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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Somehow today rendered my entire life empty, and i cannot explain the process of it at all.


It all started with an argument about how i really don’t like theatre despite the fact that i’m regularly involved in it, and how if it was worth something to me i would take it seriously but in reality it is just a placeholder for my being able to have people watch me based upon my own creative work and not some mere interpretation. Somehow (although in retrospect it isn’t such a leap) the conversation ballooned out into being about how i don’t like anything inside my life at all. Well, that’s what i said, even if i didn’t quite mean it. Of course, that’s a misrepresentation and i corrected it immediately: i love creation. I love to write and to compose and to sing. You’d think acting falls under that umbrella but it doesn’t… it’s just a shadow … a directed interpretation of someone elses work.


Sometimes i say that i hate everything about my life and it feels like i’m just trying to be dramatic to get attention; i know too many of those people. But, really, there are days that my life is really just a shell and all that’s inside are some tiny songs that no one ever really hears and me plugging away at my classwork trying to make a dent. A difference. Whenever i get to this place it comes down to… what is the point? And, i can tell you right now that i don’t believe there is one. Is there any point to existence as we know it? Each of us is the product of the almost-hubris of our parents … so sure of their love or lust that they created a physical product of it. And we, as that product, are trapped here and all we can do is try to keep ourselves happy, or to better the environment for anyone else who might get stuck here without much choice in the matter.


It sounds like a defeatist view, but it isn’t. I have goals, and things i enjoy doing, but when it comes right down to it there is positively no reason for me to exist – except for the effects that i have on other people’s lives. I am not the biggest fan of It’s a Wonderful Life (or, Scrooged, for the more skeptical set) and i am not so full of myself to think the world would be inherently different without me, but i recognize that i have left marks on the people that i have passed by and that i’m here for them as much as they’re here for me. So, it’s not like i’m perched on the edge of a roof … this isn’t a suicidal kind of raging depression, just a contemplative one.

Sometimes when i am in this place the only way out of it is to evaluate … what is it that i have and love and why? Tonight i am a reductionist… i have my narrative voice, and i have a handful of friends who i can honestly talk to without ever watching what i say. And, so, i told Jeff honestly that the only thing i ever enjoy is writing… how i can write 3500 words about something i love and not even notice and then reread it endlessly. The same with writing songs. Jeff is a communications major a year ahead of me, and he has already found what he wants to do with his life and he’s doing it. I think he was trying to tell me that i can’t ever get there while i’m busy torching the bridges i’ve crossed and the one’s i am on.

Jeff ultimately understands my point, but he won’t concede it: I have goals and places to be, but i am 20 and life is already over even if i get to do everything i’ve ever hoped and dreamed for. The world is the container of a finite amount of possibilities both big and small, and i don’t think any chain of events will ever make me truly happy even if you substitute in all of the right jobs and friends and lovers where there are just empty spaces right now. The only true choice that i have is to do something that will make anyone else forget about how pointless their life might be… to make them forget about everything i’ve just said – because i know it’s here and no one seems to care whether i notice it or not. My goal shouldn’t(can’t) be to go back because there isn’t any such thing; i need to move forward. In a way, i am meant to be a distraction.

Not such a bad job, really.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5943263/

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The shape of this quarter is starting to reveal itself to me… when i’ll wake up in the morning and when i’ll get home at night and when i’ll even think to spare a glance towards my computer. Yesterday my first instructor (a non-professor… my only one) assigned us what turned out to be a forty page reading assignment due for this morning, and i didn’t get done class until around nine last night. My bet is that she won’t possibly cover the latter fifteen pages of the assignment in one hour of class today, so i only read up to that point. When the instructor asked the class for a show of hands by non-business majors i was the only person to have fingers tickling the air; she assures me that i need not have taken any other business class to understand International Business Law, but i still remain skeptical.


I’m always whining about how boring and unobstructed my life and schedule typically are, but i’m starting to think that that just reflected the fact that i’ve never before in my life completed all of the work assigned to me in any one given academic subject. And, so far, i have accumulated a GPA that is just shy of the Dean’s List in the absence of any motivated effort on my part to do anything other than show up for class and write my papers. So, this semester i’m conducting an experiment … i’m taking seven courses loaded with reading and practicum skills and i’m only allowed to slack off in one of them (which has yet to be determined). So… we’ll see if working harder actually earns me a straight 4.0 or not in a matter of months, but i can tell you already that it’s not exactly doing wonders for my social life.

Thank god i don’t have much of a science requirement, that’s all i have to say about that…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5928426/

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The first day of fall on a college campus is always a memorable experience… yesterday was that in two respects: the first day of Fall while on campus, and the first day of Fall term. Freshmen were everywhere, lines for food and books were long, and i spotted nearly a hundred people i haven’t seen in months (and lamented easily another hundred that i didn’t see). I ran into Gina with former roommate Michelle and walked them to the bookstore where i had a sighting of Laurel and Ben before i was distracted by Kathe who was eventually joined by Selina, but then i had class with Karen and afterwards ran into Matt A. before headed back to class, this time with Gina. And, that was only in the span of an hour.

Sometimes you anticipate your relationships to all of these people changing, and sometimes you expect them to stay the same. Or, at least, i do. I’ve been finding out that sometimes i’m right and sometimes i’m not – sometimes in cases i didn’t really expect. Who knew that one biting comment from one of my favourite friends would leave me seething and writing a nasty song about them on the first day of having them back in my life? Who knew that someone i generally despise would put a broad smile on my face while i was walking around aimlessly? Who knew that people would change so much, or stay so much the same?

I haven’t really thought about my ‘blogging schedule’ … last year i took alternate weekdays off. Today i am headed to International Business Law, Critical Reasoning, Basic Production, and Communication Theory. We’ll see how i feel about blogging after all of that.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5903942/

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Yesterday was impossibly full… two or three different days all slipped deceptively into the packaging of one. Shopping turned into lunch, which turned into a deep conversation about what made me who i am, which turned into a concert for my mom that ended with a concert that pulled out notes and chords from places i’ve never been before. That was one day… happy deep family day. Then there was my day to myself, with guitar and internet and music and napping and food. And, then, came my day with friends, which typically started out happy and fun and quickly descended into misery. I’m usually introverted enough towards the middle and end of big parties, but this time i had headphones with me so i just turned on the good bits and let everyone at the party do their miserable little social dance to the sounds between my ears. Eventually i got tired of waiting for the people i wanted to be with (the story of my life) and i went out on the front step and turned it up all the way until finally i set off for the apartment.

So many blogging things happened in there… things i’ll have to say eventually for me to make more sense. Somehow i explained to my mother exactly why i like to be thin and why i like the girls who i like and why i have to be successful at something and she understood it all with this wane little smile and tears welling in her eyes. I can’t imagine what it must have been like seeing me from the outside… i wanted to thank her for everything and so when she asked me to play “under my skin” i shut my eyes and opened up and poured things into it that she had never even heard before, and afterwards she sortof just stared at me and i was just sweating and breathing and smiling because somehow i opened the song up again just when i thought i had used it all up.


It’s hard to quantify 20 years in any kind of way, but somewhere in between my nearly mathematical proof that i’ve never had a male role model before Peter Mulvey and my gut-wrenching concert i think i was having a happy birthday. The only happy one out of the three.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5862553/

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The office is empty as can be except for Fran and I, which is the way it usually goes around 6pm every night. My desk is unusually uncluttered because every trashcan in the immediate vicinity is full, and i am leaving today and never coming back. Except i am coming back… on Monday… probably a lot earlier than i’d unusually be here on a Monday. But, the clock striking 6:15 marked my last paid hour as a fully paid professional staff member of Drexel University, and i’ll miss it. It was a comfort having something so sure in my life every day; now it’s back to the normal ebb and flow. And here i go…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5833193/