Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

New Zealand

intangible assets

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Here’s an important lesson I’ve been reminded of repeatedly over the past six months of planning and executing an international move:

Your money does not belong to you.

You do not have an unalienable right or even a persistent privilege to access your money from everywhere on this Earth. It does not necessarily translate across borders. You may not be able to carry it with you every where you go in the form cash, checks, or precious gems.

If you’re someone who has never before worried about accessing your bank account, that’s a frightening concept. It was frightening when we saw it on the The Handmaid’s Tale earlier this year. In an early flashback, all of the women in the United States have had their assets frozen. The pair of female protagonists cannot access their own money without a husband to cosign.

(Your level of outrage at this particular development may strongly correlate with your age; American banks could deny women an account until the 1960s and credit cards as late as 1974.)

Based not only on my own reaction to that development but also the “aww, hell no!” I saw from many friends online, I think this scene resonated strongly with viewers more strongly than the same two women losing their jobs. In the real world, everyone is afraid their job could disappear, but we feel like we own our money. Even if that money was deposited directly by our employer into our bank account without our intervention it feels like something real and tangible to us because we earned it. We own it.

Maybe we’re just a pair of unlucky morons when it comes to international banking, but I don’t feel like we own our money anymore.

That started as far back as June, when E tried to transfer some US savings to a new account in New Zealand. Not only did our American bank not offer any tools for such a transfer, but once we found a way to do it the receiving bank in New Zealand declined to open an account for us until we were in the country and could prove our residency.

How were we supposed to land in the country and established residency without a bank account in the country? I’m not sure, but that was the topic of one of my earliest struggles here in Wellington.

I thought we were past those bank shenanigans after our first month here. We have bank accounts now, and debit cards, and E is getting paid in NZ dollars. I thought that meant our money was “real” here in New Zealand, which would make things easy if we needed to get any more of it from one country to another. Yet, earlier this week I found myself breaking down into tears at a bank counter when they wouldn’t allow me to deposit a check made out to me from one of the largest public companies in the world because it was in Euros.

“We don’t do Euros,” the bank teller said, shrugging behind the counter as I buried my head in my hands. “We’re phasing out hard copy checks,” his colleague added, blithely.

(Eventually I’ll get around to taking about the culture shock of customer service outside the United States. I’m still gathering data on how many times I have to cry in frustration.)

As with many things related to our move, I’m sure this is a problem that goes away if you are really rich and can pay someone to take care of it for you. I’m certain packing up my guitars would have been simple if I was Bon Jovi, and my comics would have been taken care of if I was Nick Cage, yet I had to jump through all the hoops to pack and ship them safely with virtually no assistance from our movers.

Similarly, I’m sure Madonna does not have a money transfer problem when she wants to deposit a royalty check from Sweden while she’s in the states.

Yet, for a single family with a discreet amount of savings and a variety of income sources, it’s an ongoing nightmare – now with the added fun of being a race-against-time to figure out how to turn this worthless piece of paper into money before 90 days pass and without giving away a big chunk of it in fees.

Around the world people love to sneer at immigrants and refugees, insisting they’d be fine with a foreign professional who “went through the process” to immigrate and then added to the economy. Well, I’m here to tell you: the process is personally and financially draining, and it makes it hard to add to the economy once you’re through with it – and that’s coming from going through one of the more simple immigrations in the world. I’d never want to try to navigate the process of immigrating to America.

Even if I have to cry at a few more bank counters, this really drives home the amount of privilege it takes to safely and securely make an international move. I’ve barely made it through mentally intact, and I had a partner and a lot of assistance on the ground here. Not everyone is so lucky.

the barber of Wellington / Philadelphian fears

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I knew that when we moved to Wellington I’d have a lot of new experiences, like converting temperatures to Celsius, walking uphill both ways to get anywhere, and feigning interest in conversations about rugby.

What I hadn’t really thought through was that one of the most intimidating new experiences would be one I had been putting off for years back in Philly.

You see, despite a lot of fear and anxiety on my part, yesterday – for the first time in my life! – I visited a barber.

A barber! Back in Philly I had a rather expensive high-end salon habit that I mitigated by only getting my hair cut a few times a year, at most.

I have big, thick, wavy, difficult hair. I’m sure a lot of other guys do too, but they either keep it too short to notice or they just suck it up and get bad haircuts – and I am way too vain for that to happen.

The few times in my life I’ve visited a casual, utilitarian hair cuttery my locks would get utterly butchered. Even a buzzcut on me will stand straight up like a trimmed hedge. My hair needs to be chopped aggressively from every possible angle to give it any hope of laying relatively flat on my head and not looking like a half-deflated pompadour, which in turn tends to make me look like a round-faced 12-year-old boy.  I need layers upon layers cross-cut in every direction for my hair to lay flat or look elegantly tousled.

I have found exactly two hairdressers over the past two decades who understood how to give me a hair cut that wasn’t disastrous and could handle my hair in both short and long configurations. Not coincidentally, they both primarily cut women’s hair. They both dealt with more lengths, more textures, and a much higher vested interest in their cuts actually looking good, because in general women pay more attention to their appearance than men, and especially women visiting a high-end salon.

The one problem with this arrangement is that I was paying high-end salon prices for what would sometimes be a pretty short, barber-esque hair cut.

Why not just go to a barber? Not only do I not know the first thing about barbers, the idea of being in a guy-filled barber shop scares the hell out of me.

I have an ingrained hesitance to placing myself in any kind of all-male environment. Once I was done with high school gym class I swore them off almost entirely. I don’t understand how to interact with a room full of randomly sampled men. They put me on edge. I cannot tolerate their leering humor. Sometimes they can even be threatening!

This tracks with my generally not having any idea about any sort of typical “guy stuff” (that really ought not to be gendered at all, but that’s another post entirely).

No one taught me how to shave; I got rid of my burgeoning adolescent mustache by stealing one of my mother’s Lady Bic pink disposable razors and just figuring it out for myself. (And, honestly, I’m still pretty terrible at it). I learned about power tools from working backstage in college theatre. I learned about sex by becoming a certified peer sex educator.

So, I was scared about the barber shop in more ways than one. I’ve been procrastinating on making an appointment since the week we touched down here, despite my hair growing from a length I could manageably slick back to an unruly shag of curls.

Every time I got past my fear of a bad haircut I’d advance to my fear of entering barber shop. Then I’d look at the prices to go to a fancy salon instead. Then I’d just give up on the entire effort for another week or two.

Finally, the sheer weight of my vanity forced me into action, as I was skipping perfectly good opportunities to shoot new videos because of less-than-ideal hair days. I asked short-haired Kiwis for advice, found a shop with decent recommendations, and booked an appointment online – which took me three entire days of mulling over options, cancelling on the last step, and having tiny anxiety attacks before I finally selected a “full service” cut and hoped for the best.

The good spirits of Wellington must have been watching over my barber selection process. My selection turned out to be a tiny, two-chair shop on an alley-way blasting New Wave music, occupied by a brightly tattooed barber with a shelf full of classic G.I. Joes and a daughter the same age as EV6. I spotted Cobra Commander just as some B-52s popped onto the stereo and I breathed such a sigh of relief.

There was no crowd of leering, lecherous men. It turns out there was not any kind of secret dude-code I needed to get me through my appointment. I had a couple of stymied moments, like when he put a sort of paper cuff around my neck (??) and later when he asked me my clipper number and I said, “my what now?”

My first hair cut isn’t perfect, but it’s not awful either. Certainly not the worst I’ve had in my first outing with someone new! And, I’m very happy to go back. We didn’t even get to talk about G.I. Joes yet!

Not only do I finally have all my curls shorn, but I feel like I learned an important lesson. My fear of men and masculinity shouldn’t stop me from engaging with the world any more now than it did when I was 17. Both men and masculinity are different in a different country, as are many other aspects of the world around me that I take for granted.

I didn’t move here to maintain the same set of fears and prejudices that I built up as a form of defense in Philadelphia. If I’m ever going to become a Kiwi, I need to let some of these assumptions go and try new things (and re-try some old ones).

 

creature comforts / window screens

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We’re in the midst of a bit of a late Spring heat wave here in Wellington and today it got as hot as 24°C.

For those of you not super quick at converting celsius to fahrenheit (I’m getting there), that’s 75°F.

Seventy-five degrees fahrenheit. It’s a wonder I survived!

Maybe I didn’t survive. Maybe I’ve died and gone to heaven – because this is my ideal weather.

My hatred for hot temperatures is widely known to my friends. Unless I am in the middle of leaping into a pool I can barely function once the mercury slips past 80°F. When Philly gets into the 90s I go into complete system shutdown.

I’d often remark that it would be nice to move to somewhere with lower highs, like the Pacific Northwest, but I never imagined I would move to place like this – where the average temperature is never over 65°F, it never drops below freezing, it hardly ever gets higher than 77°F, and the worst heatwaves of all time top out in the mid-80s.

Seriously, if I was an alien life form and biologists were charting my ideal habitat temperature range, their findings would simply say “Wellington.”

When you live somewhere where the temperature basically ranges from “chilly spring” to “warm spring” for the majority of the year, if you cannot be outside at the very least you want every possible window open. Luckily, our house has a lot of windows – including skylights – which means there’s double the motivation to open them, as spending a whole day indoors can start to feel like you’re under a magnifying glass.

Here’s the rub: of the many quirks I have discovered about Wellington, one is that they do not seem to believe in window screens.

(It’s actually not much of a Wellington-specific quirk. It turns out that’s the case in a lot of the world outside of North America.)

Even believing in properly functioning windows is a bit of a hit-or-miss endeavor from house to house here. The Wellington region is notorious for not-so-well insulated homes, which perhaps seems moot given the ideal temperature range. However, that doesn’t take into account moisture. When we were shopping for a rental it was impressed upon us to search for houses with double-paned glass windows that seemed to adequately seal. Of the over-a-dozen houses we saw, I’d say only three or four fit the bill.

Yet, even in the most beautiful, modern home with thick, well-sealed windows, you are 99.9% likely to discover that not a single window or door in the house has a screen. In fact, they probably couldn’t even fit a screen, since windows here are frequently massive casements half as tall as me or multi-part horizontal sliding doors that might open an entire wall.

I find it completely puzzling. As someone who grew up owning cats (and, at one point, a bird), you could not possibly leave a window open more than a crack or else they would find their way out! Plus, who knows what kind of dastardly squirrels and scuzzy pigeons would find their way in. Which is not to mention that screens gave your windows some minor illusion of providing security for your house even when they were open.

We don’t have pets here, there are no squirrels, and I don’t think the rate of crime is anything like Philly. Of course, there are still bugs. Even as I’ve typed this post I’ve already squashed two, chased out a third, and swatted at a fourth. [Read more…] about creature comforts / window screens

we are all prey here

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On Monday, EV6 and I stood peering into a display case of taxidermied animals. Mammals, mostly. They ranged in size from a tiny stoat to a massive antlered deer.

These animals had been introduced to New Zealand from afar. Some were brought here as game. Others were stowaways or escaped domestic companions. Many of them shared the same fate: overabundance that had to be put in check by rigorous extermination processes.

It’s not that they all bred as swiftly as rabbits. It also that there is no natural predator for these animals in New Zealand, a land mass whose only true native mammal is the bat. The bats could conveniently fly here, along with birds, which are plentiful. (There are also a handful of lizards, which presumably evolved from some other thing entirely.)

EV6 reminds me of this every time we visit Zealandia, a wildlife sanctuary near town. It is surrounded by miles of fence that extends down under the ground to protect the birds inside from burrowing predators and from a scooped top to prevent climbing animals from scaling it.

I reminded myself of this as I faced a shadowy trail just a few blocks from our house. It went from street level off-roading to a dense brush that left me humming tunes from Into The Woods just a minute later. As I navigated the steep decline, I considered how in Pennsylvania I would be wary of such a wooded area, concerned it might contain foxes, wolves, or bears herded there by development on all sides.

Or muggers. We have plenty of those in Pennsylvania, too.

As I checked my anxiety and set foot into the trail, I thought about recommending it to E, who might also enjoy the walk through nature. Then I chastised myself. I might have crossed off all my concerns with predators both human and otherwise, but a woman can’t ever do that in a place where there are also men present. The trail was close confines – you couldn’t even pass another person without brushing against them. Even without reports of a spate of rapes along an isolated trail, any man could initiate an assault.

I have that same mistrust of men, but not that same fear. In my younger years of being readily misgendered due to my willowy figure and long hair I endured catcalls and sexual assaults on the bus. Still later, I’ve winced past men yelling from their cars that I ought to get the switch out of my walk or stop wearing jeans so tight or they would beat it out of me.

Rightfully or not, in New Zealand I wasn’t concerned. I’m not still too afraid of those encounters to jog down a relatively isolated trail where I might meet one or two men. Yet, I still tense up when I pass by any assembled group of masculine-presenting men. There’s a reason I won’t play any sports or watch them in a bar. I’d never be able to turn off my anxiety.

It’s not just the actual presence of a predator that stops you from doing things. It’s the credible threat of being their prey.

I couldn’t help but reflect on how that relates to the current spate of reports of sexual harassment and assault across a wide array of professions, but focused in the media and politics. For every victim of assault, I wonder how many more were prevented by the culture from reaching the natural apex of their career, and how many beyond that simply never started.

I marvel at how much our culture has been shaped by the entertainment and law emerging from a population of men so disproportionately packed with predators. Around the world, predators are literally shaping the way we think about and interact with the world.

In New Zealand they do anything they can to reduce the alien animal populations that pose a threat to native flora and fauna. To a bird, it’s the only home they’ve known, and many have evolved past having natural defense mechanisms. Some don’t even fly! Why should they bother on an island where nothing roams the land to threaten them.

To a cat or a stoat, it’s an island full of prey. To a bulky red deer, there is nothing to threaten them. New Zealand builds fences to keep these animals out and has special hunting seasons to thin them out.

I continued on my way through the winding trail. It intermittently gave me breathtaking views of the harbor from a perch on the cliffs high above the highway. At its terminus, it deposited me so far below the elevation of our house that I could barely clamber back up the paved streets to return, let alone reverse and trace my path back up the trail.

I’d be in no shape to confront a fox, a wolf, or a bear, and probably not a mugger, either. I could barely put one foot in front of the other.

The journey was challenging enough without any predators along the way.

Beige Friday

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I think today might represent the most remarkable cultural difference we’ve experienced so far in our three months of living in Wellington.

What’s so remarkable? That today is completely unremarkable, aside from the stunning weather.

Of course, living in the states, this day is Black Friday – a day (and term) invented in Philadelphia. A day that’s ostensibly about the convenience of so many people having off (unless they work retail), but has metastasized into 30hrs of capitalist frenzy to get rock bottom prices on things you may or may not have any practical use for in your life or budget to buy but suddenly must acquire because Christmas or something.

I tended to batten down the hatches on Black Friday and keep them sealed until the entire Christmas shopping season has passed. Why risk going anywhere and getting sucked into the capitalist vortex of deal-seeking shoppers?

Here in New Zealand, Black Friday is just another Friday, owing in part to the fourth Thursday in November simply being the fourth Thursday in November. Today is still Black Friday in the sense that US holidays completely pervade the world calendar thanks to the hegemonic force of their culture.

Shopping on Black Friday is a thing here, but there are few readily visible indications of that. It comes with only a modest sales uptick on the order of 30% over the previous week, which owes at least in part to the fact that the majority people are actually at work here on this utterly normal, beautiful day.

With the lack of a push behind the retail holiday, there’s also a commensurate lack of a sense of the holiday season having suddenly begun. Christmas decorations haven’t suddenly appeared in every business and on every house’s facade.

There are other, trickle-down effects of not having Thanksgiving and Black Friday to kick off the official holiday season. Here, Christmas retail kicked off on November 1st with relatively little fuss. I would say, “the day after Halloween,” but that’s also not really a thing here. Our nearest neighbor advised us that if EV6 dressed up they would find some candy to give her, but no one else in the neighborhood would have any.

That’s not just our neighborhood. We were out and about for the day and did not witness a single costume and nary a pop-up shop in the preceding weeks. Despite being an ostensible global holiday, Halloween is uncelebrated enough by Kiwis that each year there are Very Serious articles written about Trick-or-Treating and if it should be embraced or rejected.

(From the rejected side of the debate: “it is a repugnant excuse of a holiday, dripping in slimy American commercialisation.”)

(Seriously, I like it here so much.)

Even as someone who doesn’t personally partake in Black Friday or Halloween, their effective cultural absence leads to a queer void in my perception of passing time. Sure, the nationwide NZ Secret Santa began on November 6th, but without the unavoidable drumbeat of those twin poles of autumnal capitalist frenzy I hardly believe the end of the year is approaching – which isn’t aided by the fact that today is the most gorgeous one we’ve seen in three months of living here.

The cumulative effect is that I find that I’m not dreading December here the way I did in the states. Yes, I’m sure people will be busy with holiday plans and parties. Christmas on the beach is a thing; after all, it will be summer here. There’s simply not the sense of stepping out of Thanksgiving to fall into a month-long unrelenting blizzard of blaring holiday music about Santa and snow.

Black Friday might bear all of that weight back in the states, but here it is jut another day.