Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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independence doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help

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On a top-secret mission to Sine Studios at 127 S. 22nd Street in Philadelphia, just above Walnut.

Happy Independence Day!

Last night Jake and I conducted a special, top secret Arcati Crisis mission at Sine Studios, my favorite studio in Philly.

I can’t get into the details of our journey just yet, but given the context of today it made me think about what independence and DIY really means to me – and to you.

For a long time I was DIY because I had to be – because no one else wanted to help me make music or publish my writing or code my website. I didn’t have the money or the clout to attract anyone to my projects, so I did them all myself.

I’m sure you’ve found yourself in the same place. Nobody would do it for you, so you did it for yourself!

That do-it-yourself know-how is a wonderful thing to have. I love that I’ve never been to a recording studio and that I’ve coded all my own websites from scratch or with open source. I love being capable and autonomous.

But being independent doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help.

This weekend in my JavaScript coding I got super-stuck more than once. Luckily, I am married to a self-taught JavaScript expert. I was happy to have her help. Last summer E laid down a set of beautiful new slate steps in our back yard, but mixing a new cement panel for our front walk was beyond her. We hired a local contractor, and they took care if it in a matter of hours a few weeks ago.

E and I never stopped being independent and capable. We still did our research and learned new things from the process. We just called in the experts when the time was right.

I have been working on recording projects for both Arcati Crisis and Filmstar over the past year. Recording a full rock band is a tall task. It’s not just about putting up a ton of microphones and rolling tape. You have to deal with noise, separation, splitting signals, phase issues, and tons of other aspects.

I can handle that myself as a recording engineer, but that takes a lot out of me as a performer. Add to that a fiercely played full drum set, and the hamster in my brain will run itself right off of his wheel.

That’s what lead to our top secret trip to Sine. I was asking for help from experts that I trust.

It doesn’t mean we’re not independent. It doesn’t mean I couldn’t do it myself if I wanted to. It just means that now I know when it’s time to reach out to someone I trust instead of suffering through difficulties on my own.

That’s what independence means to me today.

What does independence mean to you?

What I Tweeted, 2012-07-01 Edition

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Some of my favorite tweets of the last week:

I just discovered my new favorite pastime – showing @not_pele photos of Boo the Dog and listening to the hilarious noises she makes. #

“It basically invented the concept of a cat.” Google creates SkyNet, The Borg, and/or Cyclons & it/they discovered cats http://t.co/mM0MJrKh #

If Fiona Apple is not on the very brink of death that was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. I’ll know for sure if she’s alive next year. #

What happened when I broke my good gym-going habit last month? I got lumpy and grumpy, but then I got motivated (again) http://t.co/9iOQbsB1 #

What else did I say in 140 characters or less? See below for the gory details.

[Read more…] about What I Tweeted, 2012-07-01 Edition

The Busy Trap

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Yesterday the New York Times featured an OpEd titled “The Busy Trap,” about how Americans seemed to delight in the sound and fury of unproductive busyness. Here is an excerpt:

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’être was obviated when “menu” buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.

That first sentence describes me perfectly. I am too busy to think about anything off-mission, or to catch up with friends, or write this blog.

The OpEd made me think of my life from 2006, before Arcati Crisis, before I was playing open mics, before was in an acappella group. I remember trying to make plans with a pair of my friends and finding it impossible to find a free day. They were interminably booked for weeks into the future. Not a spot of daylight on the schedule for me to hang out and listen to music with them unless I could plan months ahead.

I remember thinking, “What is it you have to show for being a packrat of appointments? What have you accomplished? You just waste your money and get fatter. It’s miserable.” I had my songs to comfort me, and my ridiculous spreadsheets and fastidious budget. I loved my time to myself.

Lately I have been trying to schedule coffee dates with social media friends who I’ve never had a chance to get to know better offline. These arrangements have yet to be consummated, due to my impenetrable schedule. The first one will finally happen tomorrow, because I am free Mondays. I hate to make plans on Mondays, so they are paradoxically the best night to make plans.

Am I that person that I secretly hated, all those years prior?

I choose not to think so. I have less time for my songs, but so many more of them are being played. My spreadsheets aren’t as plentiful, but they’re more meaningful and permanent. My budget is still on-pace down to the cent, but I don’t ogle it every day. And the things I fit into my free time – my bands and my book and my comic collection – they are the things I always wanted. Coveted for myself but thought would stay relegated to some impossible adolescent dream, never to be fulfilled.

This weekend I had a free day, so I relearned the fundamentals of javascript. Now I can follow some of E’s work discussions, and I built myself a new web feature that previously defied any solution.

I don’t think busyness has to be a trap, unless you can be trapped into being happy and fulfilled. Oh no! I wish we could stretch each day a little further so I had more free time to sit and speculate, or just drape myself over furniture and listen to music, but if that’s all I ever did I wouldn’t even have a blog in the first place.

I wish my busyness on you, so long as it does not become a cage. It should be a gossamer bubble, shimmering and iridescent in the air around you, making the untouchable world beyond shimmer in delightful color as you float by.

always crashing in the same car

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I don’t know how else to start this story, so I’ll just say it.

I crashed our car.

Into our house.

Yes, you read that correctly. Don’t worry – there were no casualties. I’m here. The house is no worse for the wear. And the car… well, the car lived to tell the tale.

It was not quite this bad.

Before you start to make a number of assumption about me and my driving, allow me to point out that I have not so much as nudged another vehicle in my first year behind the wheel. On the road I am a cautious, defensive driver.

It’s off the road where I’m a danger. Particularly, in my driveway. I just don’t have the spacial relations skills to navigate the tiny space. Our car earned its first, tiny, quarter-sized ding in a tango with our garage doorframe last year. It’s just scant inches wider than our car.

This time I made it past the garage, but realized far too late I was still angled towards our house. In my defense, the house actually starts being houselike within the bounds of the frame of the garage door. You have to cut hard right to avoid backing straight into the house.

(If getting out of our driveway is starting to sound like a difficult geometry problem or a question on a Mensa test, you are starting to catch on.)

Angled towards the house does not equal crashing into the house. You see, I actually had not yet crashed. I stopped the car and got our to investigate my predicament. I had barely kissed the side of the house with the back fender of the car. I could reverse course and drive back into the garage and pull out again.

I returned to the car. I put it in drive and gingerly nudged it forward only to hear a terrifying metallic shrieking noise. Creeeeawwww-oy-eeeeeeeeee. I threw the car into park and leapt out to discover that the tiny, tangential kiss I had delivered to the house resulted in our stucco gripping the edge of my fender, and now it refused to let go – to the tune of pulling half of the fender off the car!

I’ll admit it: I panicked. How the hell was I going to get out of this? My crisis logic said, back up a little bit so there is less tension on the fender, and then pry it loose from the wall. And, well, since that was the smartest message running through my brain, I did it.

The problem was that I did it with a little too much verve. I put the car in reverse and tapped the gas slightly too hard, resulting in me colliding with the house at full ramming speed. In addition to my crumpled fender, I now had a shattered taillight, and had bent the spigot on the side of our house in half.

I meekly pulled the car forward a hair and got out to investigate the damage. The spigot was twisted back on itself like a pretzel. I applied slight pressure to try to return it to its former shape and it snapped off in my hands, spraying me with a blast of water.

Suffice to say, this was not one of the finer days in my personal history. To my credit, I had the spigot replaced and a taillight ordered by the time E returned home, which left only the bruises to the rear of the car and my pride as evidence of the mishap.

I don’t understand why the beginning of summer has officially became car calamity season, but I’m happy that last year’s exploits taught me to budget for the worst possible levy of my own personal stupidity tax against my bank account.