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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Man, blogger eats one witty post and i’m dead in the water for over a week. If it makes you feel any better, it wasn’t too witty… just something about Friends, urination, and Ghandi. I mean, honestly, whatever you just imagined the post to be was probably just as funny as the erstwhile real thing.


This weekend i worked an event called Scholars Days, which are the point in the admissions process when the middling-to-exceptionally smart applicants get dressed up in order to impress the faculty members who will contribute to deciding how big each scholarship will be. Exciting stuff. I remember when i came to campus for my interview i was completely miserable, soaking wet, and skeptical that i would even pass by Drexel’s campus on the street again let alone attend. So, i find working this event to be implicitly ironic.

In case you were wondering, student employees are all but invisible on Scholar’s Days. Students are either too miserable or too nervous to want to talk to us, and parents are either too overwhelmed or too well-trained as stage-mothers to listen to our incredibly valid opinions about the campus. As a result, i basically spent ten hours of my (well-paid) life alternately reading and crowd-watching.

My favorite iteration of the latter is definitely making up stories about all of the students i catch a glimpse of. This activity keeps me blithely entertained and also allows me the illusion of attentiveness. The Gimme Round tends to involve identifying the chronic pot smokers and the never-been-kissed crowd; not especially challenging. Next i move on to identifying those who have competed in science fairs, guessing at what their project was for bonus point. Afterwards, if it’s not a liberal arts day, i play “Trekkie or Comic Book Fan?” Even more tricky is trying to decide who is questioning their sexuality, closely followed by who is definitely not questioning their sexuality (though maybe they should be). And, finally, in what i like to think of as the lightening round, i contemplate who will join the theatre (we tend to be rather intelligent, on the whole) and, subsequently, who will spend their first cast party sucking face with one of the cast members of our current play How To Save The World (or The Play Big Business Doesn’t Want You To See).

If only i could get together a panel of my peers and a tiny buzzer i think Scholars Days would go by much faster. As it was i had to convince Aim to have a Corona and some wings with me afterwards to salvage the weekend at all.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/02/390367579/

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I can’t imagine when it was, as i hardly ever watch television, but i definitely have a recollection of channel-surfing past a Richard Simmons Sweating to the Oldies advertisement and remarking to Elise that i ought to buy it. Why? Because i would be a lot more likely to dance around in my living room like an idiot then do, say, ten pushups a day.


She doubted me at the time, but had she seen the solid gold dancing i’ve got going to the Chicago soundtrack right now i think she might… erm… well, she’d say i was gay.


Right. But, what’s important is she loves me.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/02/90328381/

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Winter turns me into something of a lardass; it feels as though i have been steadily gaining several pounds a week. I personally like to think of it as a protective layer of flubber combined with an appreciation of fine dining, but flub is flub. However, after many weeks of intense practice i believe i could competetively run the two block Walnut street dash to board a moving SEPTA bus.

I would surely win.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/02/90282047/

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The week that i moved into my first apartment was also the only week i’ve ever owned a cell phone. Actually, it was on loan from Drexel as part of my employment as a peer leader. Only two and a half years later and all that i can remember is working long days in our tiny cloistered room in The Armory, after which i would take a short but exhilarating walk back to my new home. Short to the tune of seven blocks, but exhilarating because it carried me off of the Drexel campus map and onto poorly lit residential streets that were known to host such threats as maliciously drunk frat-boys and the very occasional mugger.

In the beginning i would get so tense walking home from work that i would nervously finger the nine key on my company phone, as i had it set to speed dial the police. At the time i was new to the feeling of my own keys in my hand, and could not help but finger them constantly while my other hand readied for action, especially when i turned up the always-dark thirty-sixth street from Powelton. And, though I always tell prospective students that i’ve never been harassed or mugged for a reason i have the distinct feeling that neither my shiny new keys and tightly-clutched phone were that reason.

Walking down Walnut street tonight with Elise’s cell phone in my hand recalled the experience for just a moment, blogged-about but forgotten in the interim. Of course, now i am thrust into what actually qualifies as West Philadelphia rather than blocks of expensive double homes, and i am now typically as oblivious to any potential dangers the streets hold in store for me as i was trigger-happy on the nine button back in the day.

Oddly, i felt strangely alone out on the street — somehow totally out of place, as if i was being blue-screened onto a city block from the safety of a comfortably heated studio. As if a digital jaws or T-rex could snap me up as i rounded a corner, represented by your common Philly street thug. Or, you know, an actual screen-monster approximately as threatening.

Tonight was literally the first time i had a cell phone in my personal possession for more than a minute or two since those tense walks home in 2000; Elise had given me hers so i could call her to consult on Ben & Jerry’s flavors, but as the neon sign of the convenience store disappeared behind the slope of Walnut street i found the phone at my ear. Elise just a speed dial button away; I wouldn’t call her just because i was afraid, though. No, of course not.

What i would do, though, is have an embarrassingly loud one-sided conversation about themes of materialism and submissiveness in Moulin Rouge as they relate to modern feminism. Not exactly guaranteed to scare away muggers, but i suppose i was hoping to portray that any startled girly screams in the middle of such a heated debate would be construed as distress calls rather than me conceding that Nicole’s tuberculosis had nothing to do with damning her character as soon as she became more than a high class hussy.

But, really, i hated that movie.

When i finally reached my own corner the phone was still pressed to my ear with Elise only a hot key away, and i felt confident enough to finally relax my death grip on her tiny Motorola. However, it was then that i saw it.

A cat — my first assumption; fair, i think. It wasn’t as big as Elise’s dreadnought-sized house felines, but not unreasonable for a feisty-but-underfed outdoor tom. Upon a second glance i saw that the tail wasn’t right… not high and wagging like a cat’s. Not even right for being a bit damp and put out. In fact, more like outrightly straight, and tapered near the end. Not especially fluffy.

As i got closer the silhouette of its face began to resolve so that i could make out out not an adorable button of a kitty nose, but a snout. Yes, definitely a snout. At this point i upgraded my estimate from stray to opossum, although i had no guesses as to what an opossum would be doing wandering around on Walnut street at this time of year. Or any time of year.

At this juncture i idly pressed the call button on the cell so as to share my speculation with Elise. I had only gotten halfway into what i’m sure was a very clever introductory sentence about the migratory patterns of opossum when my quarry turned to face me and i discovered that it was not a cat, opossum, or even a deformed pan-handler. No, none of the above, not by any stretch of my overstimulated and sleep-deprived imagination.

Indeed, it was a rat. A rat that had grown so large that even seeing it full on i was tempted to believe it was a mutated house cat. Let me put that into perspective for you: big enough that it cannot be obscured by a single car tire; too menacing to beat to death with a flip-flop; large enough that it immediately evoked a fire-swamp joke after i was done screaming like a little girl at the top of my lungs at one thirty in the morning in the middle of a deserted West Philadelphia street.

I’m not sure if that scared away the muggers or attracted them.

The ROUS continued to stare me down while Elise casually dismissed my peril — i took her hanging up on me as an implicit refusal to rush down the stairs to arm me with a burning torch, large steak knife, or can of disinfectant lysol.

There we stood: girly boy desperately clutching a cell phone and two pints of Ben & Jerry’s and rodent … rodent and girly boy desperately clutching a cell phone and two pints of Ben & Jerry’s and rodent. After a bone-chilling minute where i thought i would be forced to lob a pint of Coffee Heath Bar Crunch at the thing’s head, it nobly retreated to the barely sufficient cover of an Accord tire so that i could breathless dart past it. My keys now added to the list of precious cargo clutched tightly to my chest, i was more urgently tense during those fleeting moments of escape than i ever was three years ago on the front stoop of my apartment building.

Moral: Cell phones cannot protect you from everything. At least, not unless you have the speed dial for Animal Control directly between the one for your unsympathetic girlfriend and 911.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/02/90266022/

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No, i will not do my reading on Modernity, or write five-hundred words about globalization in India without ultilizing the passive voice. I will do anything but. I will read every Metafilter post, complete with comments, from the last three days. I will floss my teeth, eat ramen, and then floss my teeth again — i like to think of it as an empirical study on ramen deposits in college students. Afterwards, I will aimlessly stare off into space while intermittently checking to see if i have any new email, because i would rather do anything but school between tomorrow and September, let alone now. And, let’s not even begin to mention the nine thirty communications class where, in the last session, my professor read out of the book FOR AN HOUR after making feeble attempts to evoke discussion from his dazed classroom of crusty-eyed twenty-somethings. Let’s face facts: I cannot communicate in a classroom setting before ten-thirty. It’s the gods’ honest truth; i’ve never received an A in a collegiate course that began before ten. And, well, now that i am a surly and jaded senior, may the gods be with you if you try to teach me how to communicate, study communication, or evaluate communication at any point earlier than that.

As for that “I’m so smart, i’m going to graduate with honors and go to a spiffy grad school” riff i was on last semester, it seems to be losing ground to the “Stuff my face with wild animal abandon whenever i get bored in an attempt to gain 20% of my body-weight before finals week” initiative and the “Who needs coursework when i have the Vagina Monologues? And who needs the Vagina Monologues when i can idly fuck with my website all day!” movement.

Last night i had a dream where i had graduated from college and all i could do was sob — because i had suddenly realized how much the worth of my life increased when accompanied by a silly little piece of paper. And five years of vaguely applicable torture, sometimes occurring at times when not even torture should be inflicted on a college student. Let alone theories of communications research.

Me? Frazzled?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/01/90253010/