

What if you had the chance to create your best possible life in the best possible place, just without the part where you won a life-altering amount of money?

The quarry at the end of my regular bush reserve hike (and Petone out beyond it).

I’ve been answering that question daily for the past 365 days. Crushing Krisis has been surprisingly central to that process, even when I haven’t been writing on it. I keep challenging myself to try new things and chase new opportunities, and CK has either defined them, recorded them, or acted as the negative space that surrounded them.

I’ve lived so many lives in the past year, many of them new to me. There were the familiar ones, like blogger, full-time father, comic book expert, music critic, drag fan, and business consultant.

Others were new – or, at least, unfamiliar. Talk show host. Hiker. Video editor. Ocean swimmer. Importer of goods. School parent. Job applicant. International home-seller. Gym rat. Gourmet home chef. Board game playtester.

CK was a place to record some of that, but also a way to define myself to people I met along the way. EV6’s daycare manager read CK. I referred to the inner workings of CK for a consulting gig about digital transformation for a business. I sent links to particular stories to new acquaintances, and introduced others to my comics content. My daily YouTube talkshow referred to CK’s comic guides as much as its posts about blue hair and encountering ghosts. Some of my activities started out as fodder for blog posts and then turned into their own independent adventures.

With that comes my regular, unceasing lament of the past 18 years: it would be nice if I had written about it all. Seeing it listed here reminds me of how epic this year has been and how much of it has passed unremarked.

I start almost every day thinking about what I ought to blog, but I’ve come a long way from regretting when I don’t wind up blogging a thing. Now I draw power from it. Life is a Venn Diagram of things and some number of them overlap to make me happy.

That intersection doesn’t have to perfectly overlap with things I blog about. Some happiness can pass by unremarked.

One of the oldest trees in the Otari-Wilton Bush Reserve.

The Pivot.

This was the year of CK’s unintentional pivot to video.

That makes talking about this year of CK extra strange. It was among my most-successful years, no matter how I measure success – most fun, most regularly-updated, most-seen, most-commented. Yet, it included some of the least written content of all 18 years of the blog.

The pivot wasn’t intentional. Or, at least, the videos were intentional, but I didn’t intend for them to become CK’s primary content or for them to supplant my writing quite as much as they did. They were one of those lottery-winning best-life things – something I was always curious about doing but never had the time to wrestle into existence.

All I knew at the start was that I had the compelling visual of hundreds of comic books wrapped up in butcher paper and bubble wrap and it seemed a pity to go through the effort of unwrapping them all without some sort of documentation.

I had no idea that the process of documenting my unwrapping would wind up as an 80+ episode web series that drew hundreds of subscribers and dozens of commenters. Clearly I knew how many books I had to unwrap, but I had no concept of the scope of what I was getting myself into – or that it would spin off several other video series along the way. I would have never guessed that I would spend five months staying up most nights until 2am or later editing and uploading video.

Much of the musing and introspection that used to fuel short, pithy blog posts moved out of the realm of the written word and into the introductions of the videos. On one hand, that meant there were five straight months of daily content of me talking about my thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreams. On the other hand, very little of that content made it out of the videos and into writing.It doesn’t count towards CK’s legendarily huge and always expanding word count. I cannot search it, excerpt it, or bind it in a book.

As I get underway on a new season of video production, I’m still not certain how I feel about that. CK was launched as a way to capture my thoughts, and video is a great way to do that. Yet, I’ve always considered myself a writer above most other things in life and, even when they are carefully scripted, videos aren’t writing.

CK is not the CK I know without me being a writer at least some of the time. But, just like a child, CK isn’t all about me and what I want it to be. Sometimes it is its own aggregate thing.

Maybe video is a part of what it has grown up to be.

Your author.

The Thanks.

I have now officially been a blogger for half of my life.

At some point in that half-a-life, working on Crushing Krisis stopped being a goal I measured in single years and started to become a devotion that progressed in fractions of life slowly increasing towards this day.

I’ve pictured this moment – writing this post – for a long time. Now I’m here and I’m not entirely sure what to say or what comes next. This was the biggest milestone I ever pictured hitting. From here on out it’s just decade markers and endless year-long slices of infinity while I watch an ever-dwindling number of longer-running blogs give way to attrition.

As single year slices of my life go, this has been an insular one. It’s probably the least I’ve ever spoken in a year of my life, and while that silence has been healthy it ha also an indication that I’ve been separated from so many of the people I usually thank in these posts.

I am still thankful for them all. Some of them might not even realize how much of an effect they’ve had on keeping me alive and upright from thousands of miles around the globe.

Thank you to all of my Philadelphia friends out there posting on social networks – whether it’s every day or just once in a blue moon.  You keeping me connected to the city I love. To Jess, for hunting me down. To Erich, my fellow fan. To Jill, for being a wonderful mix of love and snark who never tires of me responding to her posts. To Bill, for saving our asses. To Mikey & Allie, the spirit of Philly (or, at least, South Jersey). To Maya and Ben, for keeping me connected to my professional world.

Thank you to my comic book friends, for helping me stay centered and sane this year. To FanGirl, my amazing cohost and an amazing woman in STEM. To OmniDog, for inviting me to be in the video club to begin with. To Sherlock, my down under feminist ally. To Ian, who gets it. To Zack and Thomas and the rest of my X-Twitter crew, who opened their hearts to my weirdness and put up with me replying to their whole day of thoughts all at once when I wake up in the morning (which is their evening).

I had a revelatory, spiritual experience with this massive rainbow. No, I am not joking.

Thank you to all of our Wellington friends, especially my frequent partner in crime M – even if our misadventures didn’t make it onto CK. To L, for keeping an eye on us. To D&A for being the first friends-with-kids we actually hang out with regularly. To everyone at EV6’s school who taught me as much about being a Kiwi as they taught her.

Thank you to Lindsay, for keeping tabs on me and my happiness. To Gina, for remembering what our friendship was about before the bands. To Jake and Lauren and all of the adventures I so wish I could join. To Ashley, because we are still a band even with a whole world between us. To Alison, for never laughing at me for being thankful for lifting one additional kilogram.

Thank you to my Patrons. You have been critical in keeping Crushing Krisis alive and in letting me try new things while every penny is tied up elsewhere because I did not win the actual lottery. There would be no Year 18 without you, no comic guides, no videos. No anything.

Thank you to E, for making this new life possible and fighting for it every day.

Thank you to EV6, who endures more of my crazy than anyone else in this world, who is a new kid every day, and who reads me comic books when I’m not feeling well.

Thank you, and happy birthday to this.

Filed Under: august 26th

happy birthday to this

August 26, 2017 by krisis

EV6 rides through our old neighborhood on her trusty balance bike.

Every so often a relatively-common cultural quirk of one country becomes the fad of another.

Sometimes it’s pop stars. Other times it’s food or some random bit of technology. Suddenly we’re all singing the “Macarena” and checking our Tamagotchis while fitting a drizzle of aioli and pickled something-or-another into our Swedish diets.

A few years ago a book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing was the quirk that rose to hegemonic popularity. Western audiences marveled at how some people find it remarkably easy to cull their belongings so they can live in small (to us) spaces.

At the top of a ferris wheel at a local carnival with EV6 and my mother.

I don’t understand how the concept managed to fill out a whole book. The basic tenet (spoilers!) is that you should keep only that which brings you joy, because those possessions are the things you love.

This particular magic is lost on me. I am immune to the Japanese art of decluttering because I am swimming in the joy of my possessions. It’s very rare that I give or throw something away – it’s only if the thing has completely outgrown its use. I still have my first pair of jeans and my first comic book. I don’t have my first guitar, which lacked utility, but I still have my second – which plays nicely.

Seeing Katie Barbato open for Mutlu at Boot and Saddle with Lindsay and Jeremy.

This makes it hard for me to pack for trips, even harder to pack to move houses, and nearly impossible to both. I just want to be near all of my possessions. I want that joy.

I’m the same way on the internet. There are at least four or five times I really ought to have given up on the older bits of Crushing Krisis it and started it anew. Once when my career got underway in earnest, again when I switched to WordPress, perhaps another time when I started focusing more on my band and local music, yet again while I started blogging about comics, and possibly a fifth time as I began to write about parenting.

I should probably restart it right now, as I begin life in a new city and country!

On the Philadelphia Zoo balloon with EV.

I don’t know why I haven’t. Keeping all these words around every time I add a new topic has done intolerable things to my SEO.

What can I say? I just find joy in having these more than two million words around, which is how I’ve arrived at today – the seventeenth anniversary of Crushing Krisis. [Read more…] about happy birthday to this

Filed Under: august 26th

she can read (much to my amazement)

June 13, 2017 by krisis

Much to my amazement, our nearly 4-year-old seems to have quite suddenly gotten the hang of reading.

Actual reading. Not just spitting back memorized texted in a simulacrum of reading. I still remember the first time I witnessed that, because it was the day we told all our friends we were pregnant. It was our friend M’s daughter’s third birthday, and she “read” me an entire book from front to back. I was in total shock that she could read so many words and so quickly, until her father pointed out that she had simply memorized the entire thing.

Jumanji Cover

Our copy of Jumanji came with a CD of the audiobook narrated by Robin Williams. I put off playing it for EV6 as long as I could but finally the asking became more constant. I let her follow along with the book on the couch while I cried silently in the kitchen.

EV6 has always been good at memorization. It started one night when she was still impossibly small when she spat back the final page of Nightsong at me during her bedtime reading.

That was just the beginning. Since then I’ve heard this girl recite dozens of her books back at us – including a word-for-word rendition of Jumanji, and that is not a short children’s book.

Her current favorite thing to memorize is comic books, which I suppose must be slightly easier to do since you can focus on dialog balloons as if you are learning the script of a play. She has the entirety of the first 20 issues of Lumberjanes committed to memory. Sometimes she’s got it down after hearing it only two or three times, it’s amazing.

It’s amazing, and it keeps her nose buried in books all day every day, but it’s not reading.

I haven’t been too fussed with pushing reading skills on her while I’ve been staying at home. That’s in part because I learned to read so late, and partly because I feel like America’s school industrial process is overly quick to push advanced reading and math skills on kindergartners who aren’t always developmentally ready for them.

Despite that, I also haven’t ignored the skills. We’re always sounding out the words we encounter during the day and having little spelling bees on the refrigerator. I’s exclusively directed play and that’s fine. She’s three. I don’t expect her to read.

Or, didn’t expect her to read, because that’s what she’s been doing for the last week. [Read more…] about she can read (much to my amazement)

Filed Under: books, family Tagged With: children's books, lindsay, memories, reading

Song of the Day: “If You Harden On The Inside” by Hezekiah Jones

February 28, 2017 by krisis

This post makes me absolutely giddy with joy: I’m debuting a song by my favorite band in Philly, who I also interviewed for this post, and if you buy it all the proceeds go straight to Women’s Law Project.

The song is “If You Harden On The Inside,” the first new tune from Hezekiah Jones since after their 2016 EP Har Har Har and a track on December’s Vilomahed project curated by Michele Lynn. You can get it for as little as $1, although I encourage you to donate more!

Hezekiah Jones is the folk collective formed by and around Philly-based songwriter Raphael Cutrufello. He pulls a peculiar double-duty while fronting the band, acting the entire time as Hezekiah, with each one of the band’s rotating cast of musicians presenting themselves as another fictional member of the Jones clan.

(My favorite: Dow Jones.)

That little touch of mythology goes a long way to contextualizing Cutrufello’s songwriting. When you hear Hezekiah Jones’ music, you have the profound sense that a weird band of back-country geniuses have briefly descended from their cloistered home on a hill to play for you, like a roving band of thespians in Shakespeare.

(It may be a hill in an alternate timeline.)

The songs are full of piercing observations on the human condition, always tinged with optimism. There’s also a smattering of details that place them in a vaguely post-apocalyptic landscape full of endless roiling wars and the Mississippi river expanded out to a sea.

Hezekiah Jones, photographed by Lisa Schaffer.

Hezekiah Jones, photographed by Lisa Schaffer.

“If You Harden On The Inside” could easily be a handclaps-and-harmony 60s pop song if it was dressed up with a full band arrangement. Instead, a whimsical chorus of Hezekiahs sings “blah blah blah” as backing to the track, later joined by a swell of electric pianos. As the song whirrs to life with its halting rhythm it gives serious vibes of Dirty Projectors.

Cutrufello AKA Jones plays everything on this track save for drums by Daniel Bower (AKA Roy G. Biv Jones) and bass by Philip D’Agostino (AKA Pepe Jones), a Philly music scene legend and touring member of Get The Led Out.

Half your saints
Are playing video games
Or they’re out doing meth
Or too depressed to get out of bed

All these bodies
What a delicate make
If you harden on the inside
You’ll be easy to break

If someone
Gave into love
Their guard would be down
We could steal all their stuff

That is the paradox of our human fragility in three stanzas, each repeated to make sure the message sinks in. [Read more…] about Song of the Day: “If You Harden On The Inside” by Hezekiah Jones

Filed Under: philly music, Song of the Day, Year 17 Tagged With: charity, Hezekiah Jones, songwriting, Women's Law Project

35-for-35: 2001 – “Subdivision” by Ani DiFranco

November 19, 2016 by krisis

general_ani-difranco-by-danny-clinch-5

My second-favorite shot of Ani, shot by Danny Clinch.

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]As occasionally problematic and non-intersectional as Ani DiFranco can be, sometimes her willingness to just say stuff makes for compelling, provocative songs.

Case and point: her song “Subdivision” from 2001’s double-album Revelling/Reckoning, which starts with the line “White people are so scared of black people.”

Despite the bombshell opening line, “Subdivision” is not a song exclusively about racial divides, but about Ani’s beloved home town of Buffalo and her beloved country. Her city has seemingly been left behind by a march of modernity. Here, she wonders if that march is just about having the money and privilege to put more space between ourselves and our fears. Maybe if we’re far enough away we no longer have to confront them.

Except: when we’ve forgotten, buried, or sublimated all that we’ve been running away from, how will we know when it is stil driving our biases?

I had a sense of foreboding when I picked “Subdivision” as my song from 2001 as I prepared for this campaign last month. I’d be posting it just 10 days after the election. I wondered how its message would play in a post-election America, the same country we lived in the day before the election but potentially seen through a new lens. What would it say about a world where Hillary Clinton won the election? What about a world where Donald Trump won? Would it be equally true in both?

Now we know the outcome, and I ask that you simply listen and take from it whatever message you hear. That first line will always stand out for me, but in this redefined world it is teaching me something different than it was a few weeks ago.

Subdivision
by Ani DiFranco

White people are so scared of black people
They bulldoze out to the country
And put up houses on little loop-dee-loop streets
And while america gets its heart cut right out of its chest
The Berlin wall still runs down main street
Separating east side from west

And nothing is stirring, not even a mouse
In the boarded-up stores and the broken-down houses
So they hang colorful banners off all the street lamps
Just to prove they got no manners
No mercy and no sense

[Read more…] about 35-for-35: 2001 – “Subdivision” by Ani DiFranco

Filed Under: elections, Song of the Day Tagged With: 35-for-35, Ani DiFranco

35-for-35: 1996 – “On The Way Up” by Peter Mulvey

November 14, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]How do you remember the moments that changed the course of your life? Can you replay them perfectly over and over in digital crispness? Did time stand still? Do you feel like you were standing outside of yourself, watching, so you can rotate the entire scene around you like a panorama?

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the first time I saw Peter Mulvey play it altered the course of my life. There’s some other timeline where young Peter stayed at dinner at Serrano’s a little bit longer and skipped seeing the unknown opening act for Susan Werner and missed him entirely.

peter-mulvey-rapture

If you have Amazon Prime you can stream this AMAZING record for free! Just click!

Would I have still heard his music down the line? Maybe, but it would not have had the megaton impact on me as seeing Peter Mulvey at the height of his youthful powers from less than ten feet away.

At the time, male singers comprised approximately 1% of my CD collection, so seeing his name on the bill had no special meaning for me. My friend Rachel and I took our reserved seats at a table in the front of the house and waited for the opening act to take the stage.

He was everything I loved on guitar and something more – all of the DiFranco tunings, all of the percussive, staccato strumming, plus other things – partial capos and half barres over open strings. My songs like “Icy Cold,” “Lost,” and “Relief” could never exist without him.

One of the less show-y songs in his set was “On The Way Up,” a song from his seminal album Rapture. It didn’t have the pyrotechnics of his half-capo, mega-detuned “Love Is Not Enough” but it still left its mark. It’s a simple tune in three, a song about constantly rising but never feeling like you’re enough – not for yourself or for the partner you love.

I think it was the song that won my mother over to Peter later, listening in our tiny red kitchen, so that she became my companion for future shows. And, later, it became one amongst E’s many favorites. We used to refer to it as “our hypothetical, eventual first dance,” for an equally hypothetical, eventual wedding we weren’t discussing seriously.

Which brings me back to Serrano’s and The Tin Angel, 11 years later. Peter Mulvey was playing there on a Friday night, and E and I were attending with both of our mothers for their birthdays, which were 11 years apart. I had reached out to Peter earlier in the week to see if I could stop by during his soundcheck and have him finally teach me the proper way to play his song “The Wings of the Ragman,” which I had approximated here on CK in Trio but never quite could get the hang of.

E did not want to join me, but I insisted. “He’s my guitar idol,” I pleaded with her. “This would be like if you got to sing with…” I sputtered, “I don’t know. Pat Benatar. What if you were going to sing with Pat Benatar? I would come and witness that moment, and maybe snap a photo for you.”

E finally acquiesced, and so we found ourselves upstairs in the Tin Angel just after 6pm on a Friday, the room empty save for the two of us, Peter, and the sound man. Peter came back and said hi, shook our hands, and asked me if I wanted to get out my guitar and run through “Ragman.” I complied, just barely, my hands shaking so much I could barely get into the right tuning. He started walking me through the song, explaining in his easy way why certain voicings were different and why he was using the dominant and so forth before eventually realizing I was ready to faint and saying, “You know what, maybe I should write this down for you.”

And that is how I sat and watched while Peter Mulvey tabbed out his own song for me.

That is not the end of the story.

After we were through with my lesson, he said, “You know, you ought to stick around while I sound check. I might play a few things I won’t be doing during the show.” E and I found ourself seated in the first row of chairs behind the door of the Tin while Peter walked up on stage and began working with the sound guy to get his guitar EQ just right. After playing the portions of a few songs, he began to play “On The Way Up.”

I leaned over to E.

“We should dance,” I said, in a husky whisper.

“Dance?” she replied, incredulously. “You want to dance?”

It took some coaxing, but I convinced her to get up out of her seat and waltz subtly with me at the back of the club.

“You know, while we’re here and he’s playing this song, maybe we should ask him to play our hypothetical, eventual wedding.”

“Peter,” she hissed into my ear while we waltzed, “that is crazy.”

“You’re right,” I said, slipping my hand into my pocket to draw out a tiny black box, “that why I asked him to play our engagement instead.”

And that is how E and I became engaged. You see, I had been trading emails all week, first with Peter’s management, and then with Peter himself, to arrange this setup, having already obtained a ring which was proverbially burning a hole in my pocket. To his eternal credit, Peter tried mightily to talk me out of my plan to make sure I wasn’t doing something silly or fannish, but I eventually prevailed upon him how much the Tin Angel and his song meant to me and to us, and so he agreed to play along.

Also to his eternal credit, when Peter saw that the deed was done, he effortlessly segued into “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

Here is Peter Mulvey playing “On The Way Up” during his set that evening: [Read more…] about 35-for-35: 1996 – “On The Way Up” by Peter Mulvey

Filed Under: Engagement, Song of the Day, Year 17 Tagged With: 35-for-35, Peter Mulvey

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