Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

Beige Friday

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I think today might represent the most remarkable cultural difference we’ve experienced so far in our three months of living in Wellington.

What’s so remarkable? That today is completely unremarkable, aside from the stunning weather.

Of course, living in the states, this day is Black Friday – a day (and term) invented in Philadelphia. A day that’s ostensibly about the convenience of so many people having off (unless they work retail), but has metastasized into 30hrs of capitalist frenzy to get rock bottom prices on things you may or may not have any practical use for in your life or budget to buy but suddenly must acquire because Christmas or something.

I tended to batten down the hatches on Black Friday and keep them sealed until the entire Christmas shopping season has passed. Why risk going anywhere and getting sucked into the capitalist vortex of deal-seeking shoppers?

Here in New Zealand, Black Friday is just another Friday, owing in part to the fourth Thursday in November simply being the fourth Thursday in November. Today is still Black Friday in the sense that US holidays completely pervade the world calendar thanks to the hegemonic force of their culture.

Shopping on Black Friday is a thing here, but there are few readily visible indications of that. It comes with only a modest sales uptick on the order of 30% over the previous week, which owes at least in part to the fact that the majority people are actually at work here on this utterly normal, beautiful day.

With the lack of a push behind the retail holiday, there’s also a commensurate lack of a sense of the holiday season having suddenly begun. Christmas decorations haven’t suddenly appeared in every business and on every house’s facade.

There are other, trickle-down effects of not having Thanksgiving and Black Friday to kick off the official holiday season. Here, Christmas retail kicked off on November 1st with relatively little fuss. I would say, “the day after Halloween,” but that’s also not really a thing here. Our nearest neighbor advised us that if EV6 dressed up they would find some candy to give her, but no one else in the neighborhood would have any.

That’s not just our neighborhood. We were out and about for the day and did not witness a single costume and nary a pop-up shop in the preceding weeks. Despite being an ostensible global holiday, Halloween is uncelebrated enough by Kiwis that each year there are Very Serious articles written about Trick-or-Treating and if it should be embraced or rejected.

(From the rejected side of the debate: “it is a repugnant excuse of a holiday, dripping in slimy American commercialisation.”)

(Seriously, I like it here so much.)

Even as someone who doesn’t personally partake in Black Friday or Halloween, their effective cultural absence leads to a queer void in my perception of passing time. Sure, the nationwide NZ Secret Santa began on November 6th, but without the unavoidable drumbeat of those twin poles of autumnal capitalist frenzy I hardly believe the end of the year is approaching – which isn’t aided by the fact that today is the most gorgeous one we’ve seen in three months of living here.

The cumulative effect is that I find that I’m not dreading December here the way I did in the states. Yes, I’m sure people will be busy with holiday plans and parties. Christmas on the beach is a thing; after all, it will be summer here. There’s simply not the sense of stepping out of Thanksgiving to fall into a month-long unrelenting blizzard of blaring holiday music about Santa and snow.

Black Friday might bear all of that weight back in the states, but here it is jut another day.

the paradoxical tour guide

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Tomorrow is American Thanksgiving, a holiday that I don’t have many positive feelings about that has no relevance here in Wellington, but which finds many family members free and willing to travel, which makes getting them to Wellington a lot more feasible.

To commemorate our first non-US non-Thanksgiving, E’s sister and brother-in-law have made the trans-Pacific trip to visit us here in Wellington. Their impending visit caused me to feel a lot of pressure.

Not just because they are sleeping in the room in which I shoot Crushing Comics, which meant I had to get a lot more of it unpacked and get ahead on episodes before they arrived.

And, not just because of typical hosting concerns about if we have enough snacks to keep them fed, either. This post could really easily be another 1,000 words about searching grocery stores for decent ricotta and any provolone at all in order to make my baked penne, but I think that logline probably tells you all you need to know about that particular misadventure.

No, the pressure has to do with my inherent, internal tour guide and his feelings of inadequacy.

That erstwhile guide is still left clanging around in my brain a whole sixteen years after I started giving tours of my college campus. He existed even before that. He has a need to keep any crowd educated and entertained as they move through a space that is new to them … and in Wellington he is grasping at straws.

This was never a concern for my siblings-in-law’s many visits to our home in the states. Both of them had lived in and near Philadelphia for long enough that they didn’t require much showing around. In some cases, they could tell me about places I had never seen as much as I could do the same for them. Their visits tended to focus on a lot of TV and movie marathons and, later, a lot of fussing of EV6 followed by much shorter TV and movie marathons.

Now they are visiting us in a place that is totally new to them. They had to fly almost three times as long to reach us! It cost a lot of money to do so! And they’re only here for six days! Plus, they love adventures like safaris and canyoning! All of the days need to be full of X-TREME adventure content!

Except, I don’t know very much about New Zealand, Wellington, really – and certainly very little about anything adventurous! It feels like the only things I’ve been doing for the past three months are unpacking, grocery shopping, and going to kid-friendly stuff with EV6 – plus driving between those endeavors.

As a result, I have a lot to say about traffic patterns. Not too much else, though. The sum total of my “adventuring” has been within the confines of Zealandia preserve and in walking up and down Cuba Street.

Today I picked J & B up from the airport and it felt like I unfurled every possible Wellington factoid on the drive back to our house. It’s a strange feeling that drives home how much otherness there is left to tackle in my life here, even if I have gotten comfortable finding my way around and knowing where to buy my must-have groceries. In Philadelphia I could (and have!) lead an eight-hour walking tour of neighborhoods full of fun facts and hidden gems. I had a story or a memory to go with almost every square block. I could recommend a fun activity to anyone of any age.

I don’t have that here and I’m not sure how long it will take me to get there. The paradox of my internal tour guide is that he wound up that way by happenstance. I’ve always been homebody at heart. It’s not the cool stuff that draws me out of the house, but the memories attached to it. I am less likely to go out and wander here because I don’t have a history and a social fabric to draw me out. There are no streets I derive comfort from walking the way I did from a wander down 4th street in Philly.

I might not know enough to keep my tour guide self monologuing for an eight-hour day, but this week I have a brief window of opportunity to create new New Zealand memories. That’s the fuel for my future tour guide and the memories that I can follow down the streets of Wellington.

this is why I can’t blog about nice things (or nice birds)

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Remember a couple of weeks ago when I was rhapsodizing about the bird sounds of New Zealand and how I have found a deep and abiding love for all things avian and how these are not the kind of evil, unimaginative American birds that tweet the same damned sound over and over again all the day long?

Well, jinxing is real, because the past few days I have been subjected to endless bird-based torture.

Some form of dull, unimaginative, plebeian, single-chirp-sounding bird has fashioned a nest directly under the eave of the roof above our master bedroom. That in and of itself would be pretty annoying, but these boring birds took it a step farther: they laid eggs and reproduced.

By my count there are now at least five distinct birds living somewhere about nine feet above where I sleep. How have I estimated that number? Because when mama or papa bird returns to the nest with some sort of food starting in the vicinity of sunrise at quarter to six in the morning, each of those eager little mouths starts tweeting their demands for food. In the clamoring chorus, I think I can hear at least three diminutive birds chattering in disharmony like an elevator bank where each of the arrival chimes is slightly out of tune to the others.

It is quite specifically my idea of personal sound pollution hell. If you had asked me a week ago when I was making that lovely, charming post about birds what the worst case scenario of birds would be, I would have described THIS EXACT SITUATION.

How long do these unimaginative birds nest before the little ones get kicked out to live on their own? Weeks? Months? We initially mentioned the nesting sounds to our landlord the moment we moved in purely out of concern for the roof, but now I have to be the absolute monster who demands that an entire nest of defenseless young birds be ousted from their home so I may sleep more soundly…

…and I am totally okay with being that monster, but now I’m worried these are going to be some sort of special, endangered, protected brand of boring New Zealand birds and our rental is going to be rezoned as some sort of special nature preserve area and these birds are actually multi-generational cohabitants that will have several sets of young living in one nest and I’m going to have to live with the sunrise wake-up calls from now until we move out of this house.

All because I was feeling mushy and wrote one damned nice post about birds.

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.