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The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

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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

kiwi-flavoured future

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I first proposed that Crushing Krisis might be the longest-running blog in Philadelphia back in 2003 (at which point it almost certainly wasn’t), going further to verify that claim in 2008 (at which point it almost-surely was), and finally started owning up to it on CK’s anniversary in 2009.

Crushing Krisis’s claim to that auspicious title will finally come to an end later this summer, when it relocates from Philadelphia to New Zealand along with its author, moi, and supporting players E and EV6. Oh, and of course, OCD Godzilla will be coming too – I’ve already been assured of that. Repeatedly.

Yes, that New Zealand – the one that is “Down Under” along with Australia. The one where people refer to themselves as “kiwis.”

No, I am not joking.

There is much more story to tell along with the announcement of this major transition but I’m not prepared to unfurl it all at this very moment. Considering I don’t even especially like to travel (or, at least, to pack for travel) and have only left the country a handful of times in my life, this constitutes the biggest possible change to my personal status quo I’ve ever experienced, save for perhaps leaving my amazing job, having a baby, and leaving my previous amazing job for a potential unstable amazing start-up job.

All of that definitely helped me prepare for this and I do plan on talking about it here. A lot.

Suffice to say that my plan was not to stay at home fathering and blogging quite this long. As the possibility of our relocation loomed it became obvious that the present was not the time for a Philly-based job search for a long-term and executive position!

It also explains why I was a bit preoccupied with life in June and fell off of my ambitious (but, not impossible) posting schedule for the month.

Now, in addition to reading my talking about listening to music, writing music, reading comic books, and fatherhood, you’ll now be hearing about the process of becoming an American expatriate as well as us getting to know New Zealand, plus my utter glee at finally having an excuse to spell “colour,” “flavour,” and “favourite” with a “u.”

If you’ll excuse me, OCD Godzilla and I have to get back to a several-hundred line project plan to figure out how and when I’m going to ship an entire home recording studio and over 25,000 comic books halfway around the world.

In the meantime, please enjoy this photo of a kiwi bird:

New Collecting Guides: DC Comics Rebirth & New 52 (plus: What is DC Rebirth, anyway?)

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It’s a new year and with it comes something I never thought I’d be saying on Crushing Krisis:

Today I’m announcing the first pair of what will eventually be 52 DC Comics Guides coming to CK –DC Comics Rebirth and DC Comics New 52.

Yes, really. Each guide comprehensively covers the issues of their era, with every comic listed and every collection linked.They’re available thanks to my supporters on Patreon. If you find them useful, I’d love it if you’d chip in $1 a month.

Why DC? Why now? And, what is DC Rebirth, anyway?

That’s a slightly longer story.

I get a modest amount of reader mail. It’s always extremely generous and kind and makes me obscenely happy. I try to respond to every message.

The vast majority of the questions therein can be classified into two categories. One is “Will you extend your X-Men Reading Order into Marvel Now?” (The answer is: “I’d really love to, but it would take a very long time.”)

The other is, “Would you ever consider creating guides to DC Comics?” [Read more…] about New Collecting Guides: DC Comics Rebirth & New 52 (plus: What is DC Rebirth, anyway?)

35-for-35: 2004 – “I Control The Sun” by Lisa Loeb

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This post is part of my month-long "Blog of Tomorrow" celebration of the launch of Crushing Krisis's Patreon. Learn more or become a Patron today!



I sometimes wonder if “one hit wonder” has any meaning in a world of limitless streaming and every album of all time available for purchase.

lisa-loeb-2004-promo-squareToday, if someone likes your song, odds are they’re going to listen to another one – either intentionally or through some engine of recommendation.

Things were different in 1994, when Lisa Loeb broke through with her classic “Stay (I Missed You)” (which, incidentally, Ashley and I have discover can create a tender singalong in any barroom).

It truly was a singular hit – it appeared on the Reality Bites soundtrack when Loeb was unsigned without any other songs available on commercial releases. If fans loved that track when Loeb hit the scene they were out of luck. Her only other recorded work was on a cassette tape you could only buy from her at shows. Today, those tunes would be plastered all over BandCamp or SoundCloud, waiting to be devoured, supplemented by YouTube videos.

(For the record, I wouldn’t call Lisa Loeb a one-hit wonder; “Do You Sleep” was huge and she’s had several other charting singles.)

Hardly any artist broke through with their singular hit quite like Lisa Loeb did, but many artists – especially women in the 90s – fell to the same fate. They maybe garnered another LP before being dropped from their labels and dropping out of sight for all but the most ardent fans.

As it happens, E and I are quite ardent in our Lisa Loeb fandom. In fact, you could go so far as to say it’s part of the foundation of our relationship. We’ve never missed a Lisa Loeb release, and this house is a parallel universe where she has dozens of notable singalong hits.

One of those house hits is “I Control The Sun,” off of Loeb’s fourth (and, I’d say, indisputably best) record, The Way It Really Is. The record came out just a few months shy of E and I moving in together when I graduated college. As an overachieving Type A control freak with a raucous OCD Godzilla who rules over my innards, I deeply connected with the song in a way that’s similar to my feelings about “Center of Attention.” It might be the best song about the anxiety of being perfect since Alanis’s crushing “Perfect” on Jagged Little Pill.

There’s no doubt in my mind Lisa Loeb has her own internal raging OCD monster. I’ve seen the way she’s methodically spread her brand across multiple platforms – voice acting and starring in reality shows between albums, and now pivoting to children’s music and a line of glasses as her core fandom ages. And, well, I’m a musician and I’ve seen her live – I know all of those little tells a musician makes on stage when things aren’t going perfectly well, and she’s does them as much as I do.

the-way-it-really-is-lisa-loebBut what use is all of our perfection when it comes to our relationships? Lisa and I can control every factor in the world, but we can’t change how someone else feels. That’s why, for all its whimsy, I hear a certain desperation in this song:

I control the sun
I turn on the stars
I make all the colors that you see as you circle me
I open up the sky
I control the speed
I can make the green lights flash
I can make you crash

Those are the words of someone trying to be the wizard behind the curtain – keeping every light flashing and plate spinning all with a smile plastered across their face. What better to represent the epitome of that control than subverting the sun itself?! It’s the perfect endgame for someone with a galactic-sized need to be in charge.

I can’t make you see things the way I see them
I can’t make you feel things the way I feel them
I can’t wait around for you
I’ve got better things to do

When the sun metaphorically does your bidding, it’s really easy to want to throw up your hands the first time another human being is completely inscrutable. I’ve been that controlling person – not just in romance with E, but with friends and at work. I’ve thought that I’ve had such a good grip on all the measurables that nothing intangible could ever get in my way.

I control the world
I can make it flat
I can make the water deep so I can save you from the sea

(That’s actually a good explanation of how I fell backwards into being a good Account Manager. Early in my career I went to my boss, distraught that controlling the sun and the sea level wasn’t making my clients like me. She, much more of a people person that I, replied, “Have you ever tried asking them if they like baseball?” Being a good AM had very little to do with control and more to do with social penetration and certainty – but, that’s another post entirely.)

The song presses on, with Loeb lamenting, “I’ve tried everything” until she finally admits the truth in a vortex of rising single string bends that signal just how out of control not being in control makes her feel.

‘Cause I control the sun
I control the sun
If I can control the sun
Then why can’t I have you?
I’ve got better things to do

You could read that last line as finally giving up and walking away, but that’s not what her performance conveys. I hear resignation in that last bit of vocal and also a shade of self-reflection. Is there really something better to do, or has Lisa just been busying herself with the anxious work of control?

Maybe it would be better to let the sun rise and set on its own and enjoy the fact that not everyone sees things your way every time.

the twin challenges of reading and other children

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EV had a 36-hour runny-nosed cold yesterday and I’d really like to blame it on other children, but I refuse to let them take credit for all of the books we read together.

On Monday I finally went to the gym at the local YMCA, five months into this stay-at-home experiment that was supposed to be at least fractionally about getting back into the shape I was in five years ago. Going to the gym by day meant depositing EV into a kid’s playroom for the better part of an hour – something that has always given me pause.

I’ve met the director at the Y and would trust her chosen child-minders implicitly, plus the environment is a room filled with toys and books without a screen in sight. The pause comes from the children they are minding. I don’t know them or their manners or what vapid TV shows they watch or what their parents have been teaching them.

It’s tempting to assign this fear of other children to a yuppy millennial helicopter parenting, and I’m sure some portion of it has to do with that, but my fear of other children influencing EV comes from my own distaste for other kids growing up. I wanted no part of them and their messy, silly, rough ways. Even though I watched all the TV they did and played with a lot of the same toys, I never wanted to be associated with other kids. I didn’t even want to be one myself, which was an easy illusion to maintain as I hung out in bars with my father and went out to dinner with my mother.

I’m not trying to raise EV to be a mini-me or to have the same mistrust of her peers that I had – to this day it remains as an unhealthy habit of keeping my peers at arm’s length. Yet, when I see kids EV’s age who act up, always have their hands in their mouth, spout nonsense words, are picky with food, yell and screech, or play rough and imitate guns, I can’t help but sneer at them just as I did when I was a little kid. I don’t want EV to miss out on important peer interaction, but I don’t want her to think that behavior is the acceptable norm, either. You can be more of a kid than I was without being a terrible little snot-nosed monster.

So, I gritted my teeth and left her eagerly exploring the play room while I huffed and puffed and lifted weights for an hour. She was perfectly cheerful when I picked her up.

Four hours later every part of my body was sore from class and EV had a definite case of the sniffles. “It was those damned runny nosed play-room kids,” I raged over internet chat to E and Lindsay. To their eternal credit as my life-parter and BFF, respectively, they replied separately but in verbatim unison: colds don’t incubate in four hours.

In other words: cool your jets, helicopter pilot.

The sniffles continued into yesterday, which put a whammy on some of our plans – I didn’t want to be the asshole parent who brought a contagious kid to the playground. (This led to me trying to explain the concept of “contagious” to EV – I love that we’re in the explaining things phase of parenting). Instead, we made a return trip the library to pick up a new batch of books to read at home. There, the librarian talked us into joining their “1,000 Books Before Kindergarten Challenge.”

“We’re starting this a bit late,” I said, trying to dissuade her from signing us up.

“It’s plenty of time!” she responded cheerily as she began to copy EV’s information down onto a registration card. “Plus, you can always count re-reading the same book multiple times.

It was as if she said the magic words. I could feel OCD Godzilla revving up in the interior of my gut, sharpening his nails within my bile duct as he contemplated that most kids were doing a SELECT ALL instead of a COUNT DISTINCT when querying their book reading – the obvious tactics of a book challenge cheater.

Godzilla and I quickly did the math. We had 24 months until Kindergarten, which meant maintaining a solid clip of 42 new books a month to hit the mark. But that was barely a book a day! We easily did 5-6 even on a slow day, but those were repeats from our own collection. Surely we could do better with 26 branches of the Delaware County Library System at our disposal and me as a stay-at-home-parent.

“Let me ask you something,” I said, giving the librarian a sly sidewise smile, “what’s the fastest anyone has ever completed the challenge.”

We’ve read 30 books in the last 24hrs and have another 20 ready to pick up at the library tomorrow. Today we cleared off our entire bookshelf to begin plotting our path through re-reading them and logging them for the challenge – which, to EV, is like letting her loose in a candy store. I quickly tired of hand-entry on the challenge sheet and switched over to a database format that would also track durations and duplicate reads.

I think we can nail this thing down in less than 100 days.

Pokémon Go through the eyes of a newbie trainer

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I am lying in the middle of my living room floor, likely creating a puddle of sweat beneath my back, and it’s all because of Pokémon Go.

pokemon-go-logoLet’s back up a few days.

Pokémon Go is an augmented reality mobile game that was released last Wednesday across the United States by Niantic Labs (formerly of Google; now an independent company). In it, you run around in the real world while throwing virtual digital balls imaginary fantastical creatures. Oh, and apparently you go to church. A lot.

Okay, okay, I know a little more about Pokémon Go than that, but only through the past few hours of firsthand experience. Honestly, I only understand what Pokémon even are in the vaguest of terms. I was just aging out of spending my money and time on stuff like games, cards, and comics by the middle of the 90s, so I wasn’t even aware of the existence of Pokemon until I met E’s little brother in 2002.

Even then, I only understand it as an execution of several geeky archetypes – characters who collect things, summoning of creatures, opposing elements in a fighting game, and evolving creatures. I have no concept of how any of the games play or the story behind them.

As reports from seemingly every single person I have ever met about their Pokémon Go play experiences began to crop up over the weekend, a familiar urge began to bubble up inside my gut. Yes, it was the special brand of agita created by OCD Godzilla. There were people out there playing a game about collecting things, and if I didn’t start playing it right now I might miss content and experiences that would never be available again.

On the other hand, there is no part of Pokémon Go that particularly interests me – not the IP, nor the augmented reality. Plus, I’m never aimlessly walking around other than with EV, who I categorically prevent from fussing with screens, digital games, and IP other than Marvel’s. (Sorry, I’m weak.)

On the other other hand, “FEAR OF MISSING OUT,” roared OCD Godzilla from his position just below my spleen. [Read more…] about Pokémon Go through the eyes of a newbie trainer