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.

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When was it that i learned how to tuck the corners in so deftly? This is the first year that i’ve been good enough to warrant the question; the first time that i haven’t hollered frantically for Erika to hold down the folds for me while i taped them. I remember how i used to do it not so long ago, wrapping paper around and around a box and then practically fashioning a bow out of scotch tape to hold it all down. I hated wrapping, and i hated wrapped presented. I told my mother not to bother; “Why use all that time and paper,” i said, “just so i can rip it open?”

When did i start to thrill in surprise? High school’s last Christmas Anastasia and i sat on her floor with empty shoe-boxes and packages of tissue paper trying to decide how to best obscure our killer compact discs. I taped mine down in a goloshes box and covered it with layers of tissue while she created a protective exoskelton to protect the tell-tale shape of her jewel case. Still that mass of paper, still that scotch tape bow, but i understood something about the thrill of surprise; it wasn’t enough just to buy, but to keep guessing until the last possible second.

When did i make it my own? Last Christmas i got a few excellent gifts, but i was more intent on giving. Elise helped me hunt down a wonderful list of bottle stops, DVD players, chess sets, Dr. Seuss Books, and Guiness playing cards in a whirlwind weekend while i slowly amassed her own pile of presents solo. I shopped fearlessly into late December not because i was fearless, but because i was no longer celebrating the same holiday as the people in the line in front of me. When all was said and done i had re-charged half of my credit card, but i was too happy doing it to stop. Christmas had finally stopped being a season, or an obligation — it was an excuse to give something to some of the people that i loved the most.

I almost forgot that this year, creating invisible, impractical, self-imposed timelines and deadlines for myself. Yet, as i lined up the pattern on the wrapping paper so perfectly a few minutes ago, as i cut out my own inventive little gift tags and wrote in the cards, i realized that i have come all the way around: from understanding the joy of surprise, to understanding the joy of the season, to understanding the joy of creating the surprise.

I will never submit myself to the Christmas celebrated by the people i stand in line with at the cash register. It isn’t about their idea, or my idea, or the cash register. It’s about liking the giving so much that you hardly care about what you get in return. It’s about liking it so much that you let it creep into March and September, buying things just because, so that when you look down your list sometimes you can say “i already gave them the perfect gift.”

But, it isn’t about my idea, and you’re giving me an excellent gift right now. Here’s to hoping your ideas are working out just as perfectly.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/12/107216091026681200/

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I don’t know why drinking always seems like such an attractive thing. I don’t like it, really. I guess there’s just something about being twenty-something and metropolitan and going to a bar that makes me feel like i’m having fun. But, after five rounds of mixed drinks and more hours worth of pay than i’d really like to contemplate right now, last night it occurred to me how silly and meaningless it was — doing something i don’t like with people that i do so that we can laugh and have fun, except we laugh and have fun anyhow, whether or not i’m on my third long island.

I don’t think i need to stop drinking, i just think i need to be honest about what it does (and doesn’t) represent. It represents a childhood of watching Cheers, having my family tempt me with shots of liqueur at Christmas, of watching Karen martini-in-hand on Will & Grace. It represents commercials and advertisements telling me liquor is fun and worthwhile. It does not represent happiness, or success, or friendship, or anything other than getting more and more willing to do more and more unlikely things as the evening wears on.

I had fun last night, and wouldn’t trade the hilarity i had with my friends for anything. However, next time i wouldn’t mind saving my money, avoiding the embarrassing phone messages left at two in the morning, skipping the part where i fall on the street and rip my favorite pair of jeans, and leaving out the bit where Elise is so frustrated with me that she just goes home.

Also, sleeping off the hangover, though not entirely unpleasant, kept me out of work long enough that i could have made up my bar tab and then some. Damnit.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/12/107177270727860385/

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As i stepped out of my room this morning i was reminded of Christmas; how when i was little i would always wake up before my mother to that strange stillness of the outside world, house staffed only by the tree awaiting me expectantly with gifts below.

Here, of course, it is the opposite — i wake up late to emerge into the stillness of all of my roommates gone to class or to work, and there is nothing waiting for me at all in their absence. It still feels like Christmas morning, though, so silent up here in the attic, especially with the glow of the lights Gina and i strung across the ceiling last December.

Once when i was little i woke up before my mother and, upon descending our creaky wooden stairs into the still air of our parlor, opened all of my gifts without waiting for her. I simply didn’t understand why she would care to see me open them — she knew what was inside them all already.

When she finally came down the stairs I couldn’t seem to do anything to stop her from crying, and all I kept saying was “i’ll put them back … you can take them back,” not understanding that what she was upset about wasn’t missing the act of me opening them, but my thrill at doing so.

I always feel like i’m one Christmas behind because of that year, stuck somehow out of synch — a year away from my family and friends as they open their gifts. I always react as hugely as i can to gifts i am given, and give to others with vigor, hoping that somehow my excitement will bridge the divide.

Maybe this is why my still apartment can remind me of Christmas, whereas mall Santas and candy canes and blow-up lawn ornaments and holiday sales only remind me of spoiled children who don’t get what Christmas is supposed to be about, just what it has become.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/12/107090342461182805/

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In comments on a MetaFilter post about Democratic Presidential hopeful Howard Dean insinuating that President Bush and his advisors had advanced warning about the 9/11 attacks, there is an interesting link to a extensively footnoted timeline of the President’s actions on the morning of September 11th. I not only admire the extensive research presented here, but am rather more apalled than usual at the picture it paints of the President — rather than implying knowledge, it would seem to actually imply that no one thought to interrupt his grade-school photo-op in order for him to act as a the Commander in Chief during the most major foreign orchestrated attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/12/107074426798247507/

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Well, my Sunday estimate of 17/30 pages done wound up being a bit of an understatement, as a week of all-nighters (and, shockingly, more than a couple wake-uppers) just concluded with the completion of an unintentionally lengthy PR paper about Dracula and his effect on Romanian tourism, which clocked in at sixteen double-spaced pages. Not monstrous, but still the third longest paper i’ve written at Drexel, and long enough to meet the class’s Grad-student length requirement even though I took it as an undergrad.

Add that to my Directing analysis and my discussion of France and the forces Globalization, plus four sundry reponse papers that Aim and I managed to dash off at the last possible second, and I come to a grand total of seven assignments, accounting for 15,329 words over 43 total pages, researched from 37 cited sources, compiled over seven days of intermittent work, including one three hour hit-n-run at Penn’s library with Erika, two separate login names to the Drexel library eResource site, and a total of over two solid days’ worth of reading and writing.

I’m tempted to go downstairs to do some shots as celebration, but i was just informed that i owe my Ethics Professor another paper by Monday. Since when can a Professor make me do a paper that I want to drop as my lowest grade? Just drop the friggin’ zero, goddamnit, I was smart enough to do well on the first two. I have half a mind to turn in a blank piece of paper; she’s from the philosphy department, maybe she’ll find me ironic. Not to mention that I have about three hundred pages of reading to do on Sunday and Monday to prepare for my PolySci final, as I skipped about three weeks of class because i found it to be insipid.

Okay, maybe just one shot…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/12/107065135367374612/