Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

10 Tips to Make Your Color Run Awesome(r)

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Lilly white at the start line with my run-buddy @AllieHarch!

Today I ran Philadelphia’s inaugural Color Run with my friend and fellow blogger @AllieHarch. It was my first 5k, and the biggest Color Run in the world to date!

The Color Run is an awesome 5k that makes running fun and accessible for athletes of all levels – even someone like me who hates running. While a wave of “tough” runs add obstacles and challenges to their courses, The Color Run marks your route with clouds of primary and secondary colors and celebrates your finish with the best rainbow-colored 8am dance party you’ll ever attend.

Despite almost backing out at 10pm last night, I am so very happy I followed through. I feel awesome from the exercise, and covered my smile quotient for the week. The thrill that went through the crowd as we approached either color zone was incredible, and the party at the end was actually fun!

Sound like your kind of event? There are Color Runs all over the world! If you decide do do one, here are some tips for your from someone who just ran his first race (and who also happens to work to produce one of the largest races in the country).

Our friend @mayasalloum after her rainbow partying at the finish.

1. Be prepared.

If you drive to the run, pack a fresh change of clothes (sneakers, too!) and two sheets or towels – one to lay your shirt on to dry, and another for the seat of your car.

If you don’t drive, at least pack a small gym towel or kerchief in your running sack.

For the race itself, keep your phone and keys in a plastic bag. Even if they’re stain-proof, you don’t want the paste of sweat and color-dust on them.

2. Do the (first) wave.

Post-Run, but Pre-Party

If you want to make the most of the post-race party and the rest of your day, line up early.

We lined up at 6:30am and we were in the first wave to cross the start line at 7am, with no delay. Waves were still releasing when we finished! That gave us plenty of time to take photos and party without it being too crowded.

3. Run, don’t race.

As 5k events go, I did not get the impression that this was one where you should strive to set a personal record. For one, you’ll miss out on getting blasted with color on the course! While I certainly ran enough to make it challenging, the people having the most fun were with groups of friends laughing with each other and meeting new people.

Front row at the party!

4. Avert your eyes.

Well, maybe not avert, but cover them up with a cool pair of shades! Judging from the artillery fire of pinks and purples on my glasses, they were the right way to go. You’ll be squinting and wincing constantly without them.

5. Breath easy.

I found it a little challenging to breath in the 30 seconds after each color zone – it’s as if a bag of colorful flour exploded in your kitchen!

If you think this will bother you, just buy a cheap, disposable dust mask at the drug store to wear in the color zones until the dust clears. Don’t worry, there is plenty of clear space between them to breath freely.

6. Colors run, wet sets.

Sweating through my shirt seemed to set the colors, and encouraged them to bleed into each other, creating a muddy mess where orange met green. Similarly, my sweatiest body parts attracted/absorbed the most color.

If you really want a distinctly colored splatter on your commemorative shirt, wear a tank top beneath your shirt to slow down the colors from running.

Allie and I looking ridiculous, mid-party.

7. Use your head(band).

Going along with that last one, you really don’t want sweat on your face and in your eyes at this event. Make use of the freebie sweatband and/or wear a bandanna.

8. A colorful party.

You can only accumulate so much color on the course itself. If you really want to become a rainbow you need to locate the party at your finish line, where they continue to dispense color packets like Pez while everyone dances. Even if you’re not up for a dance party, the festive environment is unique and very photogenic.

9. The brush-off.

Resist the urge to rinse off your face at the finish or advance immediately to scrubbing when you return home. Your first pass at your face should be a gentle brushing off using facial tissue or a makeup pad. Then, try dabs of olive oil rather than water.

I have sensitive skin and huge, hungry pores, but this tactic kept my face free and clear post-race.

Rainbow haze.

10. Color within the lines.

If you rely on your face, hands, or other bare body part for work or play, consider protecting them from the end-of-run color. Despite dedicated scrubbing of my hands, I’m afraid to play guitar or read graphic novels – my two big Sunday pastimes!

In retrospect, I might have appreciated a set of rubber gloves to wear at the party.

Crushing On: Smart Girls at the Party

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E and I joke that in our relationship she contributes most of the food discovery, while I chip in most of the media. She finds fresh foods, new snacks, and recipes, while I unearth new bands, programs, and news.

Lately we have slightly flipped the script, with me signing up for a CSA and E getting more connected with the women in tech movement. Which is how I walked downstairs the other day to find her watching this:


(If you can’t see the embed, you can watch the episode elsewhere.)

I sat down. I laughed and cried. I was delighted.

That’s an episode of Smart Girls at the Party, an unusual and awesome internet talk-show hosted by Amy Poehler of SNL and Parks and Rec. The show’s mission statement is “Extraordinary individuals changing the world by being themselves.”

What that boils down to is Amy Poehler interviewing young women who are trying and succeeding at anything and everything they want to do.

“We wanted to represent real female friends and celebrate that stage of life where you write down what you want to be when you get older, before too many people tell you no,” Poehler said. “And we poke fun at the talk-show format a little bit, taking very silly things very seriously. This is like ‘Charlie Rose’ for a younger audience.”

…”We wanted something to feel bite-sized and positive and I do think that there’s some lack of celebration of the unique, original girl,” Poehler told the Daily News. “So in some ways, it was a response to that. But, honestly, we really wanted to do a talk show that had a dance party at the end.”

I am not a fanatic about Poehler, but here her typical deadpan delivery makes for hilariously honest interactions with the wide age-group of her guests. She never condescends or jokes at their expense. Actually, she builds them up as characters and experts by interviewing them from a place of delighted naivete.

Despite being a major feminist, I’m always unsure when it comes to girl-centric programming – whether that’s curricular or in media. On one hand, I know girls need to get away from the shadow and influence of boys in educational and social settings so they can grow up with equal footing. On the other, girls-only can be a ghetto, and it can serve not only to over-shelter girls but also exclude the inquisitive, equality-minded boys that form the other half of a equal-opportunity world.

It’s a tough line to tread, and I feel like Smart Girls at the Party really gets it right. It’s a show I would share with girls or boys, and I’m sure they would both find it equally delightful – it just happens to feature the empowered young women who will change the world tomorrow by being themselves today.

Best of all, it’s a reminder that smart girls at the party are often the coolest ones in the room.

break it and build it again

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I wasn’t allowed to sing for two weeks. It’s a story I’ll get around to telling once it stops freaking me out quite so much.

That meant no Arcati Crisis rehearsals. My singing is much less central to Filmstar, so we kept rehearsing sans my mic stand.

Right now we’re in pre- pre-production for our next recording. For our last one we started with recording drums to click tracks, and even if is taking me forever and ever to mix them into something listenable it was certainly worth the effort. Being able to steal sounds from any take and blend them together seamlessly was totally worth the tempo wrangling. Plus, everything is nice and consistent!

An outtake from our recent Filmstar photo shoot.

Unless you are playing the most obvious 1-2-3-4 rhythm on the planet, when you play to a click it is like the musical world you are creating from within has had its gravitational value altered. Songs feel too slow when you play them quietly and deliberately, but too fast at full blast. Syncopation puts your emphasis off-click, which feels like swimming against tide. You discover parts where you subtly speed up or slow down, and the seconds of discontinuity give you musical vertigo.

To that imbalance, this week we have returned my singing to the equation, but it’s different, too. Yes, I am more cautious of my high notes, but it’s more than that. My voice doesn’t have that worn-in groove that it usually has, where I can settle in and belt. I have to actually think about where I am placing my notes, and how I will support them.

Add to that a new set of strings on my bass and a handful of new effects pedals, and it really feels like I am playing these songs again for the first time, relearning my parts piece by piece.

What makes that so interesting is that these are the songs we learned after I joined the band. The pieces are mine. The parts came from my brain. Instead of fiddling with someone else’s bass line that doesn’t quite fit me to begin with, I am rebuilding each song from components of my own design.

It is totally different. I get to ask questions about my own musical logic. I am tearing down old rhythms and fingering for things that are more efficient or intricate, or both.

I know it is the same band of the same four people and these are songs I have been playing for a long time – two years, for some of them – but I can’t help it: it feels new to me.

The next Filmstar show is on Sunday, August 5th at NorthStar Bar, where we will have the pleasure of sharing the bill with the darling boys of Venice Sunlight.

You should come.

anti-social anti-media

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We spent our Independence Day holiday lazily barbecuing with our friends Chris and Courtney. E prepped a seemingly endless area of fishes and dessert dishes, and Chris manned the grill all day between trips back into the AC.

Courtney and I mostly just ate cheese.

Chris and Courtney are new friends, but Chris is an old acquaintance. In college he was always a friend-of-a-friend. The guy with the crazy stories about flipping his truck or blowing up things in his backyard. I would never call him up to offer to hang out.

As a result, E didn’t really know him at all. When we re-met him last year at her shared birthday party with Ross we laughed non-stop with him and his new girlfriend Courtney, and kept gravitating back to them in conversation in a room full of people we knew better. A few months later, we called them up for dinner on a whim, and now we’re semi-regular friends.

I find that a lot of the people I spend time with fall into the category of “new friends,” though it’s less down to meeting people at parties, and more because of social media. Yet, the things that give me fodder for discussion on Twitter are the ones keeping me from hanging out with the people I’m tweeting! And that’s okay – that’s how we Twitter-met, after all, and we still all have Twitter to chat on. I can be busy and physically anti-social, but still digitally mingle.

Chris and Courtney were an exception. They don’t tweet. They use Facebook to collect photos. They occasionally text. If we wanted to see them, we would have to put in the effort and the phone call and actually see them with our eyes instead of a screen.

We’ve kept it up over the past year, and every excursion is a fun one. Lately, we’re beginning to take the same methodology to our existing friends – both collegiate and online. Do they want to stop by for lunch? Can we meet them somewhere for a quick cup of coffee?

That’s what I spent my Monday night doing, with @PurpleCar. We sat and gabbed for two hour straight in a diner. E invited my dear high school friend Ariel over for lunch on Saturday. We might go to a BBQ that day, as well.

Friends are more than just a square of illuminated pixels and bolts of notable musings dashed off between other engagements. Friends are people who make your face hurt from smiling, whose stories you relish and rehash once you’ve known them all.

We spent our Independence Day with friends, unfettered by cell phones and check-ins. It felt apropos.

independence doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help

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On a top-secret mission to Sine Studios at 127 S. 22nd Street in Philadelphia, just above Walnut.

Happy Independence Day!

Last night Jake and I conducted a special, top secret Arcati Crisis mission at Sine Studios, my favorite studio in Philly.

I can’t get into the details of our journey just yet, but given the context of today it made me think about what independence and DIY really means to me – and to you.

For a long time I was DIY because I had to be – because no one else wanted to help me make music or publish my writing or code my website. I didn’t have the money or the clout to attract anyone to my projects, so I did them all myself.

I’m sure you’ve found yourself in the same place. Nobody would do it for you, so you did it for yourself!

That do-it-yourself know-how is a wonderful thing to have. I love that I’ve never been to a recording studio and that I’ve coded all my own websites from scratch or with open source. I love being capable and autonomous.

But being independent doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help.

This weekend in my JavaScript coding I got super-stuck more than once. Luckily, I am married to a self-taught JavaScript expert. I was happy to have her help. Last summer E laid down a set of beautiful new slate steps in our back yard, but mixing a new cement panel for our front walk was beyond her. We hired a local contractor, and they took care if it in a matter of hours a few weeks ago.

E and I never stopped being independent and capable. We still did our research and learned new things from the process. We just called in the experts when the time was right.

I have been working on recording projects for both Arcati Crisis and Filmstar over the past year. Recording a full rock band is a tall task. It’s not just about putting up a ton of microphones and rolling tape. You have to deal with noise, separation, splitting signals, phase issues, and tons of other aspects.

I can handle that myself as a recording engineer, but that takes a lot out of me as a performer. Add to that a fiercely played full drum set, and the hamster in my brain will run itself right off of his wheel.

That’s what lead to our top secret trip to Sine. I was asking for help from experts that I trust.

It doesn’t mean we’re not independent. It doesn’t mean I couldn’t do it myself if I wanted to. It just means that now I know when it’s time to reach out to someone I trust instead of suffering through difficulties on my own.

That’s what independence means to me today.

What does independence mean to you?