Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Attack of the Well-Mannered Ex part deux (cont’d): All These Poses

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Okay. I have now given him the tour of our house, eaten dinner, and had three more drinks.

I think i have identified the perfect drink-to-Elise’s-ex ratio, because we’re having a more charming conversation between the two of us than Elise is having with either of us.

Well, not right now, but a minute ago, when i was in the kitchen.

We shared a moment. Actually, several consecutive moments. Like, a naughty daisy chain of moments. See, first he was talking about Golden Girls, which is one of my favorite television shows ever. So, we’re in the kitchen enthusing about our favorite GG moment’s and he says “Bea Arthur” and I off-handedly remark to Elise “of course, now i’m singing that song in my head,” meaning Rufus Wainwright’s “California” where he belts out “and my new grandma Bea ArTHUR!” And, he was like, “oh, yeah, i know that song. I love that album.” And, THEN, we simultaneously launch into Rufus Wainwright concert stories in which we cry for the majority of his set.

I mean, what are the chances of two guys who like Rufus independent of a girlfriend’s influence and who are straight (mostly) (i think).

So, yeah, i think as long as i keep drinking and he keeps liking Rufus Wainwright i won’t even be freaked out by the fact that he’s sleeping in my house.

Attack of the Well-Mannered Ex part deux

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It is t-minus something to Attack of the Well-Mannered Ex part deux. He is in a cab somewhere, trying to find our tiny street.

As a precautionary measure, i have already begun to drink.

My only ex being not exactly a house-guest caliber person (for fear she would steal or break things, or try to sleep with one or both of us), i really don’t have any exes to bring into the have-over-for-dinner equation. So, the concept of an ex i’d not only allow into my home, but be happy to see and want Elise to get along smashingly with is entirely outside of my grasp.

Inching towards the four-year mark of our relationship i can’t say that i’m jealous, but…

Oh, here he is. shit shit shit, he’s coming into my room. minimize blogger. must not be passive-aggressive in front of company.

Moveable.

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With Hemmingway on my lap i began to shed layers acquired since the night before.

Raining all week, people at work began claiming that they were depressed. I think rain just gives you time to realize why you might have been depressed in the first place. Having that generally figured out, i quite like the rain.

I peeled off my sweatshirt and stuffed it down into my bag to cover the bottle of vodka, still undrunk. I carry a grand’s worth of electronics on my body almost every day, but i am scared that someone might want to knock me down when i get off the train so they can take my vodka.

It is good vodka.

On Market everything is too beautiful. The bums, even. I draw deep, diaphramatic, atheletic breaths. These are not breaths i take on a daily basis. Forgetting the vodka, i feel drunk on crisp autumn air. Drunk on oxygen.

Ross asked me as i was leaving, “You’ve got to find something to do outside, huh?” I answered that i don’t know how to do anything outside, except walk.

So i walked home.

Please Look Away (Don’t Look Away)

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It’s strange to have taken my birthday back from Hallmark and my family and friends and the rest of the world. No calls, no cards – honestly, just the way i like it. Even without receiving a single gift I got a lot of things that i wanted for my birthday, and some things that i didn’t but got anyway.

In New York i rubbed shoulders with Ani Difranco, almost knocked into Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney, made eye contact with Rufus Wainwright, and split a drink list with Rabi, among other wonderful things. For me the day started at five-fifteen waiting for a late taxi that almost made me late for my train, which was moot anyhow, as my connecting train (and all of NJ transit) was down for the morning. I had to score an unlikely Greyhound ticket to make it into the city in time (just barely) for my first event. As a result, I missed ten or fifteen minutes of Malcolm Gladwell’s wonderful speech, partially about the difference between talented mimicry and dilligent practice, and for the rest of the day i quite punctually absorbed lots of information from people whose diligent practice has resulted in moments of cinematic and musical perfecion. It might not have been on my birthday, but i can’t think of a much better birthday to have.

Yesterday i drank way too many little solo cups of beer, wine, beer again, and some more wine with better than 50% of my friends at Sippin’ By The River. It was fun at points, but ended with six hazy, tortuous hours i only recollect in the vaguest sense of the word. The last thing i remember very clearly is talking about Garbage with Erika’s sister, but afterwards i have had confirmed involved me making out with someone who i really never intended to make out with and almost drowning in my shower because i couldn’t figure out how to turn off the water. Elise further confirmed that i did invite about a dozen people to our house for martini’s and The Simpsons, even though we neither have ingredients for martinis or reception for the Simpsons. It was a wonderful example of excess which, having lived through it, will probably make for an interesting story to tell in years to come.

The merry part of making your birthday a nearly week-long event is that there is no pressure to make a single 24-hours perfect. A day of low-key shopping is finely balanced against a madcap NYC adventure, and a lazy afternoon with your girlfriend is almost a contradiction in comparison to a wild day of alchoholic sampling, but they were all my birthday, a birthday that was finally mine and no one else’s, and quite possibly my favorite one yet.

Happy Birthday To This

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I have been blogging for over a fifth of my life.

Purely as a statement, it’s meaningless. Abstract. People will tell you that you’ll be asleep for a third of your life, or waiting in line for a seventh of it, but you won’t suddenly re-evaluate the way you’ve been living your life. People don’t find god in an attempt to save themselves from a seventh-of-a-life of waiting in line.

I have been writing this personal web log for five years. I turn twenty-four in less than a month. I have been blogging for over a fifth of my life.

That’s a little more succinct. It works in numbers that you may be able to grasp – you know what “five years” feels like, and you either remember what it was like to be twenty-four or you can imagine what you want to be doing when you will be.

Or maybe you can’t do either. Perhaps you’ve never done anything for five whole years – not live in one place, or date one person Perhaps twenty-four is just another meaningless milestone in the blithe fiction that is your imagined future – so you can’t relate to that either.

Also, there are the concepts of “personal web log” and “blogging.” What do they even mean?

I have been writing this personal web log (an internet-based, sometimes diary-like, irregularly updated collection of thoughts, feelings, links, pictures, music, and other online errata) for five years (one year longer than a US president’s single term in office, half of a decade, less than a third of the the time The Simpsons has been on the air). I turn twenty-four (twice as old as a twelve-year-old, one year shy of a quarter century, three years younger than Joplin, Hendrix, and Cobain were when they died) in less than a month. I have been blogging (“blog” n., short for “web log,” thus “blogging,” v., the act of creating and maintaining a blog) for over a fifth of my life.

Is that explanation thourough enough? How else can I more succinctly quantify this peculiar obsession to you? It is at once less and more than keeping a diary, more and less than a simple concatenation of thoughts I have and pages I view. It started out as a place to say something without editing, but soon evolved into a more oblique window into my life complete with its own voyeristic audience of hundreds. Sometime after that it became about documenting moments in time, snapshot stories of misadventures freed from the banality that surrounded them.

All of this attempted definition begs the question: what is it now? And: how can I hope to quantify something that I can’t even define? This is no longer my occupation, or my pre-occupation. Sometimes I only write once in a month, and other times I have a week’s worth of sentiments tied together with a common string. In the past this was the central repository for all internet statements, the me-archive. Now I sometimes want to publish a thought or a piece of writing that has no place here.

Ulimately, I have run out of pithy, charming, defining things to say on August 26th. August 26th now looms less as a day of celebration, and more of a mandatory mark on my calendar to remind me to remember, and to try to remind you, what this means to me. The date has become less like the birthday of a child over whom I dote and obsess and more akin to the wedding anniversary of a second-cousin – to whom I periodically send a card.

In either case, I thank you so much for being an inexorable, impossible-to-define part of this half-decade-passed … for being the eyes and ears receiving these words and sounds … for being a friend, even if you are a silent one. I may not be able to articulate my definition of what you’ve been consuming, but it couldn’t be whatever it is without you to observe it.

So, thank you. And, Happy Birthday To This.