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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Time has scrunched up and distorted itself again, and just like a rearview mirror some objects are much closer than they appear. One object that is much closer than it appears is the moving truck into which i will be loading three couches, two tables, a desk, and a bureau around this time tomorrow. In my brain the truck is still so far away that i have room to maneuver, or to brake quickly, when i reality it is on top of me so much that i hardly have space to breathe.

So, time has everything that’s tailgating me held off for the time being (at least to my perception), and i am left suspended in cruise control. Work, Friends, Sleep, Work, Rehearse, Sleep,… capitol lettered events leading me from one day to the next without a question. My bed has had a giant green Rubbermaid bin at the bottom of it for an entire week, and now fully half of its width is taken up with clothes and books i am sorting through, which leaves me a significantly less-than-human-size space in which to curl up at night. But, i don’t protest, because moving the bin or finishing my sort are things i haven’t scheduled any time for. And, so, i will arrive home tonight at 8pm (after another rotation of Work / Rehearsal) and i will leave for work half a day later and in the between bits my apartment will transform itself from scattered to neatly piled, and hopefully my thoughts will follow suit.


Half a day to scrunch the remaining half of my worldly possessions into truck-sized bundles while managing to leave out the things i need to live: already packed are all of my belts, brushes, kitchen utensils, and ties vs. inexplicably unpacked snowboots, economics textbooks, and condoms, none of which i’ll be using in the next day. Or in the next semester, for that matter, unless some highly unpredictable/improbable things occur (like snow in October, me inexplicably switching back into the BS program i scratched and clawed to escape, or me having a romantic life that *gasp* includes sex)(see, i told you they were improbable).

Somewhere at the bottom of a sorting pile of snowboots and textbooks (the condoms are segregated) lies an entire box of caffeine pills that i never opened. You do the math.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5367845/

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Dreamhost temporarily vanished from the face of the internet last night and this morning, which meant that i was being deprived of MetaCookie, Fury, InPassing, LinkStew, Unreliable Narrator, Wockerjabby, and JillMatrix, among others. Cause, gee, those aren’t the majority of the first 10 pages i read every morning or anything… ::grumble:: …however, to make up for this tragedy, the rest of my morning reads have been super-active lately: Ernie, Alison, Martha, Tom, & Mollie.


Do all these names and websites confuse you? Are you wondering who all these people are and how i know them? Then you should probably be keeping an eye on the newly expanded Cast Section to answer all of your questions!

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5341342/

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Wow, in honor of a whole year in the blogging biz i ought to change my tag-line from “Yearns, Burns, and Other Concerns” to “Mixes Better Metaphors than Martinis” or something else apropos. Do you realize that it’s nearly 5am and i have to be up at 7:45am and that i have a whole day of work ahead of me. No? Good, me neither.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5316607/

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I have this thing for cheesy kid movies where the dorky boy wins over the heart of the popular girl and the respect of his parents and/or peers. Or, rather, i did have a thing for those movies, and now i just have a thing for staying up past 2am to watch them on SuperStation.

The movies always surprise me with their ability to keep the remote out of my hands… this jaded anti-pop anti-teey-bop consumer who barely even gets out to indy flicks once a year stays rooted to the spot. At some point last summer i was home and idly flipping past HBO and i spotted Jamie Lee Curtis and i stopped to see what movie she was in, because i always stop for Jamie Lee, and that’s where the newest chapter of this tale began.

The movie is House Arrest, and the concept is simple: parents are headed for divorce, and so the kids lock them in the basement to work it out. Other kids from school bring their own problem parents into the picture, and hilarity ensues.

The movie is formulaic at best, and that’s probably the reason i like it so much. It is aimed at kids… boys who do not feel in control of anything. It is aimed at the rejects who got thrown into trashcans who would love to garner the respect of the school bully. It is aimed at the ones who pined after the pretty silent girl but never thought to treat her like an everyday person (even though it wouldn’t have gotten them anywhere). And, most cruely, it is aimed at the children of parents hopelessly mired in divorce, separations, and endlessly bickering and remarriage.

So, yes, for those of you following closely, i am the target audience of this movie, and it waylays me hopelessly on my living room floor lying on my stomach with my feet up in the air with full knowledge that Jamie Lee will make up with her husband, and that Jennifer Love Hewit will fall for the simple hero of the film and that the bully winds up being a big softy after all. I fall for it every time, hook line and sinker.

I’m not sure that i really want anything that the movie is offering, but in a way it represents some alternate universe from mine where i had romance hard-coded into my neurons instead of the pop music representation of it. Of course, having nowhere to learn romance from, all i had to turn to was pop culture to educate me. It’s like when in High Fidelity we’re told that “The unhappiest people i know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but i do know that they’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.” We’re posed the question of what comes first: the music, films, and culture … or the misery?

I say it all depends.

Some people learn happy endings from their own family and friends, and some people learn them from television and music and movies, and when it comes down to the crux of the matter those of us “who like pop music the most” are expecting a different kind of resolve. We are looking for tidy tied up packages that are easy to fit our minds around, and not uneasy reconcilations and marriages built to last despite rocky foundations. We simply haven’t encountered the concept; hollywood deals wholesale in reconciled parents, and in first kisses in front of the entire cafeteria, and in happy resolved endings. House Arrest is aimed at me because i am trained to appreciate tidy happy endings, and because i want to be able to expect them in my own life even though i know they are as likely as gold records on my wall.

Do i wish that i had a happy two parent home, or that i had good giggly friends who i could idly play football with in the yard, or someone to surreptitiously kiss when we thought parents weren’t all watching? To me it’s apples and oranges, because my life wouldn’t resemble my life if i had any of those things intact. I once just lived a solitary existence resisting advances, and it wasn’t the best thing to do. I have the urge to take meticulous mental notes during these movies so i can apply the things i’ve learned against my life should i ever find myself trapped in a time warp and able to replay my adolescence from where i last saved the game.

In reality, i suppose i am saving up happy endings like the points on the back of a G.I.Joe box, hoping that someday i can put them all in an envelope and send them away for some sort of happiness in return. Here’s for hoping i don’t have to watch House Arrest too many more times to redeem my limited edition prize.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5316575/

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I’d just like to point at that Nick at Nite is running Cheers this fall. Yes, that’s right, Cheers. It was bad enough when Happy Days graduated from daytime syndication to Nitely showings, and i could excuse the addition of The Wonder Years because it was a quirky show and it was set in the era that is the bread-and-butter of the channel’s programming. However, Cheers is from the 80’s. Cheers ran in my lifetime; in fact, it used to be my favourite show. I remember being in sixth grade and desperately trying to stay awake through the movie-length finalé and not quite making it and having to glean the last details from my History teacher the next day inbetween classes. There is (lamentably) a show still in first run Must-See-TeeVee downward spiral that features a character from Cheers.

I remember when Diane episodes were prime 7pm syndication fodder, and then where we were upgraded to the shinnier funnier Kirstey Alley episodes. And, then, they slowly started trickling away, giving way to Coach, and then The Simpsons and finally Friends. And, i suppose just one more measure of how old you are is how many of your favourite shows are syndicated, and how many more are owned by a Turner Network, but somehow it doesn’t all add up in my head. When i was little i knew that Bewitched was a better built affair than Gilligan’s Island, and that i’d take Donna Reed over Dobey Gillis. But, inexplicably, Donna has been absent from the N@N schedule for years, and Gilligan is up next after I Love Lucy, the Christmas marathon of which i still have recorded on a Beta tape that still works in the Sony Beta Machine that’s older than i am.

Yesterday this page turned a year old, and in a month i’ll be twenty. However, i’m starting to get the feeling that age isn’t so much the years that pass so much as it is the scenes you remember. And the episodes you forget.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5316234/