Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

NaBloPoMo

And you are…?

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There is a chance you are arriving here for the first time, launched from Twitter or NaBloPoMo.

If that’s the case, hi. I have an extensive series of bios linked off in that other direction. Oh, and for my first NaBloPoMo I spent the entire month re-telling my personal origin story, so be sure to read that too.

That said, I know we are all couch potatoes on the great lazyweb, so you aren’t likely to hustle around clicking those things. As such, allow me to summarize the current state of me:

I live in Philadelphia and am relatively newly wed to my partner of nearly eight years.

We both work in marketing – me in communications development, she in design. We are also both musicians – she the lead singer of Filmstar, me as a solo singer-songwriter as well as and a member of Arcati Crisis.

We’re also relatively voracious consumers of music, especially within Philadelphia, which boasts an astounding and thoroughly-talented local scene.

In addition to my major three loves (wife, comm, music), it turns out I’m also pretty passionate about non-profit development. I probably wouldn’t have told you that before this year, because it is the first time it has been so patently obvious. I helped to throw a music festival and a 24-hour streaming benefit concert, both of which raised funds for respective non-profits, and both of which nearly intellectually slayed me in the process.

Inclusive of prior iterations of the festival and my wedding I spent every free moment planning an event from March of 2007 to this past month.

Right now I’m trying to be pretty passionate about me. It’s hard – for someone who spends a lot of time working in the public eye and promoting others I have an awfully hard time shining the spotlight on myself. It something I have to improve on to avoid doing a disservice to my songs.

Oh, hey, and to my blog, which has run the longest out of any native Philly weblog – I’m currently blogging into my tenth year of inane, self-centered rambling.

We’ll see how that goes.

Trio Season 6 – Suite #2: Transparency

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Trio: Season Six, Suite #2: Transparency
Deadweight, Save Your Day, Secret Queen

A sample of what I had to say in this Trio…

Re: Transparency
All three of these songs are about the same thing: a person that wouldn’t ordinarily impact me so much that I would write a song about them, and having one moment of unusual insight into that person – where I really saw through all of their opacity and outside intentions to what they were really about at their core.

Deadweight
At the time, actually, I thought it was just a throw-away. I had written another lyric on a page in my notebook … and I wrote [“Deadweight”] on the upside down of that page. … Now I have to turn the poetry notebook upside down every time I go back to check something.

Save Your Day
One of my readers sent me an email [to say that] she listened to it and just cried … because it was describing her. … You don’t think I’m going to write a song describing somebody’s life. Those songs suck. But, if you are just writing something true people find themselves in that.

Secret Queen
Oh, that secret queen. I’ve got some opinions about her. One day I just thought to myself, With all of that negative energy, you could just be the biggest black hole in my galaxy. And then “Secret Queen” arrived.


Trio – the original singer-songwriter web session – returns for its sixth season featuring my original music, recorded live and DIY in my bedroom. You can download this Trio, or listen to a previous Trio:

Suite 2: Transparency [ 16:27 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Guitarness

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I’m often at a loss for what to do with myself when we visit Elise’s families in New Jersey. At home, or at any friend’s house, my default position is guitar playing – it gives me something to do with my hands in idle moments so that I don’t feel like I have to carry on a non-stop conversation at all times.

I don’t usually bring my guitar with me to NJ, which means the families haven’t witnessed this particular phenomenon too often, but Elise was planning to leave me marooned while she went on a wedding dress tour, and I needed a way to pass the time. I added a wonderful new “print-version” feature to my lyrics database, so for the trip I printed out sheaf of my fifty most incomplete songs to workshop while Elise was out on her wedding whirlwind.

Isn’t that a little crazy – fifty songs that are unfinished and still relatively new?

I really vacillate about this sort of thing. At this point Gina and I have a solid sixteen song set, and I have ten or twenty of my strongest songs that go in and out of solo rotation. It’s a comfortable point to be at, but then I look at my freaking database and I see all of these unfinished songs – some of which I really adore and like to play, such as they are in their unfinished state. And, since my current setlist is heavily influenced by my 2003-04 stuff, there are incomplete songs hanging around that are about to be four years old.

Four years old! Which is a problem when I have a whole new fleet of unfinished songs to be working through – I only have so much headspace to to to push these things forward. So, I sat down with my sheaf today and had a touch of a workshop. I re-notated a few things in a more complete fashion, and I think finished one from 2001 – “4th of July” – once and for all.

All that rehearsal meant I was plenty limber for my post-dinner conversational gambit. Except, these are people who aren’t used to my schtick – that I like sit and underscore a conversation without needing anyone to pay attention to me, and that if there’s a lull I might sing for a bit before tucking my voice back under the din.

It made for a few awkward moments … I don’t know that Elise’s father has ever heard me play my own songs before? Certainly not songs about his daughter, anyhow. But, they won’t be getting rid of me anytime soon so they might as well get used to the incessant underscoring of my life. Along the way I turned in possibly my best vocal of all time on the bridge of “Love Me Not,” and also a very respectable version of the recently on-hiatus “Little Love.”

All of which is why I need to go home tomorrow and record a Trio. And then I need to record another another one. And then another. And so on.

Right. But, first I need to drink this glass of wine. And maybe another one.

G’nite.

all the world’s a stage

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Tonight we took in a bit of high school theatre, watching Elise’s (and, hey, soon my!) younger brother in his first ever play.

I’m self-aware enough of a blogger not to regale you with a blow by blow of his performance, but it did recall a certain memory of the last time I witnessed any pre-collegiate theatre.

It was in the same auditorium, seen with the same company, possible seated in the same row as tonight, again watching another of my soon-to-be-siblings on stage – this time Elise’s sister.

The main difference was that we were on the other end of our relationship; we had been dating three weeks at the time, and the show was a prelude to my first time meeting Elise’s family.

After the show I milled to and fro, self-conscious and worried about first impressions, while Elise ducked backstage to say hello to former costars. She was still connected to her school – certainly more than she was connected to me.

Tonight she picked those old cast members’ younger sibling out of the playbill, more mine than anyone else’s.

I like this life.

(Also, let it be said that Elise’s brother rocks incredibly; he’s like a better, more talented version of teenaged me. He’s made me – who from an early age had vowed to strangle any potential siblings in the cradle – really re-think my position this whole only-child thing.)

pee ess

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Okay, so, forgive my meta-ness for a second here, but we need to chat.

We are now at the halfway mark of the month, and I must confess I am not really feeling the NaBloPoMo love this year.

I’m quite sure the NaBloPoMo Ning site is mostly at fault. Last year there were over two thousand of us scrambling to post before midnight every day, and the only way for us to communicate and commiserate was to read each other’s blogs and leave a trail of comments in our wake.

This year there are six thousand of us, all amiably mingling on a social networking site, and our blogs would seem to have become secondary to our networking.

Or maybe it’s just me and my busyness, which is even more meta, because the whole point of NaBloPoMo was supposed to be talking about how great it is to be busy all of the time, as opposed to last year when I spent the entire month in my room reading blogs, drinking martinis, and cultivating my carpal tunnel syndrome.

I had quite a schedule plotted out to cut through the busyness with posts and Trios and links, but these days weeks go by so quickly that I don’t have time to figure out what to do with them. That, combined with some of the less amusing chapters of the engagement story and a Trio that doesn’t seem to want to be recorded, are a veritable blogging blockade.

Or, maybe I’m just taking this all a little too seriously, as is my wont. So, I’m looking to you, gentle readers, to tell me what’s what. Are there some NaBloPoMo blogs that I seriously need to be reading? Is there a type of post you’ve been dying to see from me? Or, for the more well-versed of you, is there a song I’ve been neglecting?

Speak now, or your next fifteen days will most likely mirror the last. Which, honestly, were fifteen days of fairly quality blogging, but I’m nothing if not an overachiever.

In Pursuit of Bliss, pt. 3 – Rock Shopping

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(Continued from Planning To Be Surprised)

Elise and I had flirted with the idea of ring shopping for ages but – much like my attitude towards the engagement itself – the idea of premeditating our shopping trip seemed queer and uncomfortable.

Plus, pre-meditation would lead to discussion with friends and co-workers, and another one of my (slightly less nonsensical) maxims is a firm belief that a relationship is entirely between the couple. Which, aside from meaning that I consider it arch betrayal for either of us to talk about our sex life to a third party, also seemed to preclude even talking about an engagement ring to someone in a store.

After a month of aimless internet shopping I decided to create a loophole for shop attendants, so as to render our hypothetical eventual engagement something other than an impossibility.

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I suppose this is a post where I should be imparting seasoned fiancé advice on other men about to embark on the same journey.

Let me get back to you on that one.

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In preliminary, non-binding discussions about our inaugural shopping trip we seriously considered making up stories and accents and disguises to make the outing less threatening. Elise was going to be British? Or, was I going to be from Florida? Something about us meeting at a convention and falling in love at first sight?

When it came down to it we just had a couple of mimosas for breakfast and charged right in – tipsy on a Saturday and four blocks from Jewelers’ Row with no other plans.

No plans at all, actually – we didn’t have a specific shop in mind, and we stood in awe of various dormant neon jewels hanging over a block packed with at least a dozen jewelry stores.

I turned to Elise.

“Pick a sign, honey.”

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When it comes to engagement ring shopping, there are three kinds of jewelry stores and, by extension, three sorts of store attendants.

Suppressors do not want you to be armed with information or opinions. Or taste. In fact, if you are armed with any of those things they don’t really want to hear about it. They aren’t interested in educating you – their only interest is to be your one stop shopping center for multi-thousand dollar hunks of rock. They just want you to like what you see and buy it.

Passives understand that you might be armed with information or opinions – that’s okay – buy they don’t plan to do anything to encourage the further development of either. Often a Passive sees ring shopping as an arcane or mystical experience that cannot be approached scientifically. They want you to browse in their store and find the ring for you. If you don’t see it, it’s not for sale – don’t even think about asking for anything customized.

Empowerers hope that you come armed with information and opinions, and if you don’t have one or the other they’ll help you establish them. They want you to understand your purchase, and they’re confident that if you understand it well enough you will shop with them. However, some Empowerers get drunk on their empowerment, which can make them a bit pushy – especially if they are stodgy old men.

The tricky part is telling these people apart, which you might not be able to suss out on your first trip. Sometimes you find an empowering store but draw a passive staff member. Or, you find an empowering employee schlepping the products of a suppressing store.

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As it turned out, our first store was a terrific choice, we knew a lot more about diamonds than we suspected, and our opinions were a lot more specific than we knew.

I had a certain carat weight in mind for a solitaire ring, but when Elise tried one on it dominated her delicate hand in an unsightly way. Elise knew she wanted a princess cut diamond, but it turned out that she preferred settings other than the basic cathedral she had previously dreamed of.

It was giggly, nervous business. For a while it felt like we were impersonating a happy, marriage-bound couple, until after a few stores we realized that we were a happy, marriage-bound couple.

Our strategy emerged quickly. We’d enter a store, reap the basic hellos and sales pitch, and then get down to business. By store number four we started to come to an understanding about the different types of attendants, and were easily extricating ourselves from undesirable shopping situations.

Teamwork; the sign of a potentially, hypothetically, eventually happily married couple.

After winding our way through a string of unremarkable stores we wound up in Robbin’s 8th and Walnut, which to me is a timeless Philadelphia landmark as much as it is a jewelry store. And, though I was skeptical that it wouldn’t live up to its reputation, it easily did – friendly staff, a huge selection, and warm cookies refreshed at regular intervals.

Any remaining nervousness about shopping melted away – we paced the case with our attendant wearing a half-dozen potential rings on her fingers, handing them to Elise one at a time for comparison. Two hours prior the sight would have seemed surreal, but in the present it seemed completely normal.

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So, about that advice.

There’s no right time to shop for rings. You don’t have to wait until it’s dawned on you that you’re dating your wife. However, even if you do it in the most casual of ways, it will always hang in your relationship.

That’s not to say you should only shop for rings when you absolutely mean to buy one soon. Just be aware that – much like kisses and “I love yous” – you can’t take ring shopping back. It can mean as little or as much as either of those things can, but it can’t ever be meaningless.

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We emerged from the trip breathless and armed with ideas. More importantly, we emerged feeling a distinct lack of pressure.

That would come much later.