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the customer is always angry (in America)

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After half a decade of living in New Zealand I can finally see how abnormal it is to assume that the customer is always right, and that they always have a right to get angry about it.

As an American can claim you are immune to these expectations and behaviors. I promise you’ve engaged in them hundreds of minor times. That’s true even if you are someone who is often on the receiving end of that same rage. As with many things in America, the cruelty is baked into the system.

Your dish came out a little bit wrong at the restaurant? Rage and ask for a discount. Service on your car didn’t quite repair the problem? Rage and demand an immediate fix. You received an online shopping order with an incorrect or slightly-dinged product? Unleash your fury and require free return shipping.

Some people manage to make these demands without demeaning the person who has to accommodate them, but just as often we assume that absorbing our accumulated fury is part of the job. If someone wants to be able to afford health care they have to be willing to soak up an amount of capitalist vengeance.

That’s American life. It’s part of the sickening caricature that “American Exceptionalism” has become, where everyone is encouraged to be their own plucky protagonist expecting perfection at all times. It’s the land of the Karens.

For most of my life I didn’t think too hard about this. In fact, my viciousness as a consumer always seemed like a fun feature of my perfectionist personality rather than a major bug. I was infamous amongst my friends and colleagues for causing a scene and storming out of retail situations gone wrong. I learned it by watching the adults in my own life as a kid. I wasn’t trying to be specifically cruel to any employees. I just needed to get exactly what I thought I was paying for (even when that wasn’t what I actually ordered or was ever offered).

It never seemed abnormal to me in part because my own clients demanded the same level of perfection from me all of the time. I built up a thousand little defenses and extra processes to deliver things flawlessly every time, as many Americans do, and so I expected perfection from everyone else.

Becoming a people manager changed that. The first time one of my direct reports got yelled at – I mean, really screamed at – by a client radically altered my approach in a way that being yelled at myself never did. I understood how ridiculous I had always been. I “fired” several clients for the misery they caused my team not being worth their subscription fee.

Yet, if someone made similar demands with a smile, we kept them around.

I adopted the same personal approach. No more cruelty, no more storming out. Yet, my demand for perfection didn’t change. I would complain sweetly, kindly, patiently, and with many compliments to the manager of the person I was speaking to… but, I’d still get my way in the end.

Our move to New Zealand turned my last vestiges of twisted American Exceptionalism on its head. [Read more…] about the customer is always angry (in America)

on Doing The Thing

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A lot of parenting is storytelling about your own life.

Kids are endlessly curious about who you are and how you got to be that way. Or, at least, my kid is.

She also sometimes needs to be reminded that the seemingly all-knowing parental units she trusts to answer her questions and organize her life didn’t emerge from the sea on a clam shell, fully-formed.

Recently, this has resulted in a lot of storytelling about how I got to be the me shows knows. A lot of that relied on me doing the thing.

“Doing the thing” is how I think about anything that I self-started without a nudge from adults or mentors in my own life. It’s personal entrepreneurship. Pure hustle. Unfiltered desire.

That’s how I got started performing on stage. No one encouraged me to audition for my first play. No one coached me on my monologue for my first audition. I wanted that for myself so just did the thing.

That’s how I became a musician. I begged for months for a guitar, which resulted in my receiving the cheapest, barely-tunable acoustic guitar that could be had. I had a few initial lessons. Then I did the thing. I taught myself “Ziggy Stardust.” I wrote my own songs. I put on concerts to an audience of no one in my living room.

That’s how I started this blog! No one ever asked me to do it or taught me how. I signed up for Blogger.com one day in August of 2000 and did the thing. I learned PHP because I didn’t like how Blogger organized its archives.

I could go on self-mythologizing, but CK picks things up from there. I got my minor in music, became an a cappella arranger and singer, a band leader, a comic guide curator, and made the jump to working in tech, among many other things no one else ever encouraged me to do.

I don’t deny that I relied on privilege to get into some of those situations, or that I had the support of peers once I starting doing the things. I had a stable enough home life that I could focus on wanting to be a performer. Family members bought me that first guitar and the computer I launched this blog with. Gina was there at that first theatre audition. Sara taught me to read sheet music over the phone the summer of 1998.

There were also a lot of things I wanted to do that I just couldn’t figure out how to start on my own. There are things I wanted to do that required cooperation or support that never materialized. But those undone things are distant memories. My history is written by the me who succeeded, not the me who failed.

Eventually “doing the thing” became about jump-starting new things with friends, like organizing Lyndzapalooza with Lindsay and starting a cover band with Ashley. E and I moving to New Zealand was yet another example of doing the thing.

As I’ve recounted some of these things to the kid, I’ve been amazed by my past self. I would leap blindly into a new endeavor with the full belief that I could figure it out if I tried hard enough.

Having that unflinching self-belief is a privilege.

But doing the thing – sticking with all these things for all these years – is all my own.

on new (old) holidays

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On Friday I got to experience something for only the second time in my life, and for the first time I can recall: celebrating a new public holiday for the first time.

That public holiday is Matariki, which marks the beginning of the Māori lunar new year here in Aotearoa New Zealand. It is a holiday that predates British colonization of Aotearoa, marked by the first rising of the Matariki cluster of stars – known elsewhere in the world as Pleiades or “The Seven Sisters.”

Image by Snepter from Pixabay

Fun fact: In Japan, it is called “Subaru”!

Ironically, if we were still living in America, we would’ve had this experience a year earlier, with the introduction of Juneteenth in 2021 just a week prior to the earliest of Matariki dates (which shift each year, since they are based on the lunar calendar).

When we first arrived in New Zealand, it was to a commonwealth country who celebrated the Queen’s Birthday as well as the traditional Guy Fawkes Night with a major late-spring fireworks display.

While it was fun to get to witness that spectacle for the first time from atop a windy cliff face near our old home (now populated with a new cookie cutter houses), even as new immigrants we sensed that celebrating a thwarted assassination of a British king was an odd fit for the one “4th of July” style holiday celebration of the year.

Luckily, we got to learn about Matariki the next year through the then-4YO’s kindergarten. This is something that I’ve found to be common to many immigrant experiences here in Wellington. Kindergartens – or “little schools,” as they’re often called here – often rely on a foundation of cultural education that trickles up to parents who might not learn it. That’s especially true if the parents are pakeha (i.e., white European), who are busying themselves with integrating into a society of other older pakeha who grew up in a time where educated rooted in Māori tradition was eschewed.

Little School is how we learned about Matariki, how we came to understand that saying karakia or singing waiata were not prayers to a specific god in the sense I understood (and reviled) from America’s separation of church and state, about the traditional cloak of Korowai, and about how sitting on tables is tapu.

All of those elements came together for the kid’s first Matariki celebration at Little School, which included all of those elements in a special evening session. While other kids volunteered their favorite traditional waiata, our 4YO insisted E and I join her in a trio rendition of “On the Run” from Steven Universe.

Oh, this kid.

Yet, as weird as her request was, it was celebrated by the entire class, who were happy to hear her sing a song with her family that mattered to her.

That indelible memory of the celebration and inclusion of Matariki stuck in our minds, which is why it stuck out when Jacinda Ardern’s Labor party added making Matariki an official public holiday to their platform for the 2020 national election – which they won with a clear majority.

Of course, Americans living in America got to have this same experience last year, with Juneteenth! Americans around my age and younger tend to assume that holidays always have been and always will be because we don’t recall how they’re just days that the Federal government decided to turn into observances.

That explains some of the surprise around Juneteenth becoming an officially-recognized holiday last year – the first new one in America since Martin Luther King day in 1983. But Memorial Day was only fixed to a specific day in 1971, and even Thanksgiving wasn’t pinned to a standard 4th Thursday of November until 1942!

I’m thankful that we have been in New Zealand to experience the birth of this new holiday together as a family. I’m also thankful to be alive to witness New Zealand adopting an indigenous holiday at the same time American codifies a holiday celebrating emancipation and African-American culture.

I especially love that one of the themes of Matariki “celebrate the present.” 2022 was the perfect year for me to celebrate that for the first time, as more than ever before I am focused each day on what I am doing to be a better person in the world creating moments worth remembering.

extra sleep sunday

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Last night I slept the sleep of the dead. This morning, too. Really, all day.

I was already nodding off in my chair after dinner. I barely made it through supervising kid bedtime activities. Then I was out again for fifteen hours of pure unconscious bliss until late in the morning, when I woke up, ate breakfast, and then promptly took a nap.

I’m not sick. I hadn’t worked out extra hard. I slept perfectly fine the night before. I just needed extra sleep.

No, not just needed. Wanted. Desired. Craved.

It was glorious. Pure luxury. 5 stars out of 5, would sleep that much again.

Something not enough parents explain to you as a non-parent or an expecting parent is how rare extra sleep will be for at least the next decade of your life.

Or, if they do tell you about it, they make it sound like it will be purely out of spite. The spite of a tiny rage-bomb of an infant who will never sleep. Also, the spite of your partner, who will never again be willing to cover for you for the morning so you can catch up on sleep.

And then you’re like, “of course they will, we both love to sleep in, they’ll never do me like that.”

Here’s the actual secret I’ve discovered, as someone with a kid who has always slept through the night and who has an amazing parenting tag team partner:

Parenting programs your brain to believe that sleeping extra means danger.

I’m not sure if it’s evolution at work or a result of our modern lives, but I find this is true even when my kid is many miles away on a camping trip with said parenting tag team partner, leaving me alone in the house to sleep to my heart’s content.

As a parent, oversleeping is always a scary prospect. It equals not checking on a diaper in time. Or a hungry kid trying to forage for their own breakfast. Or missing school dropoff. Or simply getting your kid up so late that their sleep schedule is ruined for days to come.

They’re all dangers external to your own well-being, so they’re an impossible alarm clock of anxiety to turn off. It’s not the same as hitting the snooze button as you tell yourself you don’t mind having to take the late bus to work. At some point, you stop being asleep because your brain is trained to spring into action.

Over the years we adapt. We affirm ourselves with statements like, “I’m a morning person now” and “I cannot imagine wasting that much of the day.” But the truth of the matter is if we want to sleep the sleep of the dead, usually it involves feeling like death rather than doing it just for the lazy weekend joy of it.

That’s why last night was so delightful. It was a random act of drowsiness. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I slept that long in a single sprint of unconsciousness apart from being ill. I didn’t have a single damn reason I needed all of that sleep and I got it anyway.

And I’d do it again. If my brain would let me.

Harbingers of Failure

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Earlier this year in a jaunty bit of Q&A with Twitter followers, my comic books colleague Adam from the Battle of the Atom podcast asked me the following question:

“Why do you hate the good stuff sometimes?”

Adam was mostly asking about comics, but this is a question that has followed me my entire life. Any of my friends who have gone to the movies with me has asked the same question.

Image by Yatheesh Gowda from Pixabay

It doesn’t matter what the thing is. You can hand me a random stack of anything: comics with no credits, new albums by unfamiliar artists, or even a selection of burger condiments. it’s all the same. I will enjoy a consistent amount of each sampling, and I will tend to prefer some of the unpopular stuff while eschewing some of the most most mainstream items.

I always thought this was because I have unique wiring in my brain. I thought it was that certain tropes or styles simply lack appeal for me.

I’m sure that’s true, to some extent, but I’ve recently learned that it might also be because I am a “harbinger of failure.”

I first heard about this concept last year while watching a 2017 episode of the British quiz show QI, or Quite Interesting, as gleaned from a 2015 MIT News article on a study conducted by two MIT professors. Here is how QI summarized it:

The difference between the next big thing and a turkey is that there are people who will always buy the turkey – as in the American showbiz term for something that flops commercially.

There is a kind of consumer called “harbingers of failure”, whose always buy a new product that later goes on to fail. Thus, people with a “flop affinity” are in demand from people in market research because they are good at predicting what products will go on to be unsuccessful.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyzed 10,000,000 transactions at a chain of convenience stores, and they found that people who buy the nail polish that fails are also the people who buy the ice cream that fails. Harbingers of failure in the past have also bought watermelon-flavored Oreo biscuits and a range of ready-meals made by the people who made Colgate toothpaste called “Colgate Kitchen Entrees.”

The moment I heard this explanation, I recognized myself in it.

More on that in a moment. First, let’s talk about the flipside of being a Harbinger of Failure: disliking popular things. [Read more…] about Harbingers of Failure