Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

betterment

don’t fail me now

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The last forty-eight hours of my life.

At six o’clock on Monday I am playing guitar. I have been playing for hours, drilling songs against a metronome. The bridge of “Unengaged” for twenty minutes straight. I’ve worn through a callous for the first time in ages.

Later I rehearse piano and vocals equally as hard. I fall asleep reading Outliers in bed, which just two chapters in already has caused one blowup with E because I said if I had me as a child I’d call me a failure.

I don’t want to be a failure.

Tuesday I have a fun, frantic day at work – the kind where you realize at the end of the day that you never stopped to hang your coat. I start writing the second my ass is on the bus, and emerge almost three hours later with that last post.

I rehearse. Hard. Again. Trying not to fail. Despite my voice sounding brittle and inflexible due to the lack of a warm-up, I venture out to an open mic while E stays at home and works on freelance.

At the restaurant my first song is awesome; the room is quietly transfixed. (I’m not a failure?) Afterward I promptly break a string and become shy and faltering when I’m handed another guitar. I fuck up “Like a Virgin,” of all things, and promptly lose everyone’s attention.

Today I feel slightly beaten up (thank god I don’t drink at those things), on top of beating myself up. Still manage another frantic work day that barely includes a coat-hanging. On the way home I listen to my own voice on my iPod, which a lot of days is the only thing I can manage to do.

I’m listening to “Like a Virgin” from 2006 and thinking, This is awful. Why am i singing like that? (Of course, I wouldn’t make it ten seconds into “Like a Virgin” from 2001.)

Then I listen to a Trio from 2008 and realize, God, I really did get better.

I am not a failure.

I get home and am kissed goodbye as E heads out to front her band at the Khyber. Another hour of writing.

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.

.

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.

.

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.

Are you the me you always wanted to be?

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Did you ever have a teacher that made you write letters to your future self, and then promised to send them in five or ten years to remind you of what you used to aspire to?

I didn’t, but I do have a blog, which functions in a similar capacity if you keep it around long enough, minus the postage.

It’s affirming to read that the me of eight years ago was worried that in half that time I’d give up playing guitar and turn into some vacant, corporate, brown-nosing shell of what I had hoped to be.

It’s affirming because in half that time I had almost given up playing guitar, but I realized the insanity in that and reversed course. It’s affirming because I got corporate, but it just made me more comfortable being myself.

It’s affirming because I imagined myself saying, “none of my friends even really knew i was into it that seriously,” and I don’t think I could accuse myself of that anymore. It’s affirming because I think the current me is exactly who the younger me would have wanted me to be.

And, it’s affirming to know that it’s okay to wonder if I’m going to fail spectacularly at the future I want for myself, because just the practice of worrying means I’m on the right track.

What worries did the you of 2000 have about the you of today? Do you think they’d be pleased to see how you turned out?

out with the old, out with the new

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Being a consumate overachiever, I am usually all over “small changes that can yield big success” articles. Like, whoo boy, sign me up for micro adjustments that cause macro improvements!

Except, at this point I have made every micro-tweak I can make. I am fully tweaked.

Take, for example. a CNN article from yesterday that suggests five simple diet changes that result in 500+ saved calories a day.

Here’s what they suggested, in comparison to what I do.

Old: whole milk
New: 1 percent milk
Me: rice milk

Old: whole bagel
New: half a bagel
Me: low fat granola
(occasionally a bagel with non-hydrogenated, light spread)

Old: chocolate ice cream
New: chocolate yogurt or a Popsicle
Me: soy- or rice-based ice cream, fruit chillers, or nuts

Old: latte made with whole milk
New: latte made with skim milk
Me: chai made with soy milk

Old: be a couch potato
New: take a 20-minute walk
Me: walk 1-3 miles a day

I could continue to match them one for one – they’d say, “eat lean meat,” and I’d say, “eat fish.” They’d say, “no more extra cheese,” and I’d say, “no more cheese.”

Articles like this make me feel okay for being thin, because I have clearly eliminated every source of culinary indulgence from my life already, and have largely found replacements that I prefer to the original gluttonous versions.

(I wish that articles like this could also make me feel like I can stop worrying that I’m going to turn into a giant Italian balloon when I turn thirty like half of my family did, but I’m just going to have keep being anxious about that bridge until it’s crossed.)

My total tweakedness isn’t limited to diet, which means I react similarly to “small changes” articles about budgets or goal setting – I’m excited to read them until I realize they’re preaching to the me of 2003. I’ve made most of these adjustments already because they all dovetail with my concept of living marginally. I suppose it’s my personal version of being green – why waste money and time on frivolous things you don’t even care about, when you’d rather waste them on frivolous things you actually enjoy?

So, to CNN readers I say, “If you like your lattes with whole milk, go ahead and drink them.” Micro changes are nice, but it’s a major change of attitude that’s going to make the biggest difference in your life.

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.