stories

Dolly told me I’m doing okay

January 22, 2023 by krisis

Last night, Dolly Parton reminded me that things come to me easily when I work the hardest. Just like Paul McCartney.

Also, our unconscious brain is the original A.I. engine.

Except, I guess it’s a paradox to call the human brain artificial intelligence? Also, come to think of it, that first sentence was kind of paradoxical too.

Maybe I should back up a step. Maybe several steps.

I am mystified by people who run. Especially those who enjoy running or who can run quickly. I’ve always hated running and it seems to hate me right back. The process of my body lurching forward into a sprint has never once satisfied me. Every second I am running is a second I’d rather not be running.

Over the past year I’ve done a fair amount of running. More than 150 kilometers, at least – which certainly more-than-doubles my lifetime mileage.

Do you know what happens when you run a lot, even when you hate every single second of doing it? Eventually, it gets easier. I stopped getting as out of breath as I did at the start of the year. I stopped getting side stitches after a few months. After a while, I started getting marginally faster on every 5k route through my neighborhood.

Let me tell you: there is no kind of reward for running that is better than the running being over more quickly.

I look a break from running over the long, soggy New Zealand winter and spring. When I started running again in the past month, I feared I was right back to where I started. I was going to hate being slow and breathless and full of cramps. That was true the first few weeks. Then, something surprising happened. Without really trying, one day I checked my stopwatch at the end of my route and realized I had shattered my personal record by 30 seconds. Nothing about the run had seemed remarkable. I hadn’t even hated it any more than I hate any other run.

Things come to you easily when you work the hardest.

That’s also true for mental exertion. [Read more…] about Dolly told me I’m doing okay

logarithmic monsters

June 29, 2016 by krisis

EV and I are headed to the Jersey Shore today for a stay of between 16 and 36 hours.

That’s more intimidating to me than a descent into the mouth of hell in the style of Dante’s Inferno. It’s an inferno plus a trip to a zoo plus sand. I have already packed five bags and I am still certain that I’ve forgotten something. If you were to pass our car en route to our destination you would assume we were on the final leg of a cross-country trek rather than a 90-minute drive to interact with throngs of primarily South Philadelphians enjoying an early start to a long weekend.

It’s been thoroughly well-established at this point in CK’s nearly two decades of history that I do not travel well.

More accurately, I am totally cool with traveling but I need several days to exhaustively pack at least half of my worldly belongings for the trip such that my internal OCD Godzilla is satisfied I am prepared for every possible contingency, and since I usually don’t have the time or ability to do that I make up for it by not traveling especially well.

I’d call it “traveling exceedingly grumpy.”

I don’t exactly mean a trip to Europe here. We’re talking about any excursion longer than an hour car ride or 12 hours in length. Having a laptop and a carry-on travel guitar has slightly eased my anxieties, but there’s still the clothes. I mean, the shoes alone are at least a suitcase’s worth for a two-day trip. More if there will be formal dining.

Thus, as you would expect, traveling with a toddler opens up whole new realms of my innards for OCD Godzilla to stomp and thrash through, giving me untold additional amounts of agita about leaving the house. While I wasn’t exactly thrilled about traveling with a baby, the possibilities were finite. N hours away from home was X number of cloth diapers + Y amount of outfits + Z cubes of frozen pureed food. All of the options of Xs and Ys and Zs were interchangeable. It was a fixed, linearly progressing equation.

Not so with a toddler. It’s fucking logarithmic and that’s not just my OCD Godzilla on a rampage talking – it’s reality.

A perfect example of this going well was a recent 6-hour trip with EV to a farm to pick berries. I figured EV needed an outfit to travel in, something lighter if it got much hotter, her swimsuit, a second set of clothes to change into post-farm if she got very dirty or interacted with animals, PJs for if we stayed out late enough that she would fall asleep on the way home, and an emergency change of clothes. That doesn’t even account for food, a book to read in the car, hair ties, et cetera, but let’s stay focused on clothes for the purposes of this example.

Somehow, we used every outfit by the time we got home. I actually had to dip into the emergency stash! It’s not as if I kept changing her clothes for fun or just to burn through them, as I do personally just to keep things theatrical. These were outfit changes necessary for the health, comfort and safety of a toddler.

What if she got irrecoverably dirty a second time?! (As for the first: don’t ask). Then she’d be walking around just in the spare set of underwear I keep in the car just in case.

And, though the farm was dusty, there wasn’t any sand there.

So, if you happen to be driving through New Jersey today and you see a steel blue Toyota packed to the gills with a toddler in the backseat who demands that Aimee Mann be played at all times while driving on a highway, please wish those travelers godspeed and hope that the purple-haired guy behind the wheel has a internal King Ghidorah who can temporarily block and tackle his OCD Godzilla long enough for him to get all of the sand out of his shoes.

Who you gonna call? Not the plumber.

June 26, 2016 by krisis

EV being an oddball while not dancing on any graves on a walk through the cemetery three months ago.

What I didn’t mention when I described my uneventful call to the plumber on Friday is that it occurred in the midst of a walk with EV through our local cemetery, and that during the call I saw what E has now convinced me was a ghost.

Possibly two ghosts.

I didn’t think they were a ghosts at the time. As I was talking to our plumber, the first appeared sort of out of nowhere and began walking very briskly toward me. He was older, but not as old as my parents, and in a neon colored t-shirt shirt that seemed to indicate that in some capacity he was trying not to be hit by a car.

“Shit,” I thought as I tried to keep up the conversation about faucets with our plumber while the man closed the distance between us with purpose, “he must be a groundskeeper or someone else who is going to chastise me for letting my toddler run around while I make calls in this sacred space.”

(To be fair, I am usually fairly reverent when walking around the cemetery. I’m really not the kind of person who makes calls anywhere but the controlled environment of my office, but the plumber called me back and I wasn’t going to miss my opportunity.)

And then… I don’t especially recall what happened. He never walked up to me or said anything. I think he smiled? EV and I were standing towards the middle of the drive walking north but I don’t remember him circling to either side to move past us to the south. But, who knows? I was trying to overcome my renters’ mentality by making arrangements for home repairs while ensuring that toddler didn’t literally dance on anyone’s grave. I’m sure I just wasn’t paying attention.

Except, then we saw him again and he was with another ghost.

I ended the call with the plumber and EV and and I swung west around the disused greenhouse attached to one of the cottages on the property. She wanted to “sneak up on the house” (which involves her running up a walk to try to jump off a step or touch the siding), but I saw that some of the basement windows were broken through and was trying to wrangle her back to the curbside.

“Oh, hello,” the older man said as he approached us from the road to the north. I think it was the same man. He was the same age with the same leathery-skin tanned look about him, although I was sure that his neon shirt had been a different color a moment before. There was also the fact that he had been headed south at least 500 feet behind us and hadn’t passed us.

Maybe, but not with the child he now had in tow. The boy was just stepping away from a low headstone he had been examining closely. He was wiry and a few inches taller than EV, with an equine nose upon which rested a very unchildlike pair of square-framed, polarized glasses. He was staring at me from over their rims.

“Ah,” I said brightly, tugging EV away from her act of trespassing. “It’s such beautiful weather.” I decided that this was vague enough that it couldn’t possible offend them if they had been visiting the grave of a loved one.

(Or, upon reflection, their own.)

“It is!” the man replied cheerily as the boy moved to idle by his side. “My grandson is showing his ol’ pops around the place.” Which immediately made no sense to me because pops had just been wandering around by himself without the grandson a moment ago. How did he have enough time to circle back, retrieve the boy, circle ahead of us, and examine tombstones? But, I have a certain way that I talk to children like little people adopted from my own years of precocity, and I already launched into it.

“Oh, do you know it well?” This directed at the boy. “I’m always getting turned around when I walk through here. I don’t understand which roads connect to the others.”

“Sure I do,” he said. “I live in the house over there.”

He gestured and I followed his finger while he continued to chatter. The house he was pointing to seemed like another one of the dilapidated cottages on the grounds – not one I’d expect a young boy to live, although I supposed a groundskeeper could live there with a little family. As I listened to him speak I noticed that EV had taken leave of me and was continuing to walk a few steps past where we had stopped to chat with each other.

The boy was still speaking, but the man interrupted him.

“How old is she?”

I took my customary pause to see if EV would respond, but she made no motion to turn around. “A few weeks shy of three,” I answered, drifting slightly in her direction. “How old are you?” I said, indicating the boy with my chin.

“Oh, he’s three, too,” the man answered. I squinted down at the boy. He did not look or sound three. He was articulate and self-possessed. He was dressed like a slightly miniature seven or eight year old who had just discovered he could stand out from his peers with a slight sartorial tweak. He continued to watch me over the rims of his tinted square glasses in a distinctly un-three-year-old like way.

EV was now three body-lengths from me along the road. There had been no cars in sight so far, I knew that distance to be the point where I cannot wind sprint to scoop her up in less than a second, so I hurried to catch up with her. Maybe I called out, “sorry,” over my shoulder.

I caught up with EV and put my arm around her shoulders. She giggled up at me. “EV, you were running away from our new friends,” I glanced back at the man, waving jauntily at EV, and the boy, as still as a portrait. “That little boy lives here.” She paid me no mind and kept walking up the road.

It wasn’t until much later, in describing our encounter to E over dinner, that I realized EV never once acknowledged the pair of them – not with a glance or with her typical shy toddler routine of standing slightly behind my leg.

I don’t think she ever saw them.

a few small repairs

June 24, 2016 by krisis

“Broken Toilet” by Siobhan McKeown. Some rights reserved.

Last week was the six year anniversary of our buying this house and I still don’t know how to do anything.

Seriously. I still haven’t replaced a single fixture in six years. I’m great at fixing electronics (ask me about that one time I baked our television) and cleaning, but my list of house projects goes something like, “get poster framed and then beg E to hang it for me.”

Meanwhile, E has hung many pictures, replaced fixtures, painted whole rooms, installed complex wall-hanging laundry systems, supervised the replacement of no less than four doors and fourteen windows, and personally sourced and laid a set of slate steps.

Yes, she is a badass.

As for me, I refer to my combination of reticence and inability as “renter’s mentality.” This is the first home I’ve ever owned. My mother and I lived in three different rented homes, including one house for almost fifteen years. The only thing we ever altered – and I mean the only thing – was paying someone to paint-and-popcorn-ceiling a back room for me in a vomitous seafoam green when I became a teenager so I didn’t have to have a tiny shoebox of a bedroom with a connecting door to her room.

The wallpaper was uniquely hideous in every room, as if there was some sort of game of ugly oneupmanship going on when the house was initially decorated. The sole light source in the living room was a dilapidated chandelier missing several of its dangling crystals and bearing the tattered streamer of a long ago party. It had a certain Miss Havisham quality to it. The kitchen … it was the worst kitchen you can possibly imagine. I still have nightmares about it. It was carpeted, and that was the least-bad thing about it. We didn’t have much money, but I’m sure we could have done something about some of it.

Yet, we were paralyzed in the middle of the renter mentality triangle – decision-paralysis about changing something we didn’t own, lack of budget and hesitance to sink money into something we didn’t own, and lack of knowledge of how to do anything because we weren’t the owners who had to deal with it.

Even though E and I owning our house removes all of the “didn’t own” aspects of that vicious triangle, I’m still stuck inside its three walls, held hostage by the tiniest of options. We want a new faucet for our kitchen and the idea that I have to choose a semi-permanent fixture for our home and then see through its installation was paralyzing.

I kind of sort of committed to a style and then stalled. What if the finish didn’t exactly match the rest of the kitchen? How could I pick a new handle I’d be interacting with dozens of times a day without an intense, hands-on study of UI, UX, and ergonomics?

(Are you beginning to understand how hard it is to be married to me?)

This past Sunday, E looked me in the eye and spoke in the kind of calm, measured voice you use when you’re trying to approach a wild animal without spooking it.

“Peter,” she crooned, “we really need to replace the toilet in the master bathroom.” She saw the fear in my eyes. The toilet. That’s permanent porcelain piece of furniture!

“The tank does not fit into space between the bowl and the wall,” she continued, soothingly, “and so it has a bad seal to the floor. The plumber said he couldn’t fix it again with caulk. It’s time.”

I gulped and nodded imperceptibly. It was a perfectly good toilet! How could we throw it away? It would probably cost untold thousands of dollars to replace and could result in the demolition of the entire bathroom – we might have to knock down a wall in the back of the house and get a crane into the back yard to winch it out.

“You just have to talk to the plumber.” This is the part where you have locked eyes with the animal and are slowly backing it towards the cage in which you are trying to capture it, for its own safety and yours. “Just find out what we need to do.”

Today is Friday. I managed to be busy enough with car repairs and writing and hanging out with our little scamp that I avoided the call all week, but this morning I knew I had to bite the bullet and talk to our plumber – not the hardest call, since he is the most patient human being in the universe who once had to respond to my emergency call after I crashed our car into our house.

I made the call. I described the problem and braced for impact. Would we need to move out of the house for a week while he did the repairs?

“Oh, I could stop by with the toilet on Monday if you want,” he responded.

Did he mean, stop by with his team of burly men, fleet of construction equipment, and double-wide trailer for porcelain throne hauling?

“No, just me.”

I was in awe. How much would such a feat cost? Could we afford it and continue to feed EV her diet of copious fresh fruits and vegetables, or would she spend her fourth year of life eating ramen, exclusively.

Let’s just say, replacing a toilet costs less than my typical monthly order of new comic books.

I was so relieved, I followed up with, “Hey, do you replace faucets?”

the room where it happened

June 14, 2016 by krisis

I sat in an uncomfortable wooden seat in Masterman’s cavernous auditorium. It was my first time attending the annual day of health awareness presented by our Peer Educators, which kicked off with a live program.

The theme that year was awareness of sexual assault. Between speeches, songs, or short plays, a single student would emerge from behind the curtain and stand alone in the spotlight. They stood there and shared a story of assault – not their own, but one solicited from friends or family. The stories were told in the first person, sometimes in the present tense – frank and unfiltered. They weren’t something you would expect to see on a high school stage, but absolutely something that ought to be there.

A portion of the program ended, bringing us to another punctuating monologue. A young man stepped out onto the stage. He had his hair in little twists and a flannel shirt around his waist, as was the style at time. And he just… talked. About being a kid, about joy and wonder, and about how his assault ended that.

It’s not my story to share or repeat, but I remember so many elements of that monologue to this day. Words, but pauses, too. The look on his face.

I was dumbstruck by it. Not because I was a survivor of assault. Not because a man was delivering the story rather than a woman. I was struck because of the piercing honesty of the words. There was no moment of latency between the actor and the performance. I knew they weren’t his own words, but he made it impossible to believe.

Sometime later the lights came up and students filtered out of auditorium to attend workshops on consent, healthy body image, and safe sex. My mind was still on the stage. As I watched my peers have open discussions about their experiences, questions, and fears, I had one thought fixed in my mind: I needed to become a Peer Educator. What they were doing was important. They were not only educating, but creating fundamental shifts in thinking.

2016-tony-awards-leslie-odom That young man was Leslie Odom, Jr, a frequent supporting player on TV and Aaron Burr in Broadway’s Hamilton. I went to middle school with him, but knew him from a distance only as the kid with the golden voice who sang at assemblies and was an 8th grader playing a lead in the high school play. I actually met him in Freshman year. I sat next to him in geometry; he read the lyrics to Lisa Loeb’s “Taffy” at a poetry slam.

I am sure that Leslie doesn’t recall me. He has no reason to. I don’t recall if we had a single conversation before he switched schools to pursue his creative pursuits. Honestly, I was always a little starstruck by him.

I recall that monologue, though. It was still playing in my head when I joined the Peer Education program during the next call for applications. I still think about it from time to time; I can still play it back.

I spend a lot of digital ink talking about how my BFF Gina made performance look easy and helped me discover my life as a performer, but I often overlook that I also went on to produce pair of those health awareness assemblies and facilitate those workshops. That was a massive part of my transformation and newfound self-confidence as a performer and occasional activist. I had never voluntarily been on a stage before. I became the one delivering the performances and monologues to the school. I’d never have Leslie’s control or gravitas, so I found my own way. I mocked convention. I mocked myself. I tried to make everyone think while they laughed.

On Sunday night, Leslie won a Tony Award. I would give him one myself, if I could, for that one monologue still seared into my brain and how it contributed to changing my life. I’ve now been a performer for more than half of it. I used to file into the auditorium as an audience member, but now I’m at home on stage. It’s how I met my wife. I’m a steadfast advocate for a sexual health and reproductive rights. I’m raising my daughter with the idea that she has autonomy over her body and that consent matters for everyone.

Leslie won a Tony Award and I cried before I even saw his acceptance speech.

Congratulations, Leslie. I am extraordinarily happy for you and I can never thank you enough.