Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Preoccupational Hazards

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Tonight was my one night off for the week, except I wanted to spend it on – do some blogging, maybe start my next Trio.

That wasn’t meant to be. I had some more pressing concerns to attend to, such as washing dishes and laundry. And, I’m not just talking about from a normal “chore” perspective. No. This was a no drinking glasses left and completely out of pants situation.

You might laugh at my situation. Ha!, you might think, he seems to be so together with his podcasts and his Groom Team, but it’s an illusion! You might continue to gloat, Aside from his yuppy job he’s living the slovenly, disorganized life of a lazy bachelor.

Yet, that’s just not the case – and not just because I’m living merrily in sin with Elise. I’m certainly spending time being clean, orderly, and tenacious outside of my yuppy occupation – it’s just that the time is invested in all of my yuppy pre-occupations.

At this point I have so many non-occupational jobs that it’s not unusual for a week to go by without me even finding the time to do a single load of laundry. Take this week, for example.

I spent half the weekend recording and mixing the four songs in the last two posts, and the other half working on an arrangement for Drexel’s all-female acappella group. Monday I spent a few hours cleaning up the back-end CK, and then I went to a concert of someone who is playing at my wedding. Tomorrow night I’ll be co-hosting an open mic with the other half of Arcati Crisis, and on Thursday I’m the artist liaison at our Lyndzapalooza Fall Mixer.

Did you catch all of that? Recording engineer, transcriptionist, network administrator, event planner, rock star, and A&R rep. That’s six hobbies that I’ve turned into part-time jobs. Hobs? Jobbies?

At least with the latter half of wedding, AC, and LP I knew from the start that I was getting into something that was both time-consuming and rewarding. However, the former three – CK, arranging, and DIY recording – all started out as innocent distractions from the rest of my life. I never meant for them to become staying up until 3am, working until I nod off in my chair sorts of engagements. It just turned out that way.

Is this insane or just slightly abnormal? Do you have jobs aside from what you do for a living and taking care of your home and family? If you do, did you choose to make them a priority, or did they sneakily transform into one over time?

Exteriors.

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Over the past few days I’ve spent most of my free moments unknotting the multi-thousand post mess that is my neglected Google Reader.

It’s fascinating to me that I let it go unread for so long, because I’m always looking for something to consume. I spend all night pinging in a circle from LiveJournal to MySpace to FaceBook to Huffington Post to Ain’t It Cool News, seeking out ever-more-incremental updates. Eventually if none of them seem to be in motion I’ll settle for mindlessly playing the newest game over at Kongregate.

Think about that for a moment. Elitist, progress-oriented me will settle for the empty feedback mechanism of a flash video game rather than check up on the lives of hundreds of my peers via my Google Reader.

What the hell? It seems my introversion extends to the blog arena as well.

And, I know you’re all like, “Peter, enough with the introversion already, you’ve kept a blog for eight years and in each of those years I’ve seen you make a willing spectacle of yourself in public at least twice.”

I had that in mind as I caught up on Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, reading her tongue-in-cheek FAQ post. In response to a question about agoraphobia, she says:

I diagnosed myself with mild agoraphobia because although I PREFER to never leave my house, I still CAN leave my house if it involves doing something fun. But even then, I usually choose to stay home. I’m emotionally, physically, psychologically, urologically, and ophthalmologically attached to my home.

Note that this woman lives and actively works on a ranch, so to some degree the concept of “home” likely includes some portion of the vast outdoors, which makes her not your traditional agoraphobe. Yet, in her mind she is still mildly agoraphobic, because left to her own devices her natural orientation is to remain in her home space.

That description perfectly fits my view of my own introversion. In areas I define as “home” I’m a natural socializer: work, meetings with friends, the stage … all perfectly comfortable environments where I can be myself.

However, socializing with co-workers, attending friends’ parties with people I don’t know, or hanging at the bar prior to playing … those experiences all make me feel weird and out-of-place. And, I know not everyone is a social butterfly and that it takes time to adapt to different environments, but my reaction is on a different level. I stop being interesting, opinionated, vocal me. I literally forget how to do it. I’m back in grade school, unsure of which lunch table I should approach to garner the least teasing.

That can really get in the way of my success in the arena of local music. Because, much to my disappointment and chagrin, you do not get booked all across the town just for showing up once or by being able to play for an hour without interruption. I assumed people would listen if I trained my voice and wrote well-structured songs.

Well, I was mostly wrong. You have to be persistent. You have to make connections. You have to build to your own personal tipping point. Otherwise, you’re some asshole stranger trying to make a splash in an unreceptive room.

I’ve been that asshole too many times, and I’m really trying to learn how to just be a regular regular, even if my regularity is slightly irregular, because being regular is really an extroverted attitude rather than a frequency of appearance.

I’ve been striving for that this summer, both solo and as Arcati Crisis. Each has their own challenges.

Solo means its hard to get me out of the house, but once I’m out I’ll sit and endure hours of open mic. Usually after my set I work up the nerve to say hello to a few people, as prior to it I am endlessly revising my set list. (One day I’ll play a solo gig and adhere to my setlist exactly. Once. Eventually).

Arcati Crisis gets me out of the house more quickly, because – duh – I get to hang out with Gina. But, once we’re installed at a coffee shop or bar I clam up around the other musicians because – duh – I get to hang out with Gina.

For a while we’d hit entire strings of open mics without making any new connections or friends, but lately we’ve been taking turns being sociable, and we’ve been rewarded by meeting some amazing musicians, like Andra Taylor, Year Long Day, and Kursten Bouton, just to name a few we’ve gotten up the balls to talk to.

So, that’s going well. The more people I meet, the more reasons I have to get out of the house and play – I am cultivating pocket of “home” at every open mic in Philadelphia. At Lickety Split I can be myself at a single table, but at Blarney South I’m me at the whole back half of the room.

Google Reader presents the same opportunity – to turn peers into pockets of extended home. Yet, if I neglect to read Pioneer Woman, and Mark Larson, Akkam’s Razor, Moose In the Kitchen, What If No One’s Watching, You’re Doing It Wrong, and dozens of my other favorite blogs, then they stop being familiar, and my barriers go up. No emails, or comments, or track backs. CK becomes the splashy asshole.

In my Google Reader cruise I was also catching up on longtime CK peruser Karl Martino, and happened upon a post about the apparently ongoing Philly Blogger Meetup.

Imagine that – a setting that can combine the terror of going to an unfamiliar open mic with the daunting task of talking to total strangers alongside the deeply uncomfortable experience of talking about my blog to someone who has never read it before.

I signed up.

Not Dead, Just Floating

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February tends to be a pretty sparse month on CK, aside from the first two, whose blogging were fueled by infatuation with the Queen of Darkness and Elise, respectively.

Actually, February tends to be an infatuated month – a 28-day Fat Tuesday of topical gluttony – which is maybe why the blogging tends to drop off. In 2004 it was SongFight; last year, consuming media. 2006 was… being scruffy? I honestly couldn’t tell you.

I bring those three years up specifically, as they’ve dictated much of my month so far. The scruffiness aspect finally ended this morning, when I shaved off what I think (if we’re being fair) I can say was my first ever mustache. It was charming at first, and looked dashing in photos, but the prickliness of it finally got to me (just as Elise was claiming I had progressed past Brillo-pad stage, too; oh well).

The mustache was, in turn, indicative of my preoccupation with things other than self – as typically I am much too busy examining myself in the mirror to allow any such deviation from core residual self image – and those two things correspond to the other two years I mentioned above.

Like a square to a rectangle but not visa versa, SongFight is to Arcati Crisis. SongFight was perhaps the first time Gina and I masqueraded under our proper name, though we had certainly recorded together before as an entity. And, from our fours-years-ago SongFighting emerged “Moscow, Idaho,” which we played an utterly stunning version of on Saturday ever-so-shortly before my voice-losing escapade.

(“Moscow” is a curious story unto itself, but I’m saving a recap of that for when we have a better demo of the song.)

Like 2004’s before it, this February so far has been a very Arcati Crisis month. We performed three separate times, and this last one marked a major milestone that we just realized this morning: we’ve now played every one of our current songs in front of an audience. That’s sixteen tunes, which represents a nearly indescribable leap from last February when we knew just three or four.

In fact, with the exception of “Fisher Price” the songs which we now consider to be the most “solid” and “reliable” didn’t even exist as duo tunes this time last year – they were still relegated to the various demo discs and Blogathons from which they originated. Suddenly we find ourselves with thumb-twiddling time at rehearsals where we once were dreaming up new riffs to catalog tunes, and so far this month we’ve filled it with new songs and rehearsals with cello (!). Tomorrow we’ll be recording the few stragglers who haven’t yet made it onto one of our Live @ Rehearsal discs, and then I’ll be spending the rest of the month mixing.

I know that other bands have come farther in a shorter amount of time – after all, of those sixteen songs all had been written prior to 2007 – but I still can’t help but be infatuated with our progress.

Not just our progress, though – that’s an old-Peter model of infatuation, that restless addiction to revisiting a process and its product, rather than living in the present. This time I am actually infatuated with the present tense of us, and all that we are capable of. Could we have imagined in 1994 that one night we’d wind up on stage at Doc Watson’s a hair shy of last call with our friends bouncing and singing along to every word of our songs?

Well, maybe we could have, but in that mental image I probably still had my Spock haircut, which is not nearly as ravishing as the current one, AKA “Dean Winchester.”

Which, in retrospect, probably prompted the stubble.

Meanwhile, there is the aspect of 2007 that I am repeating – I’ve been very much absorbed in media consumption. It’s partially because I have been following the primary elections on various news sites, but really it’s just an input/output thing. I’m outputting riffs, harmonies, new songs, project plans, site maps, engagement party thank you notes – all manner of creativity. And if I don’t ingest and digest input from some other sources I’ll be left with nothing to output.

(Or, worse, I will return to my past-process addiction and just output recursive, painful feedback. Sort of like this post, but more shrill.)

(Okay, while we’re parenthetical already I just need to point out that I started talking about that whole input/output deal almost seven years ago, and at work we’re reading this horrific business book that I won’t even do the justice of name-checking, and it has a whole fucking chapter about how you need input in order to maintain output. Like, with a chart of a Pac-Man-esque circle eating and shitting information. I kid you not. So, yes, 20-year-old-me could teach this business guru a thing or two about a thing or two.)

(Any, mucho digression; do you see what February causes?)

My increased intake of media – particularly election coverage, which has been nigh-unavoidable the past few weeks – has re-awakened my love of media critique. Especially after nearly four years of freedom from the bonds of television I feel like I’m seeing messages for what they really are for the first time – often just inelegant, thinly-veiled agendas meant to obscure the actual meaning behind the message:

Disney loves to sell its girl-empowerment, but don’t look for it to offer a fair payout to the author behind one of its hugest properties, The Cheetah Girls.

Similarly, CNN trumpets its bottomless cadre of cell-phone equipped i-Reporters, but when one of their segment producers runs a hip, snarky blog that gets too opinionated he is promptly fired.

And, in perhaps my favorite example, our favorite brand names and supermarkets re-purposed plain old oats in increasingly portable and nutrionless forms until we are paying dozens of dollars on the pound for curiously un-oat-ish cereal bars, with MILK INCLUDED (TM).

I’m not sure if the sudden transparency is coming from me, or coming from the internet, or coming from the world at large having finally gone in for a look at its cataracts, but I’m loving it.

And, with ten days left to go, that is my February, so-far.

pee ess

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Okay, so, forgive my meta-ness for a second here, but we need to chat.

We are now at the halfway mark of the month, and I must confess I am not really feeling the NaBloPoMo love this year.

I’m quite sure the NaBloPoMo Ning site is mostly at fault. Last year there were over two thousand of us scrambling to post before midnight every day, and the only way for us to communicate and commiserate was to read each other’s blogs and leave a trail of comments in our wake.

This year there are six thousand of us, all amiably mingling on a social networking site, and our blogs would seem to have become secondary to our networking.

Or maybe it’s just me and my busyness, which is even more meta, because the whole point of NaBloPoMo was supposed to be talking about how great it is to be busy all of the time, as opposed to last year when I spent the entire month in my room reading blogs, drinking martinis, and cultivating my carpal tunnel syndrome.

I had quite a schedule plotted out to cut through the busyness with posts and Trios and links, but these days weeks go by so quickly that I don’t have time to figure out what to do with them. That, combined with some of the less amusing chapters of the engagement story and a Trio that doesn’t seem to want to be recorded, are a veritable blogging blockade.

Or, maybe I’m just taking this all a little too seriously, as is my wont. So, I’m looking to you, gentle readers, to tell me what’s what. Are there some NaBloPoMo blogs that I seriously need to be reading? Is there a type of post you’ve been dying to see from me? Or, for the more well-versed of you, is there a song I’ve been neglecting?

Speak now, or your next fifteen days will most likely mirror the last. Which, honestly, were fifteen days of fairly quality blogging, but I’m nothing if not an overachiever.

The road flows like a river, and pulls me around every bend.

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I think that was a sufficient amount of time to bask, uninterrupted, in being a fiancé.

Much stuff is afoot in chez krisis, and not just our impending wedding. I have more to say on that topic than you could ever hope to consume in a single sitting, so I’ll be dragging the whole mess of it through National Blog Posting month, and beyond.

Okay, I’ll say one thing now: I love all the dire wedding warnings that come from every quarter when you first get engaged. I suppose it’s a cultural hazing thing? I just don’t get it. Each of our favorite weddings were relatively lacking in insanity and drama according to the various brides. Also, we’re both OCD project managers with the same taste in everything.

Right. Remind me to come back and read this post in about twelve months and see what I have to say about it.

If that was all that was happening it would be, oh, say, the most exciting time of my entire life. However, chattery on the topic of engagedness tends to eclipse the fact that there are also some other life events in motion, such as the massive behemoth of posts that is NaBloPoMo looming a mere two days away.

You should be comforted to know that I’ve drawn up a comprehensive content grid so I’m never lacking for post topic (see, OCD project managers). The challenge will be finding myself awake and at a computer long enough to do any posting.

Part of that challenge is that Gina and I (AKA Arcati Crisis) are playing a second trio of songs with a rhythm section on November 9th at the Rotunda, followed by multiple holiday performances, and moving through a half-hour set at Doc Watson’s in January (and, possibly another appearance at the Tin Angel), all of which results in plenty of rehearsals, both together and separately.

Oh, and the normal busyness, such as having four of my projects reviewed (and approved!) by our CEO over the last month, learning various exercises and arias for my weekly voice lessons, working up a communications plan for our homegrown music festival, and trying to drag my sorry ass out to East Falls every Thursday to play our favorite open mic.

And, last but certainly not least (though, what could really be least in this list?), I suddenly – and completely out of the blue, I assure you – can play piano. I’m still slow to learn actual pop songs, but I seem to have collected a modest enough palette of rhythms and riffs that I can bang through my own stuff with increasing ease and surprising variation, and I actually prefer some of it on keys to guitar strings. Imagine that!

Anyhow, that’s life, at the moment – full of activity, but paradoxically forcing me to take frequent naps in order to keep up with it.

How have you been?