Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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time, see what’s become of me

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I am making a New Year’s resolution.

I haven’t made any resolutions for over two decades. I’ve always believed that resolutions are intentions to fail.

Or, as I said back in 2001, “You can’t really resolve to do anything except for those things so explicitly under your own power that you could and should be doing them anyway.” A decade later in 2011, I added, “Why should 1/1 be any different from 4/5 or 6/6 or any other day of the year?”

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

In January 2004 I said I was not resolving to do three things, but that I’d like keep my focus on them throughout the year. They were:

  1. Know What I’m Spending
  2. Be Aware of What I Eat
  3. Use Time Smarter

Even as my life got more complex in the following decade, I hewed closely to those non-resolves and they served me well. As I said in 2007, “even if I went on a bender of money or time wasting, or food devouring, at least I knew it was just a bender.”

(A decade ago I tried to expanded those three goals to 10 Commandments. They were an excellent set of commandments that would be terrific to live by, but they proved to be too many things to keep in mind all the time. Three is a magic number, after all.)

After I had those three rules in place, instead of making resolutions I began to focus on goals. Goals aren’t ephemeral ongoing vows. They are tangible, doable, accomplishable things, like “get my driver’s license” or “record 10 songs.”

I liked to set a large amount of goals in January and then see where the year took me. I thought of them as the corporate balance sheet of the business of me. I’d grade myself at the end of the year, and it could be as revealing to score well as to score badly. As I explained 2010, “The goals were good for something else, too – they let me know what wasn’t important. If I cannot bring myself to tag the last 800 posts from CK’s first three months even with my grade hanging on the line, it’s just not gonna happen.”

In 2014, I claimed even those goals were getting overwhelming, and I was going to strip down to a simple flowchart. I think that had less to do with the goals being a bad idea and more to do with having an infant human to raise and an infant start-up team to grow, plus two adolescent bands to lead. I needed simplicity.

Then, all of those non-resolutions and goals trickled away. I kicked off both 2015 and 2016 without mentioning them at all. January 2017-18 & 20 were consumed with comics posts. I didn’t even post in January of 2019 or 2021-22.

Something interesting happened in those intermediate five years other than just moving to New Zealand. To put it plainly: my life went from the simplest it has ever been to the hardest I’ve ever experienced. [Read more…] about time, see what’s become of me

Happy New Year (from the future)

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I am writing this message to you from the future.

Unless you are reading this from New Zealand.

Image by TianaZZ from Pixabay

(Or if you are reading this from Fiji, parts of Republic of Kiribati, French Wallis & Futuna, or US Territory of Wake Island, but I don’t think I have any readers in those places. Say hello if that’s you!)

Yes, this is a joke about the International Date Line. New Zealand is one of the first places to experience a new day, which means it’s also amongst the first places to celebrate a new year.

I thought perhaps these International Date Line jokes would be old by now – over five years into living in New Zealand. However, people (okay: Americans) keep being surprised, confused, and delighted by the time difference between us. Especially when it comes to setting meetings. So, I keep getting to make jokes about living in the future.

I don’t make the rules, okay. (Except that I do.)

The strange thing about living so far into the future compared to the majority of my existing world of connections in America is that when I’m very focused on a specific day – like New Years or a birthday – that day lasts forever. That’s especially true while we’re in summer time here in NZ. I get to I live all 24 hours of the day here in New Zealand, but when I go to bed the US West coast is only three hours into their version of it. (And, Hawaii is just one hour into it – hello, J!)

That means the day lives on for another 23 hours beyond when I’m first done with it for the people I know and love. I get 47 hours of birthday, 47 hours of Christmas, and 47 hours of New Year’s Day.

I like it. It means I get to experience the joys of these days first, but also get most of them out of the way before all my loved ones in the US wake up. They might have questions about how their birthday will go or if it will be a Merry Christmas, but I already know.

That appeals deeply to my spoiler-loving self.

If you are wondering, I’d say 2023 is relatively calm so far. I only have this first 30 minutes to go by, but aside from a few sparse fireworks in our suburban cul de sac it has been quiet. I didn’t hear any banging of pots and pans. (We did that the one time I stayed at my father’s for New Year’s Eve.)

The one problem with living in the future is there’s no one ahead of me. I’m always the one with the toes on the edge of the diving board. I don’t have the luxury of not jumping – the rest of the world is lined up behind me ready for their turn.

Every new day is a high dive into the unknown. I know New Year’s Day isn’t really any different than any other of those days, but it feels like a higher and more exciting dive to me.

Happy New Year from the future.

after these messages, we’ll be right back!

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Just a quick note to say I am alive and don’t plan on ending my active streak writing about comics and drag and everything here on CK. I needed to devote my time and my brain to some other topics this week, but I’ll be catching up with you all shortly ?

the customer is always angry (in America)

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After half a decade of living in New Zealand I can finally see how abnormal it is to assume that the customer is always right, and that they always have a right to get angry about it.

As an American can claim you are immune to these expectations and behaviors. I promise you’ve engaged in them hundreds of minor times. That’s true even if you are someone who is often on the receiving end of that same rage. As with many things in America, the cruelty is baked into the system.

Your dish came out a little bit wrong at the restaurant? Rage and ask for a discount. Service on your car didn’t quite repair the problem? Rage and demand an immediate fix. You received an online shopping order with an incorrect or slightly-dinged product? Unleash your fury and require free return shipping.

Some people manage to make these demands without demeaning the person who has to accommodate them, but just as often we assume that absorbing our accumulated fury is part of the job. If someone wants to be able to afford health care they have to be willing to soak up an amount of capitalist vengeance.

That’s American life. It’s part of the sickening caricature that “American Exceptionalism” has become, where everyone is encouraged to be their own plucky protagonist expecting perfection at all times. It’s the land of the Karens.

For most of my life I didn’t think too hard about this. In fact, my viciousness as a consumer always seemed like a fun feature of my perfectionist personality rather than a major bug. I was infamous amongst my friends and colleagues for causing a scene and storming out of retail situations gone wrong. I learned it by watching the adults in my own life as a kid. I wasn’t trying to be specifically cruel to any employees. I just needed to get exactly what I thought I was paying for (even when that wasn’t what I actually ordered or was ever offered).

It never seemed abnormal to me in part because my own clients demanded the same level of perfection from me all of the time. I built up a thousand little defenses and extra processes to deliver things flawlessly every time, as many Americans do, and so I expected perfection from everyone else.

Becoming a people manager changed that. The first time one of my direct reports got yelled at – I mean, really screamed at – by a client radically altered my approach in a way that being yelled at myself never did. I understood how ridiculous I had always been. I “fired” several clients for the misery they caused my team not being worth their subscription fee.

Yet, if someone made similar demands with a smile, we kept them around.

I adopted the same personal approach. No more cruelty, no more storming out. Yet, my demand for perfection didn’t change. I would complain sweetly, kindly, patiently, and with many compliments to the manager of the person I was speaking to… but, I’d still get my way in the end.

Our move to New Zealand turned my last vestiges of twisted American Exceptionalism on its head. [Read more…] about the customer is always angry (in America)

on Doing The Thing

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A lot of parenting is storytelling about your own life.

Kids are endlessly curious about who you are and how you got to be that way. Or, at least, my kid is.

She also sometimes needs to be reminded that the seemingly all-knowing parental units she trusts to answer her questions and organize her life didn’t emerge from the sea on a clam shell, fully-formed.

Recently, this has resulted in a lot of storytelling about how I got to be the me shows knows. A lot of that relied on me doing the thing.

“Doing the thing” is how I think about anything that I self-started without a nudge from adults or mentors in my own life. It’s personal entrepreneurship. Pure hustle. Unfiltered desire.

That’s how I got started performing on stage. No one encouraged me to audition for my first play. No one coached me on my monologue for my first audition. I wanted that for myself so just did the thing.

That’s how I became a musician. I begged for months for a guitar, which resulted in my receiving the cheapest, barely-tunable acoustic guitar that could be had. I had a few initial lessons. Then I did the thing. I taught myself “Ziggy Stardust.” I wrote my own songs. I put on concerts to an audience of no one in my living room.

That’s how I started this blog! No one ever asked me to do it or taught me how. I signed up for Blogger.com one day in August of 2000 and did the thing. I learned PHP because I didn’t like how Blogger organized its archives.

I could go on self-mythologizing, but CK picks things up from there. I got my minor in music, became an a cappella arranger and singer, a band leader, a comic guide curator, and made the jump to working in tech, among many other things no one else ever encouraged me to do.

I don’t deny that I relied on privilege to get into some of those situations, or that I had the support of peers once I starting doing the things. I had a stable enough home life that I could focus on wanting to be a performer. Family members bought me that first guitar and the computer I launched this blog with. Gina was there at that first theatre audition. Sara taught me to read sheet music over the phone the summer of 1998.

There were also a lot of things I wanted to do that I just couldn’t figure out how to start on my own. There are things I wanted to do that required cooperation or support that never materialized. But those undone things are distant memories. My history is written by the me who succeeded, not the me who failed.

Eventually “doing the thing” became about jump-starting new things with friends, like organizing Lyndzapalooza with Lindsay and starting a cover band with Ashley. E and I moving to New Zealand was yet another example of doing the thing.

As I’ve recounted some of these things to the kid, I’ve been amazed by my past self. I would leap blindly into a new endeavor with the full belief that I could figure it out if I tried hard enough.

Having that unflinching self-belief is a privilege.

But doing the thing – sticking with all these things for all these years – is all my own.