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.

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?

Tales of My Disaffected Youth

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I forget, sometimes, thin slices of my life, those parts that didn’t leave the most permanent marks on me. Not passing fads, or habits I grew out of, but actual commitments that simply didn’t make it into the finale resume of my personality. I was a camp counselor for four years. I was in AP Computer Programming but decided it wasn’t worth getting up early for.

In one of those lives, I was a South Street kid, wearing an array faux-leather pants, walking into stores, always looking, never buying, down at Penn’s Landing keeping watch while my friends made out in the bushes. The old graveyard where I watched them open beers on tombstones, the corner of 4th where we loitered while pretending to catch the bus, the defunct fountain that served as our later-evening headquarters – places that I still pass, but am no longer connected to. Not the way i once was.

I unexpectedly found myself on South Thursday night, cool summer air and plenty of teenagers freed from school nights perfectly setting the mood. Out of habit, I met the glances of each person I passed, only to be met with blankness. I always half-expect to see people I know there – Monica, Marissa, Susanne, Guitar Dave, Amanda who wouldn’t date me because her last two boyfriends turned out to be gay and she was afraid to continue the trend, the dumb-but-hot blonde girl that looked uncannily like Taylor Hanson – that whole crew that I could find on seemingly every street corner every Thursday or Friday or Saturday night that I dragged myself out.

There was a society, an etiquette, to our association, loose though it was. There were places that we, smartly hip South Philly denizens, could be found and other places that the more enduring, slightly gutter-punk South Street crowd would inhabit, and some places where the two intersected. I don’t know that we ever did anything, though I remember something about climbing up a statue near the Moshulu, and something else about Monica kicking a Philly Weekly box and an ensuing footchase that may have involved several disgruntled police officers. But, we never did do anything, and I think all I have to show for the sum of the experiences is a tacit allegiance to the coffee-shop across from Starbucks that would let us sit all night after we bought one round of drinks.

Being a South Street kid doesn’t last; it’s a Peter Pan world of evolving maturity and dissolving naiveté. The people I passed last night were back there, in that bliss of not knowing or caring if their nightly adventures would have any net effect on the rest of their lives. I met eyes and was looked at as a stranger rather than a member.

All those people either float away, or change into something else. Walking that street for three years was a beautiful metamorphosis, from my first time as shy in glittered pants trying to learn their names to the ends of it, surely strutting with a crowd of my new college friends, watching the familiar faces slowly float away to better things, or transform into failures, junkies.

I cannot hang out on South Street anymore. I need a mission, a get-in-get-out objective. Otherwise, I think I might just walk, aimless, misty-eyed, always looking, never buying a thing.

Caffinated Brain Disco

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No time to edit, just free-writing today.

They kept on feeding me coffee, even though they know what a bad idea it is. Caffeine hits me in pulses, strobes, contractions of my brain, spasmically birthing new thoughts. Like cocaine through a straw, I whispered to my co-worker, the next idea strobing through my brain that I might be giving her the wrong impression.

I’ve talked about caffiene before.

Today one of my projects was going well, and I broke into the twist in the middle of the aisle, a perfect combination of Travola/Thurman slow-grace/sexual-tension (with a dash of mad watusi), singing “firing on all pistons, firing on all pistons.”

I never before realized how hard this job is, until this weekend a friend of Elise’s asked me what I do, and when I told her she made a little “oh” with her mouth and asked – “Are you on the good side or the evil side?” And, it just made me think, god, all we do all day is try to make our communications come out on the good side, arguing with senior management and tweaking every sentence until I think my head will explode from the twenty drafts and two reams of paper I have gone through in the past week.

Sometimes I think everyone should have Elise’s friend ask them that question once a year. Are you a good witch, or a bad witch? Which one are you? Are you being good to yourself and evil to everyone else? The reverse? The inverse?

Sometimes I wonder if we make our own futures through the process of elimination, discarding the best fantasies we have because they might offset that good/evil balance too much.

Sometimes I close my eyes and see myself, lids as mirrors, and sometimes I see nothing.

Sometimes I really have to fucking pee after I drink so much coffee.

Self Control

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I imagine that most people, including myself on occasion, have a reflex to tell them to stop eating something before they’ve had to much, other than a gag reflex. Maybe you sense that you’ve been through a serving size. Maybe your taste-buds are feeling worn out. Maybe you just don’t want any more.

There are many foods that I have eaten too much of. I am a fan of ice cream. I eat sushi with delight. My love for scappels knows no bounds. However, at some point, I can stop eating all of these foods. However, I cannot conjure any of these reactions when it comes to popcorn. You could literally strap a feed bag of popcorn around my neck, and I would probably continue to eat it until my stomach could not contain any more.

Plain, lightly salted, heavily buttered or carmelled, I don’t know what it is, really. I can eat it at movies even after having a full dinner. At home, I occasionally eat it in lieu of dinner. When my coworkers (not realizing the inherent danger of such a purchase) goaded me into buying a bag as big as my entire torso to snack from at work, I finished it in under 48-hours.

Is this just an indication of larger impulse-control issues? Or, is popcorn my dietary kryptonite, the one food that evades all of my defenses? Do you have a food like this, or does this revelation just confirm that I am a total mutant?