Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

essays

Personal essays from Krisis on everything from parenting to immigrant life to driving, and much more.

Captain Crunch and the Butterfinger Cowboy

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The tastes of many American snack foods have become a distant memory after five years spent living in New Zealand.

A few familiar American snack brands make it to our remote shores and supermarket shelves, usually via companies with an Australian outpost. We can buy Cheerios and the occasional Fruit Loops, and there are $13 pints of Ben & Jerry’s to be had for the big spenders, but the vast amount of familiar expat snacks are absent from most Kiwi grocery stores

Mostly I don’t mind. My solution has largely been to cook a lot more meals and to eschew snack foods like cookies, chips, and crackers entirely. Why start a fresh snacking habit when I can instead scan down an aisle of unfamiliar cookie packages and not know what a single one of them taste like?

Being oblivious to local brands is a terrific diet.

The one kink in this flawless snack free life is that I sometimes catch myself regaling the kid with one of my distant snack food memories. As she has grown older I’ve realized how many of my stories tie to specific foods, like the routine of buying Twizzlers every time I went to the movies (and how it’s essential to enjoy them when they are fresh) or the excitement of discovering I had a Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpet in my lunch (and the process of rubbing them against your shirt to make sure the frosting wouldn’t get stuck to the plastic).

While I don’t necessarily miss the indulgences I describe to her, I do sometimes regret that I can’t give her the same experiences. I don’t need her to like all of the same snacks as me, but being unable to give her the opportunity to turn her nose up at them makes me feel like I’m missing some essential aspect of the parenting experience.

One snack in particular, has come up again and again in these conversations: Captain Crunch cereal. Yes, I know the actual name is “Cap’n Crunch,” but I’m not typing that repeatedly. It’s undignified for a man of the Captain’s position and tenure.

I explained the mouth-shredding experience of eating Captain Crunch to the kid at least a dozen times over. I’m uncertain why Fruit Loops were able to make the ocean-spanning journey to our shores and stores while the good Captain – himself a seafarer of some renown – could not. New Zealand loves peanut butter!

(E’s theory is that Captain Crunch (actually, a Commander) is obviously modeled on historical colonizers, who aren’t as welcomed as junk food mascots here as they are in the states. My theory is that because Kiwis don’t dip cookies in milk, they simply aren’t interested in more cookie-esque cereals since there’s no built-in allure to eating a bowl full of them.)

(Seriously, they don’t dip cookies in milk here. It’s a whole ‘nother post entirely.)

Occasionally I’ll fall down the internet rabbit hole of looking into buying Captain Crunch by the case. Even in bulk, the cost of having it shipped to New Zealand is prohibitive. Plus, I’d be crushed to find out that customs had incinerated a case of contraband cereal for violating some form of border integrity (which has happened to E before while trying to import spices).

It was these memories (and cravings) for the Captain that found the kid and I staring into the tantalizing maw of US import store in our local shopping center a few weeks ago. It is tucked into an odd corner of the parking lot such that I don’t usually need to walk past it, but a rainy day of household errands had us scurrying from from awning to awning to avoid getting soaked.

There we were, slightly damp and slightly breathless, peering through the window. There was the Captain, his smiling face splayed across a row of familiar red boxes, smiling back at me. It was the first time I had seen him in person in almost five years. [Read more…] about Captain Crunch and the Butterfinger Cowboy

19 thoughts

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When I wake up early in the morning for a meeting with my team in the states, one of the first things I do afterward is visit the 8YO’s room. She claims she will wake up at 6:30am to read; she is a voracious reader. The alarm goes off, and she shuts it off and continues sleeping. “No reading today?” I’ll ask, as I give her a kiss on the cheek.

In 2012 when the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting happened I remember sitting numbly at my desk at work. We were just one month pregnant. “How can you send a child to school in this country?” I thought to myself.

She likes to have a whole orange sliced up into wedges at part of her lunch, no matter how incongruous that is with the rest of lunch. But, you have to transfer each half orange as a perfect bisected globe onto her plate so she can be surprised anew that it’s actually comprised of wedges. She’s a slow eater. So slow that I can cook my lunch, eat, and tidy up while she’s still eating. Yesterday I finished all of that and then stood behind her chair, my hands resting on her shoulders while she ate.

In 2015 when the Charleston church shooting happened I remember solemnly saying the victims’ names out loud to keep their thought alive.

In 2016 when the Pulse nightclub shooting happened I was a stay-at-home parent. I remember watching the Democrat filibuster in real time while tweeting and blogging about it, and calling my Senator and representative. I was crying so hard that day that I think I asked someone else from the family to visit to play with the kid. I remember thinking, “How can you raise a child in this country?”

In 2017, almost exactly five weeks ago to this very day, E had a job offer in New Zealand.

In 2017 when the Las Vegas concert shooting happened we had just moved into our first house in New Zealand. I remember frantically checking on my former bandmate, Ashley, who was in Las Vegas and attending that music festival. She was already on her plane home, and it was one of the longest days of my life waiting for her to land and reply to my messages.

In 2018 when the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting happened we hadn’t even been in New Zealand for six months. I remember thinking, “even after Pulse, nothing changed.”

Later in 2018 when the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting happened I remember loading and reloading the profile of a friend in Pittsburgh, only for him to later affirm he was okay but that was his synagogue on his block.

In 2019 when the Christchurch mosque shooting happened I was sitting at my desk at the Ministry of Business, less than 10 feet from the Chief Executive of the ministry, watching as her office transformed into the war room. I felt physically sick. Didn’t we leave America to move away from this?

Later that same day, Prime Minister Jacinda Arden told our nation and the world that New Zealand’s gun control laws would change.

Just 18 days later, all but one member New Zealand’s parliament voted in favor of a ban on (and buy-back of) semi-automatic weapons.

I saw news of a shooting in Philadelphia and rushed tearfully to Facebook to check that my friends were all okay only to realize it was a headline from several years ago. It had already happened, I had already grieved it. I just didn’t remember. There have been so many mass shootings in the United States this year alone that I cannot remember them all and the ways they all made me feel. I can’t remember all of the places I’ve been when I heard about another shooting this past decade. I can no longer remember all of the names and stories of the victims that seemed so indelible to me at the time. I still say their names when I look them up to remind myself.

Yesterday as news emerged that 19 children and 2 teachers had been killed in the Uvalde, Texas school shooting I stood at the kid’s chair, my hands resting on her shoulders while she ate. The kids were her age, in her grade. 19 children. 19 families who would never get to linger in these little moments with those children every again.

10 years ago I wondered if we could raise a child in a country that would allow Sandy Hook to happen and not doing anything to change it.

5 years ago we decided we could not.

Today we live in a country that has banned the kinds of weapons most often used to perpetrate these murders.

Every day I live in grief for every child who has died to gun violence in America, but also for those who walk into school each day wondering if this will be their day. Children younger than my own child. Children who I know and love and children I’ve never met.

Every day I wish America would change.

slow mo(nth)

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The speed limit in Wellington varies from 30 kilometers per hour to 100 kilometers per hour, depending on if you are on a residential street or a highway.

I spent all of March moving no faster than 8 KPH.

Not coincidentally, that was also the speed I had been moving in January and February, but for an entirely different reason: I ran over 80 kilometers the first 59 days of the year.

When we lived in Philly proper over a decade ago I walked everywhere. Even home from work several days a week.  I never ran.

I walked everywhere and it felt like I was capable of everything. I walked and got promoted, walked and composed songs in my head, walked and wrote whole blog posts.

That’s why I went on my first five kilometer walk the first week in January while E and the kid were off camping. Not for some New Year’s Resolution. I walked because it was a lovely evening. I walked because I wanted to relocate that powerful creative space in my brain.

Walking was easy. Too easy. Not enough resistance for my body or my brain. Walking quickly turned to running, which quickly turned into the fastest I’d ever ran. Not fast for a real runner, but a high speed for me. Eight kilometers an hour.

For my brain it was slow motion. It was the most cumulative time I got to spend alone with my thoughts away from my family and the internet in a long time. I was getting faster and faster with every incremental 5K and the acceleration was starting to bleed into my home life.

I was ready for a big March full of projects.

Nothing in specific, mind you. It was more a general thrum of positive, productive energy waiting to be unleashed.

That was how I felt the morning of Monday, February 28th. It was a bright, sunny morning at the tail end of summer, and I was going to have some long-put-off minor dental work done at 9am. That doesn’t sound like a good time, but it was one of those things that I had worried over for so long that it felt like it had been permanently tattooed onto a checklist of looming anxieties tallied by my brain. Finally having it done was going to free up many brain circuits for my big March.

That was the morning I woke up to discover that the minor kid’s weekend cold had now spread to E, and that the two of them were in miserable shape. COVID cases were spiking in Wellington, and while the kid is a masking pro she had also plucked a loose tooth out of her mouth on Friday at school lunch just before this cold hit.

Did they have COVID? If they did, I probably shouldn’t go to the dentist to let them spelunk around in my oral cavity for several hours.

Ah, but here was the rub. New Zealand was rolling out Rapid Antigen Tests on March 1.

The next day.

But, due to the spike in cases, all of our ample two drive-up testing locations in the city were completely overwhelmed. They weren’t even doing the shove-the-q-tip-up-the-nose PCR tests anymore. They were just slinging some special pre-sale RATs into your car window and calling it a day.

That was the official testing recommendation of the NZ COVID hotline: getting some RATs slung at you. Otherwise, the official recommendation was to wait two days and then try to buy a RAT at retail. Except, not if you thought you might have COVID. In that case, just isolate.

That was okay. It was fine. I’m good in a crisis. It wasn’t any worse than a long-awaited dental procedure. I called the dentist to cancel on account of my potential COVID exposure, grabbed my phone, my wallet, and a mask, and leapt into the car wearing the same too-small t-shirt I had slept in. This didn’t need a big plan, a water bottle, or packing up my laptop. I’d drive up to the testing center, get some tests thrown in my window, and be back in an hour. Two, tops.

Had I over-thought, over-packed, and over-prepared, would things have gone any differently? Was I moving too fast in that moment? I had all of March to think about it, and I still can’t say for sure. [Read more…] about slow mo(nth)

the influencer tax

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I have been thinking a lot about blogging lately. Mostly because of international taxes.

Taxes! Who would’ve thought that when I launched this endeavor 21 years ago that I would be tackling such hip and relatable topics such as international tax law.

When you move to a new country, you learn new things in phases. First the obvious things, like which side of the road to drive on and where to buy expensive cheese. Later, the cultural things, like songs that are more popular here than anywhere else or the sort of cheap improvised sandwiches people had for dinner as kids. And, still later, a bunch of dry, uninteresting things about international tax law.

That is what lead E and I to have a video meeting with a knowledgable but-also-hilarious tax professional last week.

(That’s really my ideal balance for any sort of professional advisor. Completely reliable, incredibly funny. Leave no stone unturned and put me at ease.)

As part of meeting with any tax professional, you are inevitably going to discuss all of your income, assets, and expenses. Which means in the middle of a lot of very serious talk about very adult topics, I had to broach the topic of blogging. Not just blogging, but blogging, comic books, YouTube-ing – my whole internet package.

Awesome Tax Person: “I see you have listed some items related to your website.”

Me: “Yes,”

ATP: “Do you sell a product or service?”

Me: “No.”

ATP: “Do you get paid to write?”

Me: “Not quite.”

ATP: “Hold on. Are you some sort of influencer?”

Me: [shaking my head vigorously in dissent]

E: [nodding her head in agreement and cackling]

ATP: “Oh, how interesting! The revenue department just put out a very interesting memo on internet influencers and I wasn’t sure if I’d need to reference it, but now I do!”

Dear readers, when I tell you that the Awesome Tax Person said this last part with obvious verve and glee you will understand why I enjoyed her so much. [Read more…] about the influencer tax

on burning your (free) (comic) books (and Secret Empire’s FCBD issue)

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Have you ever burned something in effigy?

The book The House of Leaves being burned by Learning Lark

Photos of an old lover. A flag. Perhaps a Milli Vanilli record?

Burning an object is a way to symbolically exorcise bad memories, a bold form of protest, and a sure way to destroy something you are determined to repudiate.

What about a burning a book?

Book burning carries a slightly different connotation than torching your pop music records, because it can evoke the censorship and destruction of irretrievable historical records. It conjures echoes of the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and Nazi book-burning – of lost knowledge and repression. Regimes and religions alike have used book burning as a public spectacle to symbolize the purification of their subjects after being exposed to some kind of wrongful thinking.

I propose that this sort of ritual destruction exists on a spectrum of acceptability that begins at the intensely personal (photos), continues through the overtly political (flags), and finally comes to rest at objecting to thought (art, history), and the context through which we view each destructions is dictated by the relative power of the people doing the burning compared to the people being burned.

(Now I have to explain some comic book stuff for a few paragraphs, but this isn’t really a post about comic books. Seriously.)

Yesterday was Free Comic Book Day (FCBD), where local comic book stores (LCS) spend money on special $0 cover price comics from every major (and many minor!) publishers that they can hand out for free to customers. It drives one of their biggest business days of the year, and fans wind up purchasing tons of store stock before they walk away flush with dozens of books.

One of this year’s FCBD issues was of Nick Spencer’s Secret Empire – that controversial event comic where Captain America is and has always been an agent of the Nazi-stand-ins Hydra as penned by Nick Spencer. (Not sure what I’m talking about? Here’s my essay and review of #0.)

Some comic book consumers decided to pick up said free single issue and then torch it, taking photos of the process to share on social media.

To say there is tension within the comic fan community over Secret Empire right now is quite the understatement. I’ve seen both sides of the argument want to paint the other as liberty-hating dummies who don’t pay attention to the comics they read. I’ve seen both conservatives and liberals both support and oppose the story – so now we have liberals calling conservatives “book-burning stuck-up Nazis” and conservatives calling liberals “attention-seeking SJW fascists.”

(Can we even pause to evoke Godwin’s Law when the actual comic book is being burned over its allusions to Nazism?)

Okay, enough about comics in the specific. Back to books in the general. [Read more…] about on burning your (free) (comic) books (and Secret Empire’s FCBD issue)