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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So, i’m not a big gift-giver, but i still buy things for people all of the time. If i see a cd someone might appreciate, or a book, or a concert ticket, i buy it and give it to the person and when they ask what they owe me i tell them not to worry about it. These are unexpected prizes that life drops into your lap with no expectations or suppositions attached. Gifts, however, are awkward. Gifts require perfect amounts of attention, and people are allowed to be disappointed when they are expecting something, and then there is the moment. I hate the moment – the squinty-eyes smiling happy crinkly moment where both of you have said thank you and hugged and are then standing there with the gift between you like a UN mediator. Does the giver talk about how they chose it? Does the receiver gush more about how perfect the color is? Or, do you both stand there and crinkle until someone backs down.

I think it’s sortof like a tiny war… trying to maneuver the other person into saying their piece so that you can safely and predictably respond, ending the silence allowing you to escape. The worst is ambushing someone with a gift that was due to them at a time they weren’t expecting, which leaves you with that momentary suprise-party spike in adrenaline based anticipation and then denoument when you realize it’s just a tiny blip on your flatline daily radar and that (the screen / your heart) will settle back to normal in a moment or two.

Or, if you like to avoid para-military diplomacism in the realm of unexpected presents, you can just throw little things at people all of the time. More adlibbing, less stress, and you get much better karma for doing a undeserved good deed than you do for begrudgingly throwing money into a gift-shaped hole in someone’s life.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4623153/

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Things are continuing to happen in ways i didn’t intend them to happen. I have to be at check-in for Orientation tomorrow at 7am, and i am nowhere near sleep. My tooth is still killing me. I have a lengthy appointment with my academic adviser tomorrow that will involve hemming and hawing. I have a headache. I need to do laundry.

However, those are all concerns of an entirely pedestrian nature when held against my primary concern, which is as follows: today i went to the recording studio to see if i could boot up Pro-Tools and mix down songs for 25/24 only to find that the recording studio is now an empty room containing only a tape machine and a broom. In and of itself this event is cause for some amount of alarm because it means that 25/24 cannot and will not be a studio project as conjectured, and i’d almost rather not do it than record it on my computer. However, a commitment is a commitment, and so i should be recording things right now … except that my amplifier is now MIA because i was storing it in the studio so i wouldn’t have to carry it around, and it does not qualify as a tapedeck or a broom so it is not there. This all adds up to 7 days left for me to start from scratch (i had about a fourth of the songs recorded, but obviously they weren’t mixed down as of yet) and i don’t even have my amp to power my guitar. Lovely. At worst i suppose this’ll just wind up as some sort of 24-song extended Trio, but i was very serious about getting 24 quality songs recorded and i have every intention of getting it done, whether it’s for next Saturday or not.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4612093/

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Moths are so silly. If that was me, i’d flirt with the lightbulb for exactly 1 minute and then just plunge my little moth-y body right onto the thing until my legs melted onto it and then i’d really be in my glory.


In a related tangent, listen to the new Tori single (mp3/rm), because if more people hear it my brain will be less likely to explode. I think. Moths, flames, tori, bed. Yum.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4596057/

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I used to have psychic dreams pretty regularly, but eventually my ability to fly replaced the premonitions. They were small and unimportant visions anyway, and they always came to me in an obscure enough fashion that i was never really sure of what i knew until i saw it happening in real life. But, i can’t fly rather than walking to work, so ultimately knowing just what flying feels like is a curse more than a blessing.

And knowing that Jessica’s hair would be blue ahead of when she told me she thought non-platonic meant what platonic means was actually rather amusing, in a way that distracted me from the biting pain of another romantic blunder.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4594878/

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The loins of my beloved highschool seem to have produced yet another blogger in Brendan, who has all of that tech cred i keep attempting to gain but isn’t even going to school to put it to good use. To prove how collectively demented and omnisexual our highschool made us when it comes to being starfucking gradegrubbing whores, here’s a snippet of conversation about the aforementioned attending of next year’s SxSW:


Brendan: I don’t know where I’d stay. It wouldn’t matter, though; I’d be, like, “Oooh, cool internet people! They’re almost like celebrities!”

Me: Yeah, well, my goal is to be on the verge of celebrity by then, and then just pretend to be (Ernie/KevRock)’s boywhore until everyone starts to notice me

Brendan: That’d work.

Brendan: I could be Ernie/whomever’s rented armcandy, or something.

There’s my quality pre-collegiate liberal arts education hard at work. I love me those Blue-Ribbon School of Excellence Magnet Schools. Mmm-mmmm good.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4593084/