Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

left side shock (or: The Great Wellington Cat-Brothel / Bird-Genital Tug-of-War)

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In writing about last evening’s grocery apocalypse solely from my own perspective, one detail that got lost in the mix is E doing all of the left-side driving in a ridiculously large sports utility vehicle.

It’s terrifying. And that’s just from my perspective.

Of course, E is doing all of the hard work and shouldering the even-greater terror of actually piloting the vehicle – the mental gymnastics of staying left, doing shallow left turns and wide right turns, and figuring out how the fuck you “Give Way” in a roundabout.

Even before we could get into the terror of conducting our American-driven death-tank around the unsuspecting roads of Wellington, there was the misadventure of actually acquiring said vehicle at the airport.

We were forewarned by D, E’s Aussie friend on the ground in NZ, that our chosen car rental agency was a little … odd. Perhaps our first hint should have been their complete absence from the considerable line-up of rental desks in the international arrivals terminal.

An exhausted E posed this to me as a feature rather than a bug as I swung a delirious EV6 back and forth by her ankles in an effort to keep her from attempting to surf on the baggage carousel. Our car agency would pick us up and deliver us straight to our vehicle, she advised me as she rang them up to let them know we had arrived and would require a large luggage cart.

It was a concierge service. Perhaps they might arrive wearing a jaunty hat and carrying a little white-board with our names written on it.

I entertained that possibility for the first ten, or maybe twenty minutes of us hovering around our impressive island of nine bags for two-and-a-half people, being the most obvious weirdo, materialistic, “super-size me!” Americans we could possibly be. After that, my hopes began to falter.

(“We’re moving here FOR GOOD!,” I wanted to shout at every Kiwi passing by, “And our household belongings won’t be here for FIVE MORE WEEKS!” As if our suitcases didn’t contain more clothing than most of them had in their entire houses.)

Finally, our man arrived. Sans luggage cart and jaunty cap, but with a large mini-van! Was this our vehicle? He made no comment on that, but started loading our luggage into the rear of the dingy, disheveled old van whose particular scent I might kindly describe as being evocative of a cat brothel.

Hopefully this was not our vehicle. E snapped EV6’s child seat into place and we confirmed that all of our bags were intact. Then, we set out for a short drive through the airport to the rental agency lot.

“Perhaps,” the driver mused, “you might just like to keep the van to drive home? All of your things (he said this very pointedly) fit into it so well. I could drop by your flat with your car tomorrow.”

To which we of course replied, “Um, well, we respect the rights of feline sex workers as long as they are doing the work by their own free will, but perhaps you should hold on to their mobile home and we could possibly have the actual car we rented? If for no reason other than needing to figure out how to snap EV6’s seat into it.

“And also on account of the smell.”
[Read more…] about left side shock (or: The Great Wellington Cat-Brothel / Bird-Genital Tug-of-War)

ripping off the culture shock band-aid (of groceries)

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As I stood in front of a shelf full of unfamiliar jars of pasta sauce, I thought to myself, “What have you done?”

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That the store we chose was named “New World” was not lost on me, because even after 24 hours of travel I can detect thematic content that has the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

People have been asking me, “So, New Zealand – are you excited?” for a couple of months now. It’s gotten to the point where my answers have become rote, though still entirely genuine. I talk about weather, schools, wind, and driving on the wrong side of the road.

After all, Wellington wasn’t going to be so different from Philadelphia. It was another major city with cars and people and houses. I kept that comforting thought fixed in my mind. Even as we traipsed through airports, customs, and wrestling our rental car, the pure weight of our move hadn’t really struck me.

Not like it did in the grocery store.

In that moment standing in front of the pasta sauce, I like to think that I was transmitting a very specific, very serious distress signal that Douglas Adams described so well in the first chapter of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth. On Earth it is never possible to be further than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, which really isn’t very far, so such signals are too minute to be noticed. Ford Prefect was at this moment under great stress, and he was born 600 light years away in the near vicinity of Betelgeuse.

In fact, I am a mere eight thousand, eight hundred, and eighty-two miles from my birthplace. Maybe that’s why no one caught on to my signal. As distressing as it was to me, it was far too minute for anyone else to notice. [Read more…] about ripping off the culture shock band-aid (of groceries)

the day that never was

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I missed this entire day.

We took off on Monday, August 21st from San Francisco just after 11pm, which meant we were running from midnight across the Pacific Ocean. Given our speed of travel, I’m actually not sure if we ever experienced the clock turning over from Monday to Tuesday before we hit the International Date Line.

Your author, the slapdash cowboy, sitting in his rented vehicle in Wellington – which is a whole other story unto itself.

Perhaps the pilot made an announcement when we crossed the line to let us know that it was suddenly not just past midnight but Tuesday evening. If he did, I was asleep at the time. All I know is that we wound up landing in Sydney around 6am on Wednesday, August 23rd, which was 5pm on Tuesday, August 22nd back in Philly.

Our flight was without incident, but our de- and re-planing was not.

We decided to fly through Sydney because it meant we wouldn’t have to go through customs in Auckland and then re-check all of our luggage to fly to Wellington. Our bags would simply make the connection in Sydney while we stayed safely within the confines of the International Terminal, like a fugitives waiting on a foreign embassy to take them in.

What no one mentioned to us is that even though we wouldn’t hit customs in Sydney we would still have to go through a re-security check to stay in the International Terminal. That meant that we not only had to do the whole security theatre dance while bleary-eyed just off a 14-hour flight, but that we had to discard all of our awesome snacks and liquids meant to carry us through the final leg of our journey.

On the plus side: the food in the Sydney International Airport was amazing. I had a falafel and pumpkin wrap for breakfast and it was so amazing that I followed it up with a pumpkin sandwich and now I am having serious misgivings about the short shrift we as Americans give to pumpkins. [Read more…] about the day that never was

not failing my first New Zealand test

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I love tests.

I love them because I delight in my ability to pass them. I was always that weird kid in class who loved when we were forced to take standardized tests. I can’t think of a single final in college I didn’t ace. Even my driving test, which caused me over a decade of agita, was just one more set of objective criteria for which I could learn the correct answers.

Ultimately, tests are no different than playing a song in front of an audience – all it takes to pass them is rehearsal. Plus, with most tests there’s not the subjective grading level of the audience rejecting you because of how you look or because you’re playing the wrong kind of guitar.

(But, seriously, Flying V guitars are lame and Gina and I will judge you.)

It’s only the tests you can’t rehearse for that give me any unease, which is why I was very nervous last week as we embarked on a two hour drive to northern New Jersey to one of the only three doctors in driving distance who may conduct a physical for our New Zealand visas. (There are presently only 34 Immigration New Zealand panel physicians in America – you’re screwed if you live in the Midwest, or even parts of the Pacific Northwest!)

Objectively, I knew the questions with which this test was concerned. New Zealand’s health care system isn’t socialized single-payer, but it’s government-subsidized enough that the “good health” of their potential residents is paramount to them granting a working visa.

What’s “good health” in this instance? They make it sound so simple on their friendly immigration site…

  • unlikely to be a danger to the health of the people already in New Zealand
  • unlikely to cost New Zealand’s health or special education services a lot of money
  • able to work or study if this the reason for your visa.

Simple, yes? Yet, getting there while over the age of 55 isn’t easy, and you can be rejected in one fell swoop for having certain medical conditions “deemed to impose significant costs and/or demands,” which include HIV and M.S.. In all of those cases, you can certainly be in “good health,” but it might take more state dollars to keep you there.

Not an approved INZ panel physician (I checked).

I’m not that old nor do I have any of the conditions in question. I’m in decent physical shape and quite limber. I have near-perfect eyesight. I wasn’t feeling congested enough to be anxious that my chest X-ray would give a false positive that I had tuberculosis.

The only unknowns were a urine sample and a blood test, but I would be fine. As for “preparing” for these tests, they only had three suggestions – which of course I studied carefully:

How do I prepare for my immigration medical examination?

  • If you are mildly unwell or on a short course of antibiotics, wait until you are better before having your immigration medical examination.
  • Do not have alcohol or high fat meals 48 hours before your blood tests.
  • Do not consume kava for 48 hours before your blood tests.

Easy.

Except, in that most Peter of Peter decisions, 24 hours before the test I did something very inadvisable (see also: shaving off my guitar callouses before a big gig; not sleeping the night before my driving test).

Here’s the inadvisable thing:

Yes, that is a Friendly’s Wattamelon roll. [Read more…] about not failing my first New Zealand test

Song of the Day: “Liability” by Lorde

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I am always fascinated when a teenage musician – not just a singer or player, but a songwriter – becomes a global star.

It’s a selfish fascination. I remember being that age and being full to the brim with inspiration. I recall feeling like songs were bursting out of my brain every single day, sometimes faster than I could write them down. I would naively follow all of my melodic impulses, no matter how transgressive, and for as many awful choices I see in hindsight there are the occasional flashes of brilliance.Lorde_Melodrama

I can never decide whether it is good or bad that YouTube didn’t exist at the time. I love that the teenaged songwriter version of me is a Schrödinger’s cat of internet fame; we’ll never know if he would be beloved or ridiculed.

For those selfish reasons, I have been more fascinated but the journey of the precociously talented Lorde than I was with the slick Justin Bieber or the initially folksy Taylor Swift.

All three are mega-talented songwriters, but they both express that in different ways. Bieber’s expression was about the casual, effortless coolness of being in the in-club. Taylor Swift was about transformation – from country kid who sang about being an underdog to pop bombshell sweeping up Grammys.

Lorde’s expression has been the utter opposite of them both. She’s almost too full of effort compared to Bieber, and as self-conscious as Swift but more wild and free than she has ever allowed herself to be.

Lorde’s songs are brimming with that wildness, starting with “Royals” – a song so basic yet so vividly evocative. Each feels like an aperture into her wildly buzzing creative mind, controlling the flow, letting just enough of her interior world through that we can make sense of it.

Despite the electricity of her songs, Lorde’s Pure Heroine wasn’t the world-altering smash of, say, Alanis’s Jagged Little Pill. It’s not a singular, unassailable achievement. She could and would be able to follow it up, and just has with her sophomore effort, Melodrama.

There are a lot of interesting, mature moments on Melodrama, but none so arresting as the bare piano balled “Liability.” Maybe that’s because Lorde is an obvious mastermind, controlling every little flutter and breath noise across her discography, but “Liability” is her sparest song. It’s a bare piano ballad – just keys and her voice.

[Read more…] about Song of the Day: “Liability” by Lorde