Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

krisis

Krisis has been creating Crushing Krisis since 2000, writing songs since 1996, and reading comics since 1991. He is a Customer Success and Digital Brand Strategy executive, serial organizer, parent, and feminist, among other things. Based in Philly through 2017, he now resides in Wellington, NZ.

Two & 1/2

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New Jersey, as much as I claim to detest it, always makes me think. I think in the mall, of the impact of prominent stores and brands on suburban buying patterns. I think on the roads, of the effect of weakly distributed mass transit on social networks in teens under the legal age to drive. I think at the concert, of the development of garage bands in a vacuum of live performances by national acts.

I think in New Jersey because there is not much else for me to do. I bring up their Governor repeatedly, hoping for some intriguing revelation, but I seem to know more about the story than anyone I talk to. Just wait, I said on Friday, until more news about Cipel breaks. He was imported from Isreal. You’ll see.

In the car driving down some street I still don’t recognize, even though I’ve been there with Elise dozens of times now, these thoughts are hurtling through my head. I palm my cell phone, nervously flicking the antenna up and down. Should I make a phone post? What if these thoughts escape, evaporate, never to be heard from again? I should call, call up and talk them out, but then we are at the bakery, getting out, and I am reveling in the .75$ muffins and how we can buy a heaping breakfast of pastries for four for less than $10.

I think in the parking lot, of cost of living and if it correlates at all to population density.

There was a point in time when all I did was sit at the computer, and back then every thought I had made it onto the page. I thought about q-tips. I thought about music. I thought about love. Eventually, I got out of the house more. Saw more. Did more. Wrote less. Looking back over those weeks and months, I feel disconnected from my life, so easy to chart from those earlier, more frequent entries. I chime in about class or work, but what was I feeling? What was I thinking?

Last night I think in the living room, of what I am doing with myself, and how I will remember it.

I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

After These Messages….

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Aaaaaand, we’re back!

When Lisa emailed me at work on Monday to tell me Crushing Krisis was down, I thought that my host might just be having a server hiccup (as all hosts are wont to do, from time to time). However, navigating to the domain informed me that my site registration was up, and that I needed to shell out to continue to live at this virtual address.

I always forget that this happens at the beginning of August because CK.com officially launched on August 26, 2001, the first birthday of Crushing Krisis as blog. And, forgettfullness or not, I went into a cold sweat when I saw the Dotster screen come up. My registration had expired? Could someone else register it?

We are our identities, and so the things that we identify with are almost more important to our sense of self than what other’s perceive about us. This is me.

Brains Dribbling Out From Between My Teeth

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I have become a whistler. I’m not sure how it happened, really. I don’t whistle especially well.

Certain songs tend to earworm their way into my brain, leaving me unable to stop whistling them (and variations upon) for the duration of the day. This is especially true when I’m walking from my desk to the printer, or at home when I walk from my desk to the refridgerator.

The tunes are mostly standards: Yankee Doodle, Old Susanna, the theme from Star Wars. However, I occasionally throw together a medley, my favorite so far being “Movie Tunes of the 30s, 40s, and 90s,” which included a terrific seugeway from Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited” to a Judy Garland Overture, complete with key-change.

Elise has deemed my new habit completely unacceptable to the point that she seemed to be delighted when I spent half an hour playing major scales on my guitar last night – a practice whose duration is typically frowned upon. Honestly, I find my new habit unacceptable too… the sort of aimless, pointless, eccentric thing that makes me wonder at the intelligence of the person doing it. Couldn’t they expend all that lip-pursing effort lost in thought, or some other silent activity.

Of course, now I understand: it’s a 9-to-5ism. Hopefully an isolated one, because if i get to the point where i hum the same note over an over again for six minutes at a time like the woman on the other side of my cubicle wall i think my head will explode from the dissonance between the habit and my complete and utter contemptual annoyance with it.

Only A Test

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Fire drills bring out interesting aspects of people.

The opening of my cubicle directly faces one of two fire exits on our floor. During yesterday’s fire drill, I felt as if I was entertaining – there were dozens of associates clustered around my desk, awaiting word from the droning alarm system that we could return to our desks, rather than flee in terror down the stairs. I felt as though I should be whipping hor’deurves, as if fresh from the oven, out of my file drawer.

A heavy-set woman with dazzlingly long curly hair, who I did not recognize, leaned against the wall across from my cubicle. “Probably another drill,” she sighed in my direction. “I hope they don’t make us take the stairs.”

We are three dozen stories above the ground.

A woman’s voice broke into the pre-recorded pre-alarm alert that was droning over the loudspeakers; “We are investigating the cause of alarm. Please remain at your fire exit.”

Associates continued to queue up for the fire door, leaving the sighing woman at the front of the line. She turned, to address her queue: “Did you hear her? She sounded nervous.”

I turn back to my monitor to clean out my inbox. Two minutes of pre-recorded pre-alarm alert later a man’s voice broke in, repeating the previous message to word for word.

“They wouldn’t let her get back on; she sounded nervous. Do you hear sirens in the background? I heard sirens.” The woman smiled brilliantly while fidgeting madly with her silver bracelets.

Shortly after, from the loudspeaker, “The Philadelphia Fire Dept is on scene so that we may issue an all clear.”

“You know, they sent them back to their desks from the elevator lobby in the World Trade Center.” She glance from the line, to me, and back, looking for something – assurance or agreement – in our eyes. I pointedly typed in CNN’s address, comforted by its loading (I famously was unable to load any major news services on 9/11).

Finally, over the speakers, “The Fire Dept has issued an all clear. You may return to your desks.”

Associates began to disperse, muttering, while the woman’s face brightened as if a cloud had passed away. “Does anyone want to go to the caf?”

Once again, proving that the average person tends to employ their powers of cynicism during the course of a potential emergency, but not anytime before or after. Meanwhile, yesterday’s Metro lead with a story on Smarty Jones’ premature retirement, with further revelations about possible terrorist attacks on page two. Good thing I get my revelations from the internet.

Alert: Communications Overload

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I know, I know. Don’t get married to the content. This is our mantra. You are not writing the next great American Novel. You are not Dave Eggers. It’s a letter about medical routing codes. Don’t get married to it.

I have invoked the phrase under my breath enough times that I now recall it unconsciously anytime my elegant sentences are ginsued, by associates and program directors alike. I do not flinch, because I am not married to the content.

Disconcertingly, what I have become inextricably betrothed to is the procedure. All the approval emails, final signatures, pre-flight revews – the OCDness of the whole process just turns me on. When completed in the correct order, it provides an unassailable, errorless communication. Yet, a single misstep can turn you from communications-do-gooder to a despicable piece of liability.

I do not enjoy incurring liability, so I make it a point not to miss steps. However, life is not a procedure, and sometimes things happen out of order. And, this morning, I got a little confused and let an email fly that wasn’t completely informed, and got very succinctly shredded into tiny cheddary pieces by a co-worker. Not because she doesn’t like me, not because I am a bad person, but because she didn’t like the liability I represented. I would have done the same thing to her.

And, and, would you believe that, upon reading her cool clinical rebuttal of my 9:58 am email, I felt as though I was about cry? In the past this sensation has been attributed to lack of sleep, or inadvertant overdosing on allergy medication, but today all I have to pin the blame on is my strawberry smoothie, and I drink that every day. Like a little kid who just got reprimanded by his favorite teacher, the one person I trust implicitly on the team does the same thing to me that I expect – nay, require – her to do to everyone else, and I have to go sit alone in a toilet stall and take a few deep breaths.

On one hand, oh my god, I am such a freak, no one should be a little communications perfection-monkey to the point of inducing tears for a tiny, completely repairable error. On the other hand, I like that I am emotionally invested in my otherwise somewhat clinical occupation, that I can get tied up in language edits and approval processes, and actually feel proud when I do something right (and, conversely, feel utterly crushed when I do it wrong).

Where’s that balance? I do not want to be the automatons that I stand on the elevators with, who do what they’re told as best as they can right up until 4:49, and then go home to do something completely else without a thought of what they left behind. But, I don’t want to be here until seven o’clock for the rest of my life for a myriad of reasons, including that I don’t want to be here for the rest of my life, and that staying two extra hours a day effectively lowers my wage by nearly a third.

Am I just too detail-obsessed to work somewhere where detail obsession is an encouraged trait, sending me into a spiral of minutia-examining doubt on every email I send? Or, is that I am supposed to be doing something that I am truly in love with, rather than something I just geek out about?

Or do I maybe just need to leave the building during my lunch-break a little more often?