Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
Lest you think my life is all work, wedding, and rock music, for the next seven hours I’ll be bartending and providing other general assistance at a fundraiser with live hip-hop music and DJs for IX ii V Records.
Never let it be said that I am not living an eclectic life.
Around this time in last year’s NaBloPoMo Gina and I were just convening for our yearly holiday revue rehearsals, which wound up evolving into full-time Arcati Crisis.
Back then we would break off a set early if our mixing was bad or we biffed a harmony, and we didn’t like playing with other people because it threw off our very precarious musical balance.
Tonight we played three songs with a backing band in front of a modest crowd, rocking two of them quite adequately, and soldiering through a third one despite highly audible technical issues arising from our back line.
Our mixing was middling; no harmony was biffed.
.
After our set we mingled with various artists up in the (awesome) balcony-level green room, and witnessed a stunning percussion jam lead by our dear friend Dante Bucci and including our new favorite tabla player on the entire planet, Natasha.
Whilst we were relaxing between sets we struck up a conversation with the other performers. I’m always a little fearful of these backstage relationships, because I find them impossible to maintain with tact and grace if I decide that the performer is not up to par (and I’m afraid they’ll have the same issue with me).
One woman in particular was very charming, and we spoke to her at length about our history, how long we’ve known each other and have been playing together, and how satisfying it is to finally be a real band playing music together.
When we asked her about herself she mostly demurred, saying that she had given up writing songs for a while but recently fell back into it. That just made me all the more anxious about the prospects of carrying on a conversation afterward she played, but I put it aside; we were talking to a such a perceptive and personable fellow musician, and I should enjoy that completely apart from her actual musicianship.
As it turns out, she was amazing. Her songs were campy in an intentional, hilarious, genuine way, and her piano playing and singing were both unassailable and sometimes remarkable. Later she complained about a flubbed chord, and Gina and I remarked truthfully that we wouldn’t have ever known had she not told us.
(I need to remember that the same usually holds true for us.)
Nancy Huebner. Keep your ear out.
.
The moral of those dual stories is one and the same.
If you have something in your life that you’ve always wanted to do – something that you love (or think you would love doing) but never thought you would be good at – do it.
Stop asking questions. Don’t ask questions. Don’t doubt. Equip yourself with knowledge and enthusiasm, work at it until the work becomes effortless and fun, and then have fun doing it in the absence of the approval of anyone other than yourself.
Eventually it won’t matter if your harmony gets biffed or your chord gets flubbed every once and a while, because what you’re doing will be about a lot more than harmony and chords.
It’ll be about happiness.
It occurs to me that so far I’ve presented a sort of sterilized view of myself for NaBloPoMo, and I’ve decided that the only cure is to shock you out of your complacency by telling you something very personal.
After a day of soul-searching I think I’ve finally seized on the right detail; something deep and secret that Elise only knows by virtue of living with me for the past three years.
Here goes.
I don’t like hot food.
It’s not that I like to eat all food raw, although given my mostly vegetarian state I certainly wouldn’t mind being left with a diet of hummus and sushi, since that’s practically my desert island ideal.
I do like things braised, or blackened, or melted. I just don’t want to eat them while they’re hot. I don’t like the way flavors work in hot food. I don’t like how it feels on my tongue. And, I don’t tend to slowly savor it.
Just about any hot food you can name I prefer cold. Pizza, for sure. Back in my more omnivorous days, any sort of chicken. Pasta dishes, out of habit, especially lasagna or creams that won’t separate.
Chinese food, categorically. Fish, increasingly. Hot dogs, even.
The list goes on.
There are few specific exceptions to my rule. Drinks, for one, are categorically excepted. Frequently so are french fries (or, at least, they aren’t the same after they’re refrigerated). Anything with over 50% of its volume as eggs, which includes some quiches and mega-french toast are excused on the basis of texture. Food that is primarily liquid, like broth-based soup, is often an exception (though there are some hot soups I prefer cold). And, I find red meat especially distasteful cold, thought it’s pretty much always distasteful as far as I’ve ever been concerned, and I don’t plan on eating it ever again, so the point is moot.
Also, I admit that there’s a certain thrill to certain foods being warm. Warm breads and pastries, those are always a treat.
On the whole, though, I prefer 90% of the culinary world straight from the refrigerator.
There you go; deep, meaningful, previously secret aspects of my life out there for the whole world to read. Never mind that in the last post I snuck in a confession about my deep-seated fear of navy blue. Plus, I rambled in a sort of personal way during Trio.
Hmm, maybe this NaBloPoMo hasn’t been as superficial as I thought…
(Continued from Permission)
When does a plan of engagement first transform into an Engagement Plan? When you first move in together? On your first anniversary? During the first kiss? On the first date? At first sight?
According to our firmly-established personal mythology, Elise’s side of the plan began – with tongue planted firmly in cheek – somewhere between the latter two occasions in our long and storied relationship.
It was at a theatre party over six years ago. I was in one of the darker territories of my life, but from the outside it looked as though I was on a flamboyantly giddy joyride, which lead to Elise’s infamous remark, “If he’s not gay I’ll marry him.”
My own engagement agenda didn’t get initiated until much later. At the time I was more interested in dating her roommate than the possible ramifications of her comment.
.
My life operates on a well-established network of arbitrary, sometimes nonsensical rules, like that I have a physical aversion to navy blue. It’s sort of an elaborate solitaire game of Simon Says. I like to think of it as “OCD Twister.”
Unfortunately for Elise, a lot of the rules manifested themselves as ridiculous hurdles for our burgeoning relationship. I would not say “I love you” until it came out spontaneous and unbidden, and refused to degrade the phrase by using it over the phone.
We could not make overt public displays of affection at parties. I was adamant that we not plan our lives more than two times the length of our relationship into the future. And, I would not even consider getting engaged until we lived together for at least a year.
Despite that last maxim, I lacked a rule for exactly when to get engaged. And, also generally lacking for happy, stable relationships to draw examples from, I hadn’t the vaguest idea of how I would know the time was right.
As a result, when the “living together” requirement first approached being fulfilled I solidified a new, previously informally considered rule. A moronic, obstinate, paradoxically difficult rule that I obeyed to the letter and don’t regret for a single second.
Our engagement would have to be a surprise.
.
As our relationship wore into it’s third – and then fourth – year, Elise, her family, and our friends certainly couldn’t be blamed for wondering when we would ever get engaged. As a result of my “surprise rule” I seemed doomed not to know myself.
Maybe “surprise” isn’t the right word, especially since early in our relationship Elise specifically barred me from ever proposing during a performance or via a jumbotron, which – given my flair for all things dramatic and flamboyant – would have been odds-on to occur if she hadn’t said anything.
I suppose the rule meant that engagement had to be a revelation. An epiphany. A moment where I realized I was meant to spend the rest of my life with Elise.
Being me, I constantly used the vague nature of my rule to disqualify any conscious thought of engagement as a pre-cursor to engagement. If Elise brought up rings, even in a non-threatening conversational way, any forward motion towards engagement would be halted. And, paradoxically, planning to start a bank account to save for a ring would disqualify me from planning to save for a ring, which seemed to mean I’d be doomed to buy it entirely on credit.
I had seemingly painted myself into an OCD corner – I was trying to plan to surprise myself with an unplanned surprise.
.
Last fall Elise and I both started new jobs, and Elise’s afforded her (literally and figuratively) her first chance to take an extended vacation. Having used my vacation days and accompanying budget earlier in the year to attend Bonnaroo, she opted for a solo excursion to California.
It was the first time I would ever be Eliseless for more than a long weekend, and I relished the thought. Finally, a house to myself. I would play loud music, leave the heat off, invite friends over to watch Aqua Team Hunger Force, blog all night, sleep on the couch, get drunk alone, and order lots of takeout. Sometimes all in one day.
After a week basking in the hazy glow of bachelorhood I was surprisingly relieved to have Elise back from California. I hadn’t expected to be quite so enamored with her return, and in my excitement I dragged her out for a day of wandering through the Italian Market, punctuated by our first visit to our now-regular local haunt, Cantina Los Caballitos.
There was a tangible excitement to our idle walk through South Philly. At the moment I would have told you that I was simply giddy to have her back home, but with even a few days of retrospect I realized that it was my reaction to seeing my future wife for the first time.
.
I finally had my epiphany. Now I just needed a ring.
