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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You know, i’ve gotten really far away from posting about the simple nuances of my daily life. For example, my room is an utter mess. By now i think you should’ve figured out that everything in my life is always a mess, so it’s not as though this is a huge surprise. However, for once i’ve managed to contain my mess to my room and areas directly adjacent to it, so i can escape my room and pretend that my life is in any kind of order. But, really, it’s not. It’s a wonder i pay my bills and pass my classes. Hmm… what else about me is boring that i used to talk about… time to hit the archives…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/6976249/

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So, this is as out of order as the rest of my life right now, fittingly, because i got all the way out of New Hope and into the umpteen hundred magic cards on my bedroom floor and skipped Saturday. So, that whole thread on masturbation will have to get resolved later. So.

Saturday.

In Autumn, hardly a week goes by without a party, and having been here for three years i’ve noticed that fall quarter falls into a neatly distributed schedule of nighttime affairs. Welcome Back! for returning people, and then Welcome Freshmen! to meet new girls, and then Kegger (part 1)!, and then Halloween, Supertech, Pre-Play, Cast Party, Post-Play, et cetera ad nauseum. Yes, i am a social fucking butterfly, because i wind up at all of them one way or another. But, anyhow, this past Saturday was Supertech and so we appeared at the corresponding party already quite inebriated from hitting the house liquor from last weekend. At some point before or during the inebriation process i was informed that one of the “new girls” seems to have a little thing for men of my type, so not only was i slightly drunk, i was slightly drunk with a mission!

Point being, not only does someone quite apparently have a crush on me, but she’s, like, sorta kinda really hot. And listens to good music. And has this really hot roommate… oh, wait, didn’t i mention that i had previously declared her really hot roommate the only Freshmen worth flirting with? Such is life. But, rest assured, they’re both really hot.

Please also rest assured that i’m not pulling a Selina on you and that i am, in fact, not currently at this girl’s place blogging around the issue. Here i am, blogging in the issue, tracking it all over my easily locatable page for all to see. Blog blog blog.

So, i don’t know, if she found my portrayal of a drunken lout charming i’m apparently just her type. Heaven only knows what that’s supposed to mean. As soon as i figure it out i’ll tell you…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/6970405/

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That’s (read the last post first, silly) the encapsulated story of my life… find out about something, fall in love with it, remove it from any sort of social context, and then watch it wither and die on its lonesome. That’s how all of my crushes work too… find someone i adore, remove them from their life to insert them into mine via the insides of my head, and then watch the actuality of us wither and die because i’ve separated it out from the social soil it was once rooted in.

I never had sleep overs. I never had to share my toys or play with a second person. I never permanently traded or anted up anything to anyone in my entire life. I never learned that the whole point of having a life of my own was to share it with anyone else, and so in highschool i marched home every day to dutifully ignore my homework and read my email while other people hung out and messed around and dated and did drugs for the first time; i was my own intensive after-school program. Eventually the internet grew into its own social structure so much that i was discarding friends who i couldn’t keep up with via IM and starting to have online-only acquaintances who i looked forward to talking to. And, eventually, this happened.

I can’t really decide which is the magic card: this page, or this life. On one hand, i pour my heart and soul and free time for no kind of compensation into something that not more than a couple of hundred people see on any given day. On the other hand, i have this wonderful spark of existence that i am mostly busy keeping to myself… emotions and voice and song that i’m bored with from all the times i’ve sat through them, but that amaze other people.

Either way, i figure i am still living the life of an only child… i create my own personal fantasy where the sharing is always one-sided and shun any interruptions of it. In that respect, this page mirrors my life. The things i say are the toys that i have earmarked so carefully to be touched by other children in the sandbox while i keep Jinx and my Nightmare card secreted deep in the pockets of my memory. I am spoilt and selfish, but i do not learn. You’d think i’d know better by now than to be selfish, and i might have figured out that i like going to parties better than i like sitting and staring at the blank white box of blogger, but i apparently haven’t caught on that i have to be a real person-shaped-person here if i expect to be treated as such by an audience…. blah. sleep needs to happen now. i’ll continue this tomorrow… ! in fact…:

to be continued…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/6906529/

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Every time i see my mother she has a plastic bag for me, without fail. It always contains a potpourri potentially exploding with tissues, snack bars, cds, mail i’m still receiving at home, household items i probably won’t ever make practical use of, and any special requests i had from home. On Friday when i slid into the back seat of our car while in mid-sentence of bitching about the length of my day and not quite remembering how to tie a tie and not really being able to do anything spectacular with my hair i noticed that the normally expected plastic bag had two familiar long boxes in it, and that’s when i remember that i had asked my mother to bring my Magic Cards with her.

As a frame of reference for this you should know about my first and last experience with Magic. The latter was in Boston where Rabi‘s brother had a deck of 7th Edition cards and i played him in two games at the kitchen table while Rabi idly surfed the internet The former was at my first year as counselor in training at the good day camp, where i watched one of my camper’s older brothers play his friend in what had to be Unlimited edition. So, now that i’ve established those two floating points in space, let’s look at what’s within.

Going from seventh grade to eight grade i really didn’t have very much of anything in my life. I wasn’t especially tight with anyone from Masterman yet, and i only had Monica left over from grade school; i had no life after i got back from camp every day. That was way before I had a website, let alone a computer, and I’m honestly not sure what I did with my free time. My only hobby at that point was … um… i want to say that it was some RPG on Super Nintendo, but i think it might have actually been masturbation. We’ll just let that one lie. Anyhow, point being that Magic excited me… it was like keeping my entire army of GI Joes on tiny shufflable cards and being able to wage war against other people’s collections. I made haste in pestering my mom to buy me some cards as soon as 3rd edition saw wide release, and by Christmas of 8th grade i really did have my veritable personal army which soon included two nearly infallible decks.

The thing about infallible armies is that, no matter how infallible you claim them to be, you’ve eventually got to pit them against another army to see whether they’ll fail or not. And, being the introvert that i was, i wasn’t exactly heading out to comic shops to play other people on gaming nights. My foes were just classmates who randomly got hooked on the game, and they played by all sorts of non-conforming rules on slimy lunch-tables that my cards wouldn’t be caught dead on. So, i just kept buying cards in a vacuum, without any practical use for them. I finally stopped at Ice Age and 4th Edition, because i felt like nothing i really wanted or needed was coming out anymore. The cards went into boxes, the boxes went onto my bookshelf, and with mostly no interruption that’s where they stayed for the entirety of highschool.

And now they’re back, spread out on my floor in a fabulous array of five colors and the names of Anson Maddocks and Melissa Benson calling me back to a hobby meant for multiple partners that I somehow made just as self-contained as masturbation. As a spectacular example of an only child, I suppose that everything I did was like social masturbation, and so now all I’ve really got going for me is that I’m really good at interacting with myself and that hardly anyone else does it the way I can do it.

But, anyway, all I meant to say is that I’ve been playing Magic all night, and that I have to remember to send some cards to Rabi’s brother later this week.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/6905888/