Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Hindsight

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Can I just put something in perspective for a moment?

My free time has been devoted to event planning on at least a weekly basis since November of 2007. That’s one and a half years of constant event planning.

We spent two months planning our engagement party. Then wedding planning started in the background of planning LP’s There’s a Stage on My Lawn for last May (coming on the heels of my major advertising event at work, which I adore).

Then wedding planning was in the forefront while I background assisted on LP’s Summer Mixer. Towards the end of wedding planning was honeymoon planning, as well as the beginnings of planning LP’s BYM Fest. And, since the wedding it’s been lots of BYM Fest (plus my major advertising event at work, which I still adore).

So, as of Sunday I will be NOT planning an event for the first time in eighteen months.

Wow.

“I’m not old,” and other stories from my actual life.

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Before we head into a week of Kelly Clarkson coverage (just kidding!) (but not really!), here’s a brief interlude from real life.

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(1) Today at work we had a meeting about social networking.

I make it a point not to talk about work so much, but this seems like a big milestone. After all of my years of harping about dragging ourselves into a new digital era I was in a meeting about figuring out how to drag ourselves into a new digital era. My work life has officially merged with my home life.

In said meeting was a hyper-intelligent new employee from elsewhere in the company who joined to chip in her expertise. I expect to be her employee by 2013.

At one point I was trying to articulate how some social networks make a certain amount of sense to me, while others do not. My overly long introduction to that thought was, “It’s not that I think I’m so old (maybe I am), but… [insert communications nonsense here].”

Meeting newbie came back with, “Oh, I don’t think you’re old.”

I should mention that I shaved prodigiously this morning and look about 12.

Somewhere in NJ Kate is still laughing at me.

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(2a) Is it just a given at this point that we’re all having nightmares about an imminent, complete, worldwide, economic collapse?

I mean, I am certainly not denying the existence of a recession, as the evidence is all around me in my group of close friends. Those nightmares were already existent, thank you very much.

No, this is more global, and more systemic. Like, I just had a dream that I was camping in a derelict, foreclosed row home (possibly just down the street from here), and that the banks were going house to house to take the squatters prisoner to work in their slave camps. They were executing the infirm and the socialists on sight.

Something like that, anyhow. Are you having those nightmares too?

(2b) I generally hate when people blog about dreams. Isn’t real life wonderful and terrifying enough? Dream posts are really the only things I ever redact – I write them all out and then think, Who in god’s name is going to stick around after hitting this tripe off of a Google search?

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(3) As to my sudden subconscious fixation with us going the way of Mad Max (before subsequently going the way of Waterworld), maybe it’s just because I was reading about motel homeless earlier.

Okay, honestly? It’s more because of my trip to F.Y.E. to buy the Kelly Clarkson album, which is the only reason I would ever set foot into that abomination of a retail establishment.

I detest F.Y.E. on principal – that a chain with so little relevance or personality could supplant Tower Records as the sole national record-seller is inherently offensive to me. Seriously, they could be a chain specializing in argyle socks and turn-of-the-century coffee pots and I feel like the retail experience would be exactly the same.

Anyway.

This afternoon the sales floor was barren. A group of teenagers were lazily playing Rock Band off in one corner. There was a single cash register open, doing no business whatsoever.

I was accosted by five employees in quick succession within 90 seconds of entering the store. Each of them asked if they could help me find anything, with a certain lingering desperation in their eyes. Like, “for the love of god let me help you find something; if I don’t sell at least two CDs every hour they’ll fire me.”

I started assigning them trivial tasks, just to clear the cannon fodder. One lad I engaged with couldn’t find an explicit version of a Pink album and mumbled some mea culpa like, “You know I could just burn that for you or something did you want maybe a Pink Floyd album instead you know I went to college to get this job please just kill me.”

I did a lot of nodding and backing away, and found myself cornered by another sales associate in the classical section.

It took a while to escape with my Kelly, who always leaves me feeling obligated to stimulate the economy by purchasing music at irrelevant brick and mortar retailers.

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(4a) The house at the end of our block burnt down last week. The debris is still on the sidewalk, giving off a certain hickory flavor.

Last week I wouldn’t leave the house for work until the firemen stopped looking concerned. In row homes that’s only eight doors from here.

(4b) I spend all this time (and money) acquiring Kelly Clarkson albums and guitars and French graphic novels, and all of that could burn away in a matter of minutes. Or the renegade banking enforcement brigade could kick down my door and take everything in the financial holocaust.

It makes me think about the intangible things in my life that have value. I guess in that way social networking is a beautiful matrix, containing all of the memories you might have lost in the flames.

My songs can never burn down. My blog can never burn down.

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(fin) I’m just going to keep living my life, going to meetings, and creating things.

And listening to Kelly Clarkson albums.

My Life Is a Joke

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Lindsay and I have an ongoing joke about my life.

Lindsay, being my primary secret squirrel, always finds a little nook of day to tuck a conversation into. Frequently we talk about all of the things that I do – work, blog, play music solo and with Arcati Crisis, Lyndzapalooza, freelance writing – &c, &c.

She, one of the more overachieving and time-conscious people I know, marvels at how I actually advance my goals in each of those areas all of the time.

The joke is that, in order to fit in all of those things, I must not do anything a normal person does. I don’t watch television, sit down for meals, or talk to people on the phone. I don’t sleep. I’m like some sort of T-1000 or Cylon. Or Madonna. I’m purely focused on achievements and achieving them, and nothing else.

That’s a slight misrepresentation. I am not a robot, and only aspire to be Madonna. I still do all of the things that human beings do.

Occasionally. And quickly.

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When I graduated from college and started my career I resolved not to do any theatre or music for an entire year. No art, essentially. I would focus solely on being a good employee and a good boyfriend, because I wasn’t sure I’d be good at either. If I had free time I would sit and play video games until another opportunity to be a good employee or boyfriend presented itself.

After a year I allowed myself to get involved in a theatre project with Gina, and from there my natural inclinations for art and recklessly large personal projects took over.

I made a very elaborate chart. It included every possible thing that I could do in a given day. All of the regular human things, all of my time at work, all of my special goals, and everything else. Washing dishes. Walking from one place to another. Making out with Elise.

I tracked what I did for three months, every minute of every day.

At the end I had a beautiful graph of my life. A rainbow of lines interwove with each other to show me the relationship between work and sleep, guitar-playing and housework, or blogging and masturbation.

The area under some of the lines was the shape of my success; the area under others a dimension of dead space.

My priorities snapped me into focus. Before the chart I would have told you I was already busy enough with life. After I realized that I wasn’t writing songs because I was reading TMZ for 20 minutes a day.

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The chart was almost three years ago.

Today Lindsay initiated the latest iteration of our joke, querying if I planned to sleep at all in the next few months while chipping away at my list of measurable goals for the year.

The chart was about sleep too. I tried to live on just five or six hours a night, and suddenly all the useless things expanded. The chart showed me that I need sleep to stay focused.

It was a disappointment, sure. I work and commute for almost ten hours a day, and if I have to sleep for seven that leaves just another seven hours in which I can live my life.

The punchline to our joke is that every minute counts, awake or asleep. 60 seconds to flip channels is a quick email reminder. Three minutes to set the table is rehearsing a song. A half an hour on the phone is this post.

Which would I rather look back on in December, or when I turn thirty, or when I die?

I always eat with the wrong fork, anyway.

Stuff Takes Time

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I rung in 2009 the same way I spent December 25th – quietly at home with Elise. The reality is that every other day has become its own holiday spectacle, so the actual holidays are one of the few chances we have to lay low and relax.

Our wedding is a scant 16 days away. When we set the date for January I was concerned that it would compound all of the craziness of December. Now that we’ve crossed over to a new year I feel exactly the opposite. We’re changing in a time of change. The wedding extends the exfoliation of a prior year, as though our NYE kiss will last from midnight yesterday through when we touch down back in Philadelphia after honeymoon.

My mantra in 2008 was “stuff takes time.” If it sounds unspecific, good – that’s the point. The point that everything in life – my education, my music, my blog, our relationship, our music festival, my career, and our band – has taken a lot of time and effort to get to this point. The point is that no goal worth attaining is instantaneous. I didn’t have a senior position at work and four CDs with my band in 2004, yet here we are. We couldn’t have gotten married in 2004 or rented a farm for our music festival in 2006, but that’s where we’re headed.

It would be pointless to spend the rest of the post back-patting for all of my accomplishments in ’08 – I sortof already do that once a year, anyway.

Let’s not look back. Let’s just devote our time to the people and the things we love, and move inexorably closer to our goals, one year at a time.

The Cost of Maintaining Me

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One of the pitfalls of working in the middle of a major city is that it’s easy to blow your paycheck before it ever makes it into your bank account.

Since I don’t take actual lunch “breaks” too often (and because there is no guitar store in easy walking distance) I’ve stayed relatively insulated from midday shopping. Where I’m at risk is food.

When I first started working after graduation I was in the early throes of my obsessive budget-keeping, and I figured out quickly that the breakfast smoothies and muffins I had been accustomed to ordering every day during my internship added up to a bank-breaking amount over the course of a year – I wouldn’t have had to borrow money from my mother for a down payment on our first apartment if I had gone smoothlieless as an intern!

On my first day of full-time work I showed up with my own homemade smoothie and bagel, and continued to do so for several months, until finally my slothfulness caught up with my budget. Rather then blend up a confection every morning, I opted to allow myself a fixed weekly lunch budget to use however I pleased – buying groceries, eating modestly every day, or starving myself all week to go out for one big lunch.

Over four years of employment I’ve hewed pretty close to the budget, which rendered my $5 a day smoothie habit an obsolete luxury. The casualty was breakfast – I altogether stopped eating it, which made me a ravenous beast around 11:15 a.m.. I shrugged off plenty of health-concious co-workers bugging me to start my day with a meal, but when I began working on our healthy living initiatives earlier this year the message was drilled home by project after project: I was wrecking my naturally awesome metabolism, and I needed to eat more fresh fruit.

So, this summer when I found a nearby fruit cart that made $3.25 16oz. smoothies I was ecstatic – $16.15 a week was only a portion of my food budget, and it meant I’d actually eat my daily recommended servings of fruit. I immediately became a daily customer, and they’d have a smoothie ready to be blended when they saw me coming from a block away!

Two weeks ago my precious cart disappeared like clockwork on the first near-freezing morning, and without thinking about it I retreated to my four-year old smoothie/bagel habit. By the end of the week I had racked up $30 in spending – a huge chunk of my weekly food allowance, and over $1500 over the course of the year!

I had to put a stop to it, but I had become addicted to the energetic, breakfast-eating me I rediscovered over the summer. Could I produce my own smoothies and bagels for the convenient $16.25 I had been spending weekly over the summer?

The first hurdle was that I’d have to buy my supplies at the supermarket most convenient to me, which meant a slight markup. Five bananas came out to between $2-$3. Over the winter I’d rely on frozen organic strawberries, which were $.218 an ounce, and I’d need 50 oz. a week, for a total of $11. I’d also need a carton of off-brand OJ to fill out my concoction ($3), and a can or two of coconut milk to sweeten it a little (less than $2).

That’s a total of $18 for smoothie ingredients, proving the value of my cart-bound friend. Add to that a six-pack of everything bagels for $4 and $.90 weekly for my share of non-hydrogenated buttery spread for a total of $22.90 a week – a scant $7.10 savings over my gourmet breakfast. It would net me $555 in savings a year, but it still cost a bank-breaking $1195! And, that’s not including my time expenditure of thirty minutes of grocery shopping, plus 15 minutes a day of preparation.

No matter how I slice it, my morning smoothie is a major budget hit – a significant detraction from my ability to acquire new gear, my potential to pay off credit cards, my plan to save for a house.

Yet, what’s the comparative value of starting every day with a healthy breakfast, and getting my daily fix of fruit? Not to mention that my bagels and butter are healthier than the ones I’d be served in town. Sure, the monetary expense seems steep, but in the long term is it costing me less than the effects of eschewing fruit and starting my day with lunch?

Since the answer to that is unknowable at the moment, I’m going to have to find another way to justify my smoothie-enabling weekly shopping trips. Next steps? See if I can score my ingredients more cheaply elsewhere, or create a better economy of scale by also rolling in shopping for my lunch rather than buying it.