Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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high rise lunch

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Not too much to say today, except our winning RJRetreat team enjoyed a victors’ lunch at one of my fav lunch spots, XIX at the Bellvue.

Why is it a fav? Aside from the view, the weird echo-chamber created by their domed ceiling, and the consistently good (and appropriately-portioned) prix fixe entrees, there’s that dessert bar…

Dessert at XIX 2015-08-31 13.01.46

(This particular outing also involved a supermarket-sweep style last-minute run to Banana Republic for respectable-looking clothes, because I made this big deal to my team (who had never been to XIX for lunch before) to “dress well” and then I showed up to work in a t-shirt and baggy jeans and got super-self-conscious which resulted in a 10:40am wardrobe change and a new pair of gray stretch jeans, mmmmm.)

swimming myself sore

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This week I was sore from our 30-hour summer camp at least through Wednesday, with maybe some isolated twinges extending into Thursday.

What amazes me is that the soreness almost certainly didn’t come from sports. My team only drew volleyball and kickball in our round robin (which we won) (which means I won) (at sports) (soak that in for a moment), and neither of those involves the kind of physical exertion I’d expect to leave me unable to take the stairs the next day. Or, you know, sit up straight or get out of bed.

No, the soreness was surely 75% swimming, 10% tennis court yoga, and maybe  10% lumpy plastic camp mattress and 5% sports. I don’t know, how much soreness comes from setting my all-time single day sportsball scoring record against people my own age?

I guess the answer is 5%. Now, back to the swimming.

There’s something entrancing about an outdoor pool on a hot day. I cannot resist diving in headfirst, depth allowing. There’s something about that moment of flight followed by my face breaking the plane of the water. Honestly, I lost count of how many dives and full 360 flips I did into the pool, but it had to be upwards of 50. Add to that a few half-laps, treading water, and pulling myself out, and it was hours of constant, full-body exercise.

And boy was I feeling it on Monday. And Tuesday. Et cetera.

(That, in turn made me think of conducting deep-end swim tests for the six-year-olds when I was a camp counselor. (I cannot believe I’ve never told this story on CK, I reference it constantly.)

Every year I managed to pull swim lessons for my bunk in the first or second spot of the morning, when it was still a wee bit too chilly to really love the pool – and, when you’re only standing up to your thighs in water next to a bunch of 1st graders you really notice that. Thus, I was all over any sort of deeper water swimming or coaching.

In this particular instance, each kid had to dive in and spend an entire minute treading water unassisted. Of course, that meant I had to spend about fifteen minutes treading water and also helping the kids if they didn’t pass with flying colors. Thatwas the only time I recall being sore purely from swimming as a teenager.

The moral of the story is: damn, was I in shape during camp when I couldn’t really manage being anorexic thanks to all the exercise and unlimited mac’n’cheese)

Even through my soreness this week, I was like, “Whoa, that was an awesome workout, how am I going to get that much exercise without waking up in the ass-crack of dawn to swim laps?” That’s the sort of pain-response you gain from being a suburban lump over 30 and also from yoga, which are relatively synonymous.

And then I remembered: we were invited to a pool party this weekend!

Granted, the pool party was primarily a backyard housewarming barbecue for our friends Jem & Jan’s gorgeous new house and probably wouldn’t involve any super-intense Big Splash Competitions, but more pool meant potential awesome full-body workout and potentially more subsequent soreness!

The complicating factor (or abetting, depending on how you look at it in light of my story above) was that I’d be in-pool with EV who – despite loving her swim lessons to death – isn’t exactly buoyant all on her own. Into the pool we went, and I merrily swam that toddler around in circles, helped her paddle through the deep end, and towed her on a float. We only had a single scare, when she lunged off of the float to grab a ball and I caught her by the ankle to prevent her going face-first into the drink. We took that as a clear sign that she was exhausted and not entirely thinking clearly, and so E retreated with EV to solid ground.

Meanwhile, I just kept diving in, swimming a lap, pulling myself out, and diving in again.

“Uh, Peter, you’re swimming pretty hard,” either Jack or Jake observed (if you get them both in the same place their sarcastic commentary can elide), probably with cocktail in hand.

Then I had to explain the whole summer camp last weekend thing, and then the whole summer camp back in the day thing, and then I kept swimming and diving.

I’m not quite so sore today as I was all this week, but I’m pretty satisfied with myself for putting in the effort. Jem made sure I got a “Swim Club Member” button before I left her house, but unless I just start showing up at their house every weekend to tread water for an hour between dives I think I might have to relent and get re-acquainted with ass-crack-hour swimming at the local Y to get my full-body soreness fix.

(Terrible alternate title of this post: “sore, sore good.”)

Giant-Sized Surprise

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I recently mentioned in passing to a new colleague that I am a walking X-Men encyclopedia, and he replied he had some valuable X-Men comics. “Maybe a #1?” he said.

I was like, “uh, sure, great.” He’s younger than me, so I thought he might be referring to the 90s relaunch with Jim Lee, copies of which are valued in the low triple-digits … of cents.

Lo and behold, today he walks in with a pristine copy of Giant-Sized X-Men from 1974. It’s just in a normal, cheap mylar bag. Perfectly square spine with a tiny nick on the bottom corner and a white cover. He says, “don’t you want to flip through it?” I was like, “Don’t let me touch that! My hands are not clean enough! I am not qualified to handle a book that valuable!”

Eventually, I gingerly paged through. The pages were yellowed, but with crystal clear colors. I was transfixed by the separation of the yellow of Cyclops’s visor against the blue of his costume. It was beautiful. My hands were shaking a little bit as I put it back in the bag.

I was afraid to sit and read it despite his invitation to do so. I would never read it multiple times! I would never leave it lying open as I recapped it for a message board post or blog. My obsession with it was as an artifact, not a story-delivery-mechanism.

It made me marvel about the state of collected editions, and about this community. When I started collecting almost 25 years ago, I never had any hope of reading those early Uncanny X-Men issues. They were completely inaccessible. I had my Milestone reprint of Giant-Sized X-Men and my prized possessions – a middle-grade set of the original Dark Phoenix Saga my father bought for me at a comic convention. The reprints in “Classic X-Men” aside, I had no hope of reading UXM #94 or #108 or any of those other landmark early Claremont issues.

Yet, here we are today, gamely reading not only the first issues of our storied favorites, but the second, fifth, thirteenth, and twenty-ninth issues. We’re sampling runs of comics that aren’t our favorites in trade or hardcover for the price of one key back issue. Sure, we might wish for them in a different format or have to hunt them across the internet, but today our $100 buys us 30 or more issues of those classic comics, when even at my first convention it might not have yielded a single, low-grade copy of Giant-Size X-Men. And, a new generation of readers has unlimited access to many of these classics on Marvel’s app!

This is certainly the golden age not for comic book collectors but for readers, and I’m very happy to be here for it.

Originally published at the Comic Book Resources forum.

the shocking discovery I made about boy bands may or may not shock you

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This is how I remember New Kids On The Block: The girls in third grade had buttons of them pinned to their winter coats.

“Buttons!” I told my mother after school one day. Why would you need a button of a band? I had NKTOB’s cassette tape and posters of Madonna, but I didn’t wear my fandom as an actual, physical badge (which wasn’t so easy to do back before the internet).

I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. They sang that one decent song, “The Right Stuff,” and that was about all that interested me about the whole endeavor. I think my mother might have liked them more than I did. And then, not so long afterward, they were gone – and Madonna remained.

That was my first and last exposure to boy bands in my youth. If there were any in the 90s, they were invisible to me (aside from Boyz II Men, of course – I am from Philly) and I was headed to college by the time Backstreet Boys and NSYNC broke. I remember the summer after freshman year – just a few short weeks shy of the birth of this blog – dancing with the incoming students to “Bye Bye Bye” during their orientation party, bobbing and weaving across the dance floor with my broken collarbone sending twinges of pain through my body with every choreographed wave goodbye.

Weirdly, that’s a positive memory, and so NSYNC has always benefited from a bit of unearned goodwill from me even though I have – and this is the honest truth – never again heard a single verse of a song by them in the intervening fifteen years.

Unless last week. Last week I liked to “Bye Bye Bye” a lot. Probably not enough to make up for my decade-and-a-half of abstention. Certainly not as much as a girl with a button on her winter coat might in a single 24hr period. But, a lot. Enough to have it mapped out cold in my head so we could rehearse it today as a result of sustained requests for more “boy bands,” plus the avalanche of cheering and drunken singing along that greets our cover of “I Want It That Way.”

Here’s the shocking discovery I made about boy bands along the way: most of their members are not really so much better at singing than the rest of us plebes (again: aside from Boyz II Men).

Okay, maybe it’s not so shocking for you. For me – brought up on non-stop Doo Wop on every car ride – it came as a bit of a revelation.

Sure, you need a tenor or two in there to fill out the chords, but there’s a reason that Justin Timberlake is the one one of the two guys in those two bands with a significant solo career – most of their voices aren’t all that interesting or amazing on their own. There’s no David Bowies or Freddie Mercurys in the bunch or else all of their songs would be as fucking weird as “Under Pressure.”

As it turns out, I can deliver perfectly serviecable versions of both “I Want It That Way” and “Bye Bye Bye.” The Backstreet Boys tune is on the high side for me, but I can nail the NSYNC without much strain. Even the harmony – which I had always assumed the whole point of assembling five good-looking guys to be a singing group – is easy enough that Ashley can jump into it and easily teach it to me.

This made me a bit curious about my original boy band: those New Kids. I listened to that seminal album on my way to work one day and made it two songs – just far enough to hear the first ragged and somewhat tuneless attempt at falsetto.

That will probably be my last listen to NKTOB for at least another fifteen years. I’m open to hearing some more NSYNC, though.

the big kids are in the next room

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Tonight I brought EV to a party with more or less the complete collection of college friends I regularly attended parties with in the summer before I met E – sans Erika in Boston and Jack, off being a turtle doctor somewhere, or doing whatever a turtle doctor does in cold weather when the turtles are presumably moving more slowly than normal.

(I’m sure Jack would tell me that’s a turtle misnomer, but Jack is not the topic of this post.)

The difference between college and today? We’re now all married (well, one re-married, two divorced), we drink less by an order of magnitude, and between the eight couples we have eleven children with another incoming.

(No, not from us. For heaven’s sake, get a hold of yourself.)

It is moments like these that remind me that I’ve never seen EV spend time with other children. Not by design, really. None of the children in the neighborhood passing my extensive background check to make sure they won’t tell her about Disney or princesses, she’s not exactly hanging out with babies.

(Just kidding – none of the neighborhood kids have even passed the qualifying verbal and potty exams to get to the background check.)

I set that chubby baby down on the floor and a fascinating thing happened. She had no interest in the other kids running and whooping all around her except for briefly babbling with another baby around her age. Instead, she wanted to explore, examine things, and smile at the adults.

(She also signaled for and used the big girl potty four times, because she is the best baby ever. In case you were wondering how that was going. Because you were.)

Effectively, it was like watching a young me exploring a social space. I never had any interest in other children – almost disdained them for their running and whooping. I never lacked for creative play ideas, but if I was at a party with adults I typically wanted to enjoy their company. Even now, I am not an extrovert at a party unless I am the host. I wander from conversation to conversation, sharing a laugh or a smile, and then I settle down in a corner regardless of if it is inhabited.

For a few hours tonight, EV and I both did that – sometimes together, sometimes independently.

I don’t mean to project that smaller me onto EV. She will be the person she will be, and that doesn’t have to be a reflection of me. Nor would I want it to be, honestly – I did plenty of great things as a child, but there’s a lot of things I could have handled better.

I suppose that’s the point of parenting just as much as it’s hard not to see yourself in the behavior of your child when they already look half the part.