New Zealand

RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under Season 2, Episode 6 – Hometown Hunnies: Review & Power Ranking

September 4, 2022 by krisis

Kia ora and welcome to my review and power rankings for the sixth episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under Season 2 – Hometown Hunnies, where queens were challenged to create a spoof tourism ad for their hometowns.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen another episode of Drag Race where RuPaul seemed so incredibly over it, both in the workroom and on the runway.

Maybe that comes down to how the queens took the direction to create their spoof ads. All of them understood the challenge in an incredibly literal way and were initially planning straight-forward homages to their hometowns with little bits of humor. Ru sets them straight one-by-one in the workroom, telling each one of them to go back to the drawing board with limited time before their shoot begins.

We all know Ru loves to keep the queens second-guessing themselves, but the fact that she needed to correct everyone in the cast tells me there was some form of missed communication from production to the queens. Maybe that was intentional, or maybe Ru and the production team simply assumed the “spoof” aspect of the ads was implied right up until Ru’s walk-around.

I think there’s a little bit of a cultural aspect mixed in with that. I feel like if the US franchise asked a queen to talk about her home town, she would be more likely to assume it was mean to be a silly version and script it as such.

For Australia and New Zealand, I feel like there’s a lot more pride in wanting to make your town look good – especially on an international stage. Even though almost all of them do take an initially negative view of their hometowns (Beverly, especially), at first they all seemed mor- focused on explaining their places rather than telling a story about themselves.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen this many awkward moments in a Drag Race judges’ critique that didn’t end in RuPaul screaming about H&M. It feels like the editors could barely piece together enough comments from the three judges to fill the time. Maybe that’s down to Ru’s openly hostile reception to most of the ads (again, stemming from poor direction). Or, it could’ve been the super-basic “Swimsuit Edition” runway prompt, which feels like it was originally intended for a mini-challenge or third ball look. To their credit, all of the queens took things in a conceptual direction with their swimsuits, but the prompt definitely failed to produce a gag-worthy moment – and, it gave the judges very little to discuss.

That leaves us with a fairly obvious Final Four, as predicted in last week’s “Bosom Buddies” Power Rankings (and the week before that in Snatch Game, and the week before that in Drag Brunch). The real question is who will graduate to the Top 3 in the finale after next week’s episode. Two of the choices seem very obvious, while the other one is still hotly contested.

If you want to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under Season 2 outside of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada you can sign up for WowPresentsPlus to watch the many worldwide Drag Race franchises for $4.99 a month or $50 a year. (Note that if you’re in the home country of a franchise you will need to use a VPN to “visit” another country to see that content.)

Readers, start your engines… and may the best Down Under drag queen win!

on new (old) holidays

June 26, 2022 by krisis

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.

(un/)settled

June 9, 2022 by krisis

Last week I threw away some expired prescriptions from at least a decade ago.

I know what you’re thinking. “Krisis will really blog about anything to keep up these regular posts. Maybe we’ll get a YouTube show reviewing the contents of every trash can in the house.”

Honestly, I wouldn’t rule it out. But, I promise, this trip to the trash can was particularly significant!

When we bought a house back in 2010, in many ways my life entered “accumulation mode.” I never had that much space to fill before, or a space that felt so permanent. After an entire life spent in rentals, I finally felt like I could have and do stuff. I’m not just talking about my comic collection! Having a house also lead to me fronting a full band, learning to play bass, writing a book, and making a huge career pivot.

In short: I felt settled. That extended to more than my stuff. It came with a feeling of psychological safety.

Image by tookapic from Pixabay

Then, almost exactly five years ago, we packed that entire life into a shipping container. We had fewer than 90 days to go from committing to our move to hopping on the first of three flights en route to New Zealand, so the packing wasn’t very discerning. All of the comics, musical gear, kitchen appliances, and expired medication got boxed up regardless of if we’d ever want to see them again in New Zealand.

Even though we’ve long since unpacked all the essentials, in some ways I’ve been living out of boxes for the past half decade. Heck, I needed an almost 90-episode web show to motivate me to unpack all of my collected editions! It’s not unusual for E to send me on a scavenger hunt through the garage for something we haven’t seen since leaving America.

This set me back to a mindset of everything in life being temporary. Having to move again in 2019 when I finally felt at home in our first rental in NZ made things even worse and it was compounded by our deportation scare in early 2020.

I was back to being unsettled.

If feeling settled came with a warm, tingly feeling of safety, feeling unsettled again introduced a constant, low-level of buzzing anxiety in the back of my brain.

I still bought stuff and did new things, but it felt unsteady. Imagine cooking a big meal while wearing roller skates. Would you whisk and chop as confidently? Would you clean up as you cooked? Would it be easy to lift a heavy pan into a hot oven? Or, would you do everything more slowly, with less certainty and more mess.

That’s how being unsettled feels to me now that I know there’s an alternative – slow, uncertain, and messy.

Here’s the thing I’ve slowly accepted about the rollerskate-cooking that is my ongoing immigrant life: forcing yourself to be physically settled helps with feeling mentally settled, and the opposite is true as well.

Sometimes that’s buying a new shelf to improve the clutter. Others it means inviting friends over for dinner, because that is a thing we can do.

And, sometimes that means unearthing a box full of expired prescriptions I haven’t dealt with since 2012 and tossing them all in the trash.

Captain Crunch and the Butterfinger Cowboy

June 5, 2022 by krisis

The tastes of many American snack foods have become a distant memory after five years spent living in New Zealand.

A few familiar American snack brands make it to our remote shores and supermarket shelves, usually via companies with an Australian outpost. We can buy Cheerios and the occasional Fruit Loops, and there are $13 pints of Ben & Jerry’s to be had for the big spenders, but the vast amount of familiar expat snacks are absent from most Kiwi grocery stores

Mostly I don’t mind. My solution has largely been to cook a lot more meals and to eschew snack foods like cookies, chips, and crackers entirely. Why start a fresh snacking habit when I can instead scan down an aisle of unfamiliar cookie packages and not know what a single one of them taste like?

Being oblivious to local brands is a terrific diet.

The one kink in this flawless snack free life is that I sometimes catch myself regaling the kid with one of my distant snack food memories. As she has grown older I’ve realized how many of my stories tie to specific foods, like the routine of buying Twizzlers every time I went to the movies (and how it’s essential to enjoy them when they are fresh) or the excitement of discovering I had a Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpet in my lunch (and the process of rubbing them against your shirt to make sure the frosting wouldn’t get stuck to the plastic).

While I don’t necessarily miss the indulgences I describe to her, I do sometimes regret that I can’t give her the same experiences. I don’t need her to like all of the same snacks as me, but being unable to give her the opportunity to turn her nose up at them makes me feel like I’m missing some essential aspect of the parenting experience.

One snack in particular, has come up again and again in these conversations: Captain Crunch cereal. Yes, I know the actual name is “Cap’n Crunch,” but I’m not typing that repeatedly. It’s undignified for a man of the Captain’s position and tenure.

I explained the mouth-shredding experience of eating Captain Crunch to the kid at least a dozen times over. I’m uncertain why Fruit Loops were able to make the ocean-spanning journey to our shores and stores while the good Captain – himself a seafarer of some renown – could not. New Zealand loves peanut butter!

(E’s theory is that Captain Crunch (actually, a Commander) is obviously modeled on historical colonizers, who aren’t as welcomed as junk food mascots here as they are in the states. My theory is that because Kiwis don’t dip cookies in milk, they simply aren’t interested in more cookie-esque cereals since there’s no built-in allure to eating a bowl full of them.)

(Seriously, they don’t dip cookies in milk here. It’s a whole ‘nother post entirely.)

Occasionally I’ll fall down the internet rabbit hole of looking into buying Captain Crunch by the case. Even in bulk, the cost of having it shipped to New Zealand is prohibitive. Plus, I’d be crushed to find out that customs had incinerated a case of contraband cereal for violating some form of border integrity (which has happened to E before while trying to import spices).

It was these memories (and cravings) for the Captain that found the kid and I staring into the tantalizing maw of US import store in our local shopping center a few weeks ago. It is tucked into an odd corner of the parking lot such that I don’t usually need to walk past it, but a rainy day of household errands had us scurrying from from awning to awning to avoid getting soaked.

There we were, slightly damp and slightly breathless, peering through the window. There was the Captain, his smiling face splayed across a row of familiar red boxes, smiling back at me. It was the first time I had seen him in person in almost five years. [Read more…] about Captain Crunch and the Butterfinger Cowboy

My Dungeons and Dragons Lifeline

June 3, 2022 by krisis

Gather round, folks, because I bring you a tale that begins on the very precipice of the pandemic, extends through a year of extreme burnout, and involves a fantastical land full of dragons, dungeons, and indecisive half-elves.

Picture it: February 2020, AKA the last normal month on Earth. We were all reading COVID-19 articles with a sense of bemusement that grew into dread as they crept from the international news section forward to the front page, but most of our lives hadn’t been changed by it at all.

Three big things happened in my life in February 2020. First, I started what seemed like it was my dream job (spoilers: it was not).

Second, I started playing D&D remotely with my college friends back on the East Coast.

And, third, we were almost deported!

Of these three events, it seemed like starting the D&D campaign with friends would prove to be the least significant. It was the 18th anniversary of when we assembled to play together in college. That campaign ran for just a few months, but it gained an appropriately mythical status in our collective hindsight. When our beloved friend Dante passed away in 2014 we reformed for a one-off night, but none of us ever expected to play together again – certainly not with me halfway around the world!

During a catch-up with Lindsay about my new gig, she mentioned that some of the old gang would be assembling physically for a new campaign. We joked about how funny it would be to have me projected on a screen playing remotely – imagine that! But, the more we joked about it, the more the idea took hold. After making arrangements with our longtime DM, I appeared in that first session live from New Zealand!

I cleared off a desk in our spare bedroom, still packed with boxes from our recent move, and pointed it out the window so I could enjoy the sunny day while I played with friends who were up past midnight back in the US. It was ridiculous fun. We had forgotten all the rules and were all playing newly-invented characters and classes we had never played before. I inadvertently vaporized an entire alleyway of assailants with my first Thunderwave. Even though the session was meant to be a one-off, we agreed to reconvene two weeks later.

Two days later, the New Zealand government informed us we were 40 days away from deportation.

(This is too big a story to explain in full here, but in short: The NZ government told us repeatedly in writing that we absolutely should not renew our visas while we waited on a decision on our residency application. When we (as a pair assiduous rule-followers) did not renew our visas while waiting on said decision, the Ministry promptly informed us that our visas had expired, we were in the country illegally, we had to quit our jobs, and we should make plans to depart immediately.)

The weeks that followed our deportation notice were one of the most stressful periods I’ve experienced in my entire life. We lived every day wondering if we should put our newly-moved-into household into storage and look for a place to stay back in the states even as a global pandemic began unfolding. It was one of the many times in our lives as recent immigrants when we realized how powerless we were and how arbitrary the rules of borders and residency are in every country around the world.

Truly, I don’t know if I would’ve had the emotional fortitude to survive our tense process of getting emergency visas without the fresh connection with my best friends from the states and the knowledge that I’d see them all again in two weeks. We played that second session with all of us remote from each other as the early days of the pandemic reached into all of our cities. I certainly had a thrilling story to share in our “what’s been going on with you in the past two weeks!”

Then, between our second and third session, New Zealand began its first two-month COVID lockdown. That meant no leaving the house, other than for groceries, gas, banking, medical care, or a short walk around the neighborhood.

Even if the states wasn’t in an official lockdown, all of my party members were similarly shut in their houses. It was the perfect opportunity for us to set a regular date to play – none of us were going anywhere! Each session before playing we would catch up, sharing our stories of hunting for scarce groceries or finding the perfect pattern for sewing masks.

As our initial campaign drew to a close, I asked if I could take a turn at being Dungeon Master for a session or two while our regular DM prepped his next adventure. I had always been fascinated by DM-ing as a mash-up of carefully planned math and improvisational storytelling, but I never had the guts to try to convince people to play with me as a first-time DM. [Read more…] about My Dungeons and Dragons Lifeline