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.

XBF3

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As ex-boyfriends go, Elise has decent enough taste. After all, they were all her boyfriends once.

When I got home the other night, after a grueling 12-hour day at the office, I was met by Elise plus her most recent ex-boyfriend, who was visiting before he takes off for a semester in London.

Having never met this boy, he who had dated Elise for the year directly preceding our relationship, I spent my first fifteen minutes in the apartment satisfying my animalistic urge to mark my territory. I walked into all the rooms, picked up guitars, slid my fingers across my keyboard, and opened up a bunch of cabinets.

I felt like a bit of a gorilla.

It’s funny – meeting someone for the first time after having two and a half years and just one blurry snapshot to form your seemingly indelible mental image of them. He was smaller than I expected, and meeker, but quippier, and more charming. Half of me could see why they had been together in the ease of their interactions – movements around each other in the kitchen as if choreographed, subtle innuendo exchanged as if scripted.

Even as I witnessed this obvious synergy with half of myself, the other half wondered how it could have ever happened at all. After the quips had ended, their conversation seemed to drift into the room from somewhere far, far away as I sat quietly and played my guitar. Her personality seemed to expand to fill the room while his contracted into something more obscure. With all my introspection I perceive change in myself easily, but it took meeting this boy to see the changes in Elise, and that we have grown to complement each other.

I liked him, the ex-boyfriend, but hidden beneath our blithe conversation and my invitation for him to stay just a little longer I was ever so crushed. Crushed for snatching her away from him so quickly, and crushed that if we were ever to end I would be that boy, sitting on the same couch as her but never able to touch her again.

Um, it’s a hankerchief?

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Note to self: Take the blue, bikini, leopard-print underwear out of your work bag when you get home.

Either that, or stop pointing out that they’re not Elise’s.

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.