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.

March 12, 2003 by krisis

I’m having trouble deciding what i feel about anything except for sitting holed up in my room protected by womb of thick walls and loud music. Yesterday on my way home from class i walked a block out my way – out of boredom, i guess. I had never been on it on foot before, just in a car passing by. The feeling was indescribable, as if i had stepped off of my front porch and onto the set of a television show (because i had never seen that block before except for through the glass of a window/screen).

I think that sometimes Elise feels bad that i don’t write so many songs anymore, as if it’s her fault. It guess it is a little bit, because i am happy and not creating stupid scenarios in my head to connect me to every person that i pass by on the street out of utter desperation to be a part of someone else’s day. It’s confusing to look at the entries in my little grey book from a year ago, while Elise was still new and confusing enough to evoke my typical lyrical ramblings. At a point not too far after that there is a disconnect, and suddenly i am not writing out of my gut anymore, from where my songs used to spring covered in bile and blood. Every time Elise gets used to me not having anything new to sing at all i surprise her, the other night with four new songs that she had never even heard a hint of before. They make me uneasy — i have trouble feeling them and so they are hard to sing.

I have thirty four weeks of college left after i complete my last co-operative learning experience this summer. I said a funny thing last night to Erika about that. I said that i wasn’t returning my mother’s phone calls because she would have to get used to not hearing from me and being worried once i left Philadelphia. I talk a lot about what i may or may not do after i graduate, everything from going abroad to going to grad school, and usually it has an air of fantasy and speculation about it. Last night, though, i said it without thinking. It felt like singing one of my old songs, half diaphragmatic support and half a punch in the gut. I don’t know where i’m going to go, or what i’m going to do, but apparently it’s not going to be here.

Or so i say. But, for as many streets there are in this city that can make me feel alien there are other cities on this planet that i’ll never see. I really ought to start working on that.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/03/90595788/

February 25, 2003 by krisis

I never know what’s going on in my apartment.

There are four of us, spending all of our time alternatingly at work, in class, with our significant others, or on stage. The odds that more than two of us will ever be here at the same time are dwarfed by the odds that the apartment will be empty when one of us arrives.

The way i figure it, you and your college roommates would have to be absolute dweebs for this not to be the case. “Dweebs,” for sure, because the four of us are definitely geeks, so i had to find a word that had more of a “shut-in” connotation.

It’s not hard to spend nearly three quarters of your typical waking hours outside of your collegiate abode; it’s not like we do it intentionally. In fact, occasionally going days at a time without re-entering it really isn’t a challenge — especially when you’re dating someone with their own apartment.

What starts to occur is that, with so many lengthy departures, your home can hold something unusual for you upon your return. Different. It can be full of surprises. And, though these surprises might prove alarming at first, as the length of your residence increases the unusual circumstances that you find yourself entering into become less and less alarming.

Rearranged or missing furniture should not phase you, nor should strangers reclining on said furniture (even if they are the only people presently in your house). The appearance or disappearance of drastically large amounts of any kitchen items, including actual food or liquor, should be duly noted but not unduly fretted over. Finding a sign on your front door that proclaims “Ring hard and often; cover $5” should only bother you if you do not have a doorbell. You should expect to find large new appliances, game / home-theatre systems, or piles of laundry more often than not. You should strive to exhibit no surprise upon the emergence unexpected or unwelcome people from your roommates’ bedrooms. If any of your personal effects seem to be lost or missing, even from your own room or bathroom area, you should allow ample time for them to be returned or replaced before entering a period of mourning.

Then there are the notes. Even in this technologically advanced age, notes are the most effective form of roommate to roommate conversation. Why? You can blow off an email, but there is only so long that you can profess to ignore something that is affixed to your doorknob, disco ball, toilet-lid, television screen, Brita pitcher, or bedroom door. Additionally, you should learn to anticipate what will at first seem like non-sequitir content in said notes, which will eventually bloom to make a terrifying amount of sense once you put the correct context in place, as in the only vaguely exaggerated examples that follow:

Please extinguish your own toaster fires.

Do not poke at the holes in the bathroom ceiling.

For your own safety do not open the closet door until Animal Control arrives.

You have 24 hours to return all dinnerware to the kitchen before a fine goes into effect.

and, a personal favorite excerpted from Elise’s house:

Dear tenants … I am leaving the country to serve in the Isreali army, hopefully to return in March … These are the best years of your life; make sure to have fun every day … Signed: Your Landlord.

College… it’s an adventure.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/02/390367882/

February 24, 2003 by krisis

Coolness

Meet Ariel Meadow Stallings. She is a blogger of some note and repute, but i really only know her as a commenter on Little Yellow Different. Apparently, she’s also an occasional contributor to the (now defunct?) Shift magazine, which i had never even heard of before today. Her latest contribution was an article about small-time blogger Helen-Jane, who was hired (yes, hired) to blog on the behalf of a movie starring real famous people!

How, you ask, did a little-known blogger get flown across the country to do such high-profile weblogging? Simple: star on Ernie Hsuing‘s reality-based Blind Date Blog this past year, which i ostensibly served as a color commenter on, along with Cyan Pictures president Josh Newman. That makes Helen and i both alum of the same fantastic blog empire! So, theoretically i connect to Helen-Jane here. However, let’s keep moving…

The movie, I Love Your Work, stars Christina Ricci, Vince Vaughn, Jason Lee, and Elvis Costello. The index page of its website, to my vague disbelief, is literally Helen-Jane’s daily log from the set (which is also covered in this Salon article). The move site provides a link to Helen’s personal webpage and there, in her top-left-sidebar box she highlights what she is currently “listening to.” And, what, you ask, is she listening to?

None other than Peter Mulvey, my personal favorite folk-rock hero and my mainstay musical influence — not to mention being one of the few people on earth who owns both of my demo cds as well as occasionally talking to me from on-stage about his bottom-end. So to speak.

The internet: a small damn world afterall.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/02/90368335/

February 24, 2003 by krisis

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/

February 15, 2003 by krisis

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/