Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Definitely Probably Pregnant

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As I fall asleep, I think about cells rapidly dividing.

Nothing is ever a sure thing, but I am pretty sure we are pregnant.

ZygoteWe have been trying for a few months now, where “trying” means (close your eyes, future offspring) having sex with a little more consternation and chart-making than usual. I mean, depending on your usual sex, I guess.

This time around I don’t think it would be projection to say we both felt a little different as the week wore on. When we woke up yesterday, after much devil’s advocacy from both sides we wanted to take the test. I inquired if I needed to hold any sort of papers while E peed on them and was rapidly dismissed.

“Wait,” I said. “What should I do?”

“Not follow me into the bathroom?”

“No, I mean, what should I be doing in case you come downstairs and tell me we’re pregnant? I don’t want to be surfing the internet. This is a big moment.”

“It is,” she acceded, maybe fidgeting impatiently.

“How long does it take?”

“Five minutes.”

“I’m going to play a song. Something I wrote. A song about you.”

“Okay,” she said. And, maybe, “Can I go take the test now?”

“Yes. Okay.”

I played a song called “What Do You Want From Me?” which in retrospect was a peculiar choice. It’s a song about being an imperfect partner and lover, and being afraid you aren’t enough how you are. I don’t think I chose it with any intent, but it was a decent enough selection for five minutes of being Schrodinger’s Expectant Father.

She returned during the last verse and proffered me a tiny strip of paper full of arcane writing and a series of red lines.

“I think it’s positive.”

“What am I reading here?” I said, squinting down at the paper.

“Two red lines.”

two-red-lines“I see them. The one’s a little faint.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she replied. “I’m pregnant.”

Of course, this is me we’re talking about. E is growing a baby while I harbor an OCD Godzilla. She would need to test again. I would watch. Luckily, this was not the pee right on it sort of test. There was a sort of shot glass full of urine for testing purposes. Is that too much information? I’m just trying to be transparent about the utter ridiculousness of the situation. This is how new life is discovered.

We tested and I watched. Like a hawk. From two or three inches away from our second little urine-soaked paper strip while E kept time on a digital watch.

“I definitely see a second line.”

We were pregnant. Definitely. Probably.

“Can we just dip a fistful of the strips into the pee to be sure?”

She sighed, exasperated, maybe realizing she was in for nine months of me being the crazy one … and, that even if her hormones allowed her to briefly surpass my crazy, Godzilla and I would spring back into the lead and maintain it for the majority of our offspring’s 18 years of childhood.

“Imagine,” I encouraged E later in the day, “if we had a way to make just one or two of those cells the best possible cell right now. We’d wind up with a 12.5% better baby!”

That was most of the baby chat for the day. We’re not too precious. But, as I turned over in bed to face E all that was on my mind was cells that were once one and are now many, more even since we discovered them in the morning.

That was our baby.

Note: This post was embargoed until we reached 20 weeks; it was made public on 3/20/2013.

not what i meant to say

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That post was supposed to be about the Marvel Avengers Alliance PvP tournament and how you have to be in the top 1,000 people in the world to win Deadpool for free and how I am currently ranked 1,700 out of TWO MILLION but I am never going to close that 700-person gap between now and tomorrow when it’s over even though I am taking every POSSIBLE shot at this point.

In my head I still know it was about that, but I’d have to draw a effing diagram to explain to you how it wound up being about Wayne Gretzky.

Instead, please accept this rather hilarious comic book cover of Deadpool facing off against an undead Teddy Roosevelt and a hoard of animals – presumably either ones that he hunted or intended to kill but never got around to prior to his death.

Why they are playing for Team Teddy, I don’t understand.

shots you don’t take

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I know exactly three hockey players by name, and two of them are Flyers. The other, of course, is Wayne Gretzky, who famously said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

(Actually, maybe it was his dad who said it to him? In any event, I enjoy this version: “I learned that 100 percent of the shots you don’t take don’t go in the net.”)

This might be the first time the visage of a sports star has graced the front page of CK. Bask while you can, sports fans.

This is one of those maxims that is so crazy obvious that we tend to lose the meaning. Like, duh, if you don’t try it, it will never get done. All of the shirts I never folded will stay unfolded until I fold them.

Except, I think it deserves a little more nuanced than that. It’s not just about taking every possible shot – like, asking every girl out until one says yes. It’s about maximizing your shots … which, in that unfortunate example, means going somewhere where there are a lot more girls.

(Or, maybe asking some of the boys out, too.)

This makes me think about how I play video games. I am a super-defensive player. This can be traced back to my great love of playing Chun Li in Streetfighter through ceaseless hours of turtling in strategy games like and Warcraft. I like avoiding attacks as I chip away at a player’s defense until I am big and bold enough to crush them decisively.

I take plenty of shots, as long as I stay safe while I”m doing it.

It should not come as a shock that I am awesome at playing these games against the computer opponent (hello: only child), but I am not so great at playing against other human beings. The computer isn’t terribly innovative, so my long game tends to work fine in keeping my undefeated, even at the highest difficulty. But, introduce one PVP game of Starcraft into my mix and all of my careful planning goes out the window. I get shredded. Or Zerg rushed. Whatever.

I’m taking every shot I can in my normal play style, so I’m doing Mr. Gretzky proud… right?

No. My play style isn’t meant to maximize wins – it’s meant to minimize damage. It features way less shots. That would be fine if I was a member of a team, but when we’re on our own we’re all playing the same position as Gretzky – center. I can’t afford to just play goalie, praying for shut-out.

The only way to take more shots is to change my entire approach to the game.

Hockey and video games might not be my calling, but when it comes to songwriting, me and Mr. Gretzy see eye-to-eye. It write it ALL down. I take every shot, even if it’s just a single line I’m jotting down, because I’ve seen too many bad one-liners turn into amazing songs to ignore them anymore. I know every song counts, so I stopped being such a perfectionist about it.

I’m a perfectionist in many things, and perfectionists take way less shots. Maybe they never get blocked or intercepted or misunderstood or finish second. Maybe every song is a hit. But, if you write down only the hits, you’ll be missing so many melodies, until you’re not writing down anything at all.

I do not want a life full of empty nets and blank pages.

I am going to take more shots. Defense be damned.

Crushing On: Productivity Tools ToDoist & TimeSheet

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I’m at my best when I’m on the clock.

That’s not just a euphemism for procrastinating until a deadline. I am consistently, measurably better at getting things done when I consistently measure what I’m getting done.

That’s always been true for me at work, especially starting in 2006 when I flourished like a unruly weed when paired with a project management system that allowed me to track my billable hours. Knowing what my to-do list consists of and how long I spend doing it is a huge motivator for me. I guess it was my own version of  “gamification” before that became a hip thing to do to everything in your life.

It hasn’t always been as easy to find the same productivity alchemy at home. I always have long-term goals and near-term projects I’m working on, but I don’t exactly have billable hours. Who is there to charge, aside from myself? Left to my own devices I’ll always pick the thing that is the most fun or the most methodical – which works out frequently to rehearsing, occasionally as laundry, and hardly ever as cleaning the bathroom.

I’ve found a website and an app that both nip that occasional path-of-least-resistance listlessness in the bud, but from slightly different directions.

ToDoist: a tasklist website and app

First, there’s ToDoist. I found it over the summer after demoing over a dozen task management systems online to help my wrangle dozens of things I was hoping to get done. Some of the services were no-frills checklists, while others were practically their own personal Outlook installation.

ToDoist falls closer to the former side of the scale – it’s a simply, obvious checklist that allows you to group tasks into projects and set deadlines and priorities.

When I checked out other systems, I discovered the lack of projects and priorities to be a real dealbreaker. If you can’t organize your tasks or give them some sense of order then you might as well be working with a pen and paper – which is cool and all, but I wanted something dynamic that worked from any internet connection as well as on my phone.

ToDoist does the trick, and for a mere $2 a month you can add improved filtering, tagging, searches, and reminders – totally worth it!

ToDoist meant I was actually crossing things off my list of at-home to-dos – awesome! However, it lacked one feature I really treasure about entering billable hours at work – the ability to perform an audit on what I was spending (wasting?) the most time on. I find that’s a useful exercise to undergo both at work and at home to normalize your expectations … like, your commute is always 45 minutes, so stop being so sure you can leave work late and still get home by six!

Timesheet: a time tracker app for Android

I needed a super-straightforward phone app – effectively, just a stopwatch for tasks. I found my match in a free app called TimeSheet.

It’s the perfect tool for a freelancer or home project enthusiast. You can set up multiple projects, each with a client and a billable rate. When you start working you simply start the clock on your project! When you’re done you stop the clock and wind up with a handy task summary that breaks out your billability and allows you to add expenses and notes. You can also add tasks after the fact without the clock, and export your data to Excel.

Is this overkill for a week or two of auditing how I spend my time? A little. But, you don’t have to use all of those features. Heck, you could use it just for one thing you are trying to bring more of in your life, like working on your NaBloPoMo book or mixing your band’s new album.

(Not that I need extra motivation to do either of those.)

(Okay, maybe just a little.)

In just three days I found out that I’m getting way more sleep than I used to, and that my commute takes up a lot more time in aggregate than I realized – so I should find something productive to do while I’m in transit. I also decided I could be spending a minimum of time each day doing other things (a-hem: blogging), so I added projects for those too.

There you have it – two free productivity tools that can help you get a better handle on your time. I’m totally into them both, so hopefully you can find some use for them too.

Now it’s your turn: What productivity tool are you crushing on lately? Is it super-techy, or as simple as a pen and paper?

Musical Fingerprints

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I often lament that there is no instruction manual to being a rock band, and one of the areas I most frequently wish Arcati Crisis had some sort of guide to is selecting songs when your band has multiple songwriters.

Ideally, this guide would be written by The Beatles, or maybe Fleetwood Mac. However, Gina would probably not read it if it was written by Wham!

(What is the grammatical rule for punctuating sentences that end with a name that includes punctuation? Like, I didn’t mean that sentence to be exclamatory. I certainly don’t want Gina to think I am shouting (again) about her not liking Wham!)

(There it goes again. Damn you, Wham!)

Lately Gina and I have been on a new-song-selecting kick. It is interesting to pick multiple songs at the same time because we always choose one song from each of us at a time, but there is a huge disparity in the pool of selections. I write a lot of songs – anywhere from 6 to 20 every year – in many different styles. Pop, folk, rock, country ballads. I’m all over the place. Gina writes relatively few songs. There have been years when I have only heard one or two finished ones, even if she has many others lying in wait. Yet, Gina’s songs are much more thematically consistent.

Thus, the selection process is a bit madcap. A few weeks ago, I played twenty-five songs for Gina to select a mere two. I had my preferences, but I have long since learned that it doesn’t do any good to try to force Gina’s hand into a pick. The resulting song will suck. Gina has to hear a space for herself inside of it.

In the midst of reading the monstrous New York cover story on Grizzly Bear, I discovered they utilize nearly the same process.

Ask them who they’re thinking of when they write, and it’s not an end listener—it’s the other members of the band, who might dislike what’s been written, or lack anything to contribute to it, at which point it’ll be tabled. “Everyone has to have a fingerprint on every song,” says Droste. The whole thing sounds like passing major legislation through Congress.

“Maybe it’s a lot,” says Bear, “that we’re asking ourselves to all be four democratic voices on everything. Maybe that’s not common.”

It is common, Grizzlies! See, this is why we need a guide.

(After reading, I was inspired to listen to Grizzly Bear’s new LP – Shields. It was very well-produced – transfixingly so. Yet, not a single melody was memorable. I felt pretty similarly about their last record.)

(I don’t think my votes would be very popular in their democracy).

By contrast, Gina played me a mere seven songs (a bumper crop, for her), of which I became immediately obsessed with six, so then she had to go back and choose four more of mine. One of hers was about zombies, another about Ben Franklin, a third particularly ingenious one about Daylight Savings Time. It helps that I am a massive fan of Gina’s sensibility in just about everything.

However, there was one I was not obsessed with. Gina also played it for me earlier this year, and at the time I said I thought it might not be done. I made the same argument a few weeks ago. “Maybe it needs more of a refrain,” I said, “or a slightly different chord change in that middle section.”

Now I realize – after Grizzly Bear so succinctly summed up the democracy of songwriting – that there is simply no room for my fingerprint on the song. It is distinctly Gina, with very little room left for my own devices. I am trying to convince her to change it to make room for my fingerprint, but it doesn’t really need it.

How is it that I have always understood that about Gina’s choices in my songs, but never about my choices of hers?

See: we really need an instruction manual.