Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

pushy little George

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I thought I’d have more than a two weeks of EV6 being in school before I had to deal with explaining bullies to her.

I also didn’t expect that bully would be a very pushy two-year old, but at this point nothing about our experiences in New Zealand surprises me.

On one of the first days I picked EV6 up from her new school, I saw a toddler built like a fireplug who was really enthusiastic about grabbing and pushing. He tried to grab a book from EV repeatedly, and when she eventually managed to dismiss him  he redirected his attentions to a tiny, reedy toddler in the the corner of the room.

He gave the tinier toddle one push. Two pushes. A third push. At first I thought the two kids were playing, but then I saw tears welling up in the eyes of the reedy little one and before I could move one of the teachers sprung into action and scooped him out of the corner while gentle admonishing the pushy sparkplug.

This pushy little spark plug was George*, and to hear her tell it EV6’s days are chiefly concerned with avoiding his pushes.

*His name isn’t actually George, but I now asked EV6 no less than four times if that was his name only to have her correct me, so we’re just going with it since that’s what my brain is convinced to be true.

I asked about EV6 about her day as we were driving home the next day, and she replied, “Oh, I spent a lot of it sitting in a tree.”

“Oh,” I replied, “were you having fun climbing trees with your friends?”

“No, it was that George kept pushing me and I climbed the tree because he wouldn’t stop.”

Let me tell you: I was seeing way more red in that moment than I was seeing the road. I was seething with parental rage. [Read more…] about pushy little George

the giant sucking sound

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Sometimes the biggest culture shocks come from the subtlest parts of our daily routines.

Case and point: the giant sucking sound produced by seemingly every bathtub in New Zealand.

No matter where you live, you probably take for granted that your bathroom habits translate more or less universally around the globe. Everyone has toilets and showers, right?

Well, yes, but they don’t all have exactly the same form and function as what you’re used to. I haven’t lucked into any bidets or squat-toilets in my admittedly minor international travels, but they’re out there. More common is that showers outside the US often come standard with a detachable head on a long hose rather than a fixed one, so that you can spray your most hard to reach spots.

What I did not expect is for baths to be different here.

Personally, I have not taken a bath since the 1980s. I find the concept of sitting in a puddle of my own lukewarm filth to be pretty disturbing. Heck, even swimming pools are a little bit creepy if you stop to think about it, and they have the benefit of chlorine.

Yet, when you have a small child, bathtime becomes a regular fixture of your daily routine (which is a bit ironic to me, as after a typical day of life kids generally have way more filth to rinse off of their bodies than a grown-up). Even when your little one starts to become enamored with showers, you will continue to appreciate the convenience of just tossing them into a bath and let the water passively soak off their grime while they play with floating toys.

Thus, that’s what we did back on our first evening in our temporary lodging in August. The filling of the bath was normal. The bathing was normal. Then came the draining of the tub.

I forget if if was E or I supervising the bath that evening, but I know that it was likely EV who pulled out the drain stopper – a favorite activity of hers. Or, at least, it used to be a favorite activity. This time when she pulled out the stopper, the drain began to emit a horrible, deafening sucking sound.

“WHAT IS THAT?” I asked E, covering EV6’s ears with my hands as she (totally understandable) freaked out about the squelching.

“THE DRAIN?” she replied?

We both peered into the drain, thinking perhaps it was clogged in some way. It looked like a normal, unclogged drain. The water was going down in a typical fashion. It was just making a terrifying sort of slo-motion Nazgûl sound while it was happening. Like, maybe Peter Jackson just sampled a Wellington tub while it drained to create the Nazgûl’s in Lord of the Rings and then speed it up slightly for their high-pitched wailing.

I didn’t think too much of the noise. After all, it would only be our problem for a few weeks. We simply got in the habit of one of us scooping EV6 out of the tub and transporting her to her own room, closing several doors behind us in the process, while the other unplugged the drain.

Thus, the giant sucking sound was not on the top of my mind our first night in our house, when I gave EV6 a bath. Right up until I unthinkingly pulled out the plug and that very same squelching began a new, much to EV6’s terror.

I spent the next few nights poking my finger and other blunt objects into the drain to see if I could interrupt whatever hellish centripital force that was summoning the sound. E decided to take a more anthropological approach to the problem. She polled her co-workers: who among them had impossibly loud bathtub drains?

The majority of her subjects volunteered that they, too, had Centripital Sucking Nazguls in their bathrooms. Not just brand new renters like us. Long term residents who just kind of shrugged as if to say, “Yeah, they all do that.”

This story is more about incorporating a careful strategy of closed-door tub draining into EV6’s nightly bedtime routine. It’s about peculiar little cultural differences in our expectations.

I’d imagine many travelers to the states marvel at our many undetachable shower heads. It only takes a little more effort to make the thing detachable. Honestly, I agree with them.

Similarly, if a drain made this noise for one second in America, you would do something about it. As a renter, it would merit a call the next morning to your landlord. I cannot conceive that anyone I know would tolerate it in the long term, especially if they were using the bathtub on a daily basis. You’d swap out the drain fixture, check the fitting, move the U-pipe or something… I don’t know, we’re coming to the end of my plumbing knowledge already. I just know that you would do everything in your power to do something about it!

In New Zealand – which, I will point out, is a country of incredibly handy people – this noise is so common that it merely produces shrugs. It’s not a problem worth innovation or solving. It’s just a minor, bearable annoyance.

I’m not sure which will take longer to get used to – the noise or the shrugs.

The Great Wellington Wheelie Bin Saga of ’17

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One way you can be pretty sure that I am a liberal in American political terms is that I really don’t mind taxes.

I frame this sentiment in two ways. First, I happen to have empathy for my fellow human beings and I am totally cool with redistributing a pretty big sum of my meagre wealth to other people if it serves the greater good.

But, shhhh, be quiet about all that altruism. The second reason is why I really don’t mind taxes: I want stuff from my government.

Roads? I like’em. Firefighters? Nifty. And for all the bitching that homeowners did in Drexel Hill about their property taxes, do you know how excited I was every time the dang snow plow would come down our dull little street before there was even an inch of snow on the ground?

SO EXCITED! Because, after you have lived through a few blizzards in Philly proper, where your side street is left with six inches of hard-packed ice on the ground for a month after the snow, the sight of a snow plow before it’s even really necessary is really freaking exciting.

New Zealand has an uncomplicated flat tax rate on income and in exchange for forking over so much of your hard-earned money the government actually cares about you while you live there. Yes, socialized medicine, they have that. But I’m talking about special perks like friendly and informative people working at the Ministry of Biosecurity who don’t mind talking to you on the phone. I’m talking about really well-designed government websites that thoroughly answer your questions about every possible municipal service.

Look at them there, all lined up together, so stately and consistent with their thick yellow plastic lids.

It was just such a service that brought me to said web site a few weeks ago. As a part of Wellington’s impeccably well-choreographed dance of weekly trash and recycling pickup, I noticed that some amount of neighbors had special wheelie bins for their recycling, while we were left with the still-pretty-cool color-coded bags that you buy at the library – a place where paper goods can also go to get re-used!

(Can we just pause for a moment to marvel at the narrative consistency of this country?!)

Anyhow, putting recycling in a disposable plastic bag seemed to be a bit counter-intuitive and I covet pretty much any kind of functional houseware I can lay my hands on, so of course I wanted our own wheelie bin. They didn’t seem to be sold anywhere I could find, so I turned to internet research, which is actually effective in Wellington because all of their web properties are so lovely.

The lovely government website provided a handy number to call for wheelie bin inquiries. The handy number was answered by a friendly human being with one of the thicker Wellingtonian accents I have encountered to date. Forging through this potential communication barrier, I explained how I coveted a wheelie bin. In return, the friendly government employee (paid for by our hard-earned tax dollars) explained that he would have someone visit our property to conduct a multi-point inspection for appropriateness of wheelie-bin issuance and we would be notified by post if we were approved.

“Awesome,” I told him. I love tests. Bring on the inspection.

Friends, yesterday I received a letter from our friendly, helpful government. Do you know what it said? [Read more…] about The Great Wellington Wheelie Bin Saga of ’17

birdfriends

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Major Plot twist: Living in New Zealand has turned me into an avid bird-watcher and amateur bird-song identifier.

This is a big twist because I do not have an especially positive history of avian/human relations. This is what I had to say for our fine, feathered friends the last time I moved to a new house:

That’s not the nature of my problem. Birds are fine as a concept. I just don’t like things that make uninvited noise (other than, obviously, me). Birds fall into the same offensive category as small dogs, train tracks, and babies.

Based on that assessment, you might be a bit nervous about me moving to a country with a serious stock of birds and where bats are the only native land mammals. Bats!

Yet, I’m living a bird-loving kiwi life. I send chats to E about cool bird songs I hear when she’s not at home and can frequently found browsing Birds of New Zealand to try to identify the ones I spot on our deck or feasting on snails from our garden.

The only way I can explain it is that birds here have beautiful, varied songs. Key word: varied. The birds of Philadelphia didn’t have songs so much as rude catcalls that they screeched repetitively at the top of their birdy lungs.

“CHIRP. CHIRP. CHIRP. MOTHERFUCKING CHIRP.”

They’d all gather around my house starting just after 5am and start their shouting all at once. There was nothing beautiful or remarkable about it. It was like the world’s worst noise machine.

To be fair, those are some of these insistent asshole birds in New Zealand, but I think the other birds must shun them or eat their food or something, because I rarely hear them singing. Maybe it’s simply an evolutionary thing.

Tui are one of the most-common NZ-only birds, and one of the first I started noticing while we were living in our Air BnB house. They possess a double larynx, which gives them an uncannily large range of vocalization. There’s not a lot of repeats on tui radio.

When we we were looking at houses, we met the New Zealand wood pigeon. It is a hilariously, outlandishly large bird, maybe four times the size of the pigeon of the flying rat variety you see back in East Coast urban spaces back in the US. It’s husky, low hoot matches its comedic appearance as well as its rather humorous habits, such as getting drunk enough on fermented berries that they fall out of trees.

There is an even greater variety of birds here at our more permanent home, as we’re not in an urban area and also much higher up. I’d say we hear at least six or seven distinct bird calls each day, at least.

One particularly mysterious bird living in the bushes surrounding our house has such a beautiful call that I crave hearing it. Its bright, trebly tone sweeps down and into a throaty alto and then back up again, with fluttery vibrato throughout. If I notice this mystery bird’s song ringing out I will literally drop what I am doing and rush to a window to try to spot it, to no avail.

What I find most interesting about the situation isn’t the variety of birds or their beautiful calls, but my sudden change of heart about having them all around. It represents a complete shift from what I would have sworn was a make-or-break aspect of a new house just a few months ago – being relatively birdless.

As it turns out, it’s not just brands and habits that change when you move to a new place. Sometimes it’s your whole philosophy on what constitutes noise versus song.

first day of school, finally

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Yesterday was EV6’s first official day of school.

I don’t just mean the first day of proper “you might learn something there” school. I mean it’s her first day of public or private care outside of our own home. Ever.

It’s quite the belated start to school for her, considering she’ll be heading into Year 1 (the NZ equivalent of Kindergarten) just nine months from now. Many kids have logged four years of being cared for out of the home by this point in their lives.

As with many things here in New Zealand, our perception of pre-Year-1 school from abroad was a little different than the reality here on the ground.

While kiwi kids have a guaranteed Year 1 start date on their fifth birthdays, all care prior to that is optional despite 20hrs of each week being state-sponsored for 3-4yr-olds.

Given the state sponsorship, we were relatively sure getting into a daycare would be relatively easy, and there seemed to be tons of them. That’s compared to Philadelphia, where for many quality pre-schools you need to have your child on a waiting list before they are even born!

The complication arose from just how much school we were interested in Some care centers only offered 20hrs a week of care. Basically, they were set up to capitalize on the state-sponsored benefit, but that was it. That would be great for right this moment, but if I wound up in full-time job prior to EV6’s Year 1 started date we’d be in a pickle. By contrast, outside of the city the full-time child care centers were much smaller than their US equivalents and they all had wait lists – just not quite as long as the ones in Philly.

We sent out notes to the closest full-day schools on my birthday back in September. Two replied in short order – both to offer us a spot on wait lists stacked up into 2018. Eek.

Luckily, for once my resident OCD Godzilla really paid off for us. [Read more…] about first day of school, finally