Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
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.
by krisis
I’m happy to report that the ever-popular summer West Philly guessing game “Gunshots or Fireworks” (and it’s inevitable winter counterpart “Guns Firing or Cars Backfiring”) has now inhereted a new plausible answer: Elise sneaking out of the bedroom to make popcorn.
You’d think that i’d eventually get better at a game i’ve been playing since age four.
by krisis
Some random stuff.
Boy, does this site render weird in FireFox. Not bad-weird, just weird. Gotta look into that now that i’ve finally ditched IE in my mad retreat from the neverending CoolWeb inhabitation of my computer.
So, cast-iron stomach aside, i got sick. Sick to the tune of using a SEL day and lying on the tiled bathroom floor at 4am vaguely twitching as to try to distract myself from being sick. It was not a good scene. Luckily, mom is just a numeric page away, and she generally arrives bearing legal narcotics. I swear, it’s worth sending a member of your family to nursing school just so you know you won’t kill yourself over a stomach flu.
Note that this ended my Seinfeldian abstanation from fever-induced nausea. Damnit. By the way, did you know that fear of vomiting is called emetophobia? [cue “The More You Know” theme].
If you’re a LiveJournal user, you can now subscribe my RSS-feed to your Friends list. As Blogger doesn’t allow formatting of our RSS feeds, i don’t think there’s a way to make the permalinks in my RSS feed point to the real homes of my posts, rather than the bastardized version they currently lead to. Click through to see what i mean. Advice, as always, is appreciated. b2Evolution, a fantastic and easily installed MoveableType alternative, is looking more attractive EVERY DAY (but i’ve always been a fan of having the place i post and the place my posts post be two difference places, for redundancies sake. Did that make any sense?).
Shafted is still alive. Approximately three of my known readers understand the relevance of this fact. It has nothing to do with “Shaft, The Drexel.”
I have bought eight new CDs in the last 10 days. I am still formulating opinions on them, but here’s quick rundown, from best to worst (with comments, if you care):
Lisa Loeb, The Way It Really Is //
Butterfly Boucher, Flutterby //
Mike Kovacs, Writing On Water (Part II) //
Heart, Dreamboat Annie / Little Queen //
The Honorary Title, Anything Else But The Truth //
Rilo Kiley, More Adventurous.
There you have it: errata.
by krisis
Good lord.
If I call technology support with a simple question – say, that my QuickLaunch bar disappeared and I can’t get it back because I’m not an administrator on my machine – why don’t I have it back after three days and seven phones calls? Why? Why is it that they can’t figure out what to do even after calling in their co-workers on conference for assistance? Why, after I research the answer and subsequently TELL THEM HOW TO DO IT because I know more about computers than they do, can’t they can’t figure it out still? What am I supposed to do?
Maybe if I were to unplug my network connection after they remotely logged into my machine I could surreptitiously fix my settings and then plug back in before they’re any the wiser? Hmm.
(I’ll never understand why IT people make so much money. Good IT people deserve it, but the only good ones I’ve ever met have been my friends at Drexel.)
In other news, it seems as though Blogger altered the longstanding variable “BlogItemUrl” to display a full domain url rather than just a file name with a target attached, thus breaking every single permalink from the past four years. That’s 2500+ permalinks. I had to have an emergency template-editing session in the middle of the day so that you can obsessively link all of my highly entertaining writing from your own pages. So, yeah.
Meanwhile, my department is dropping like flies. One of my coworkers left the office in the middle of the day yesterday so suddenly sick that she literally had to bring a trash bag for her cab ride home. Then, this morning, two more people had to go home before our morning meeting was even underway, with a third turned a color so yellow that I think he may have developed jaundice overnight.
That’s a fifth of our entire department! I refuse to catch their sickness; I haven’t involuntarily thrown up for a reason other than alcohol consumption since middle school. Rest assured, my OCD is in high gear today – I typically treat every surface in the office as if it was thinly coated in poop anyhow, but today I have expanded that distinction to include fellow associates and added the additional precaution of wearing an imaginary fencing mask, so that I am unable to touch my hands or any office supply to any area near me face. And I still feel queasy; damn placebo effect.
Maybe it’s ebola or something, and I’ll prove to be resistant due to my iron-clad stomach, and after everyone dies I can sneak down to tech support and fix my damned Start bar.
by krisis
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.
by krisis
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.