Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Recently I’ve had a couple of people tell me that you start to feel old when one of your exes gets married. Of course, I really only have the one ex, and we all more or less lovingly refer to her as the Queen of Darkness, so that particular trauma has already passed for me. I didn’t feel old, though – I think she had been betrothed to the dark side even before she started seeing me.

I guess the thing that makes you feel old when a former significant other ties the knot is that you could have, theoretically, stayed with that person, forcing them to wind up knotting with you rather than some other person. Instead, not only have they successfully replaced you (with their spouse), they are several spins ahead of you in the game of Life.

Despite not having an ex for this to happen to, this weekend someone told me something that still managed to make me feel old in that same way – only a little bit different. Because, you see, I found out that a girl who I had never even kissed got married.

Of course, if I was counting the social evolution of every girl I ever had a crush on but never kissed against my own I would have to have some sort of leader board hung in my room to keep track of it all. In fact, this girl is a little bit different because I could have kissed her. I really almost did – as I remember it, we were all lined up for the moment, lips aimed and everything. We didn’t kiss, though. I didn’t kiss her because she was seeing a very nice boy who she seemed to like a lot, and I didn’t want to make myself a chink in their relationship’s armor.

I didn’t kiss her, even though I wanted to, and wound up thinking about it for the rest of the week, hovering by my computer in case she sent me a message of any kind. I’ve talked to her since, hugged and laughed with her, slept on her couch, and rode in her car.

I haven’t heard from her lately, though; we haven’t spoken in months. But, this weekend at our (yet-to-be-blogged-about) cast party, a friend of hers who was in town stopped by to say hello, and she off-handedly informed me that this girl, who I never even kissed, got married. Married to the boy that kept me from kissing her.

It’s not quite the same feeling of being old. Instead, as her friend’s words reached my ears, they manifested as a strange quiver in my stomach. Something about fate? Or karma? Would that kiss have made a difference? Would she have really kissed me if I had leaned in? Would I have been a bad person for doing it? Could it have ever even happened In the first place? Would I be who I am today if it had?

I really ought to save the tough questions until after lunch, huh?

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/05/200321905/

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Dreams amalgamate my life and the inside of my head, suspending my disbelief by showing me what I want to happen. Sky has been a part of a lot of my dreams as of late; the Philadelphia skyline mapped in perfect three-dimensional detail.

Last night I found myself staring out from my IBC cubical view — I saw a strange dark swirling cloud dominating the distant skyline. Something struck me about that cloud — drew me to it, so out of place against the otherwise blue horizon. And, suddenly, the reinforced windows surrounding my floor were gone and I reached out my hand to meet fresh air, thirty-five floors about the ground.

Stepping up onto my desk, and then onto the window sill, I leapt out into the open expanse, the wind catching my body and propelling it upwards, ever upwards. I flew up to meet the blackness, only to find that like a passing plane it was ever higher than I thought. Half pushing against the increasingly distant ground, half pulling myself up towards its swirling vortex, I soon was close enough to see into its oily form.

Face to face with it, I found that it was not a dark cloud, but a nightmare, a nothing, a black bull hidden inside a swirling lightening storm. And I flew into its heart, striking out wildly against the air all around me, only to be driven down towards the earth by its horrible breath. Plummeting endlessly, like Gandalf and the Balrog. Unable to orient myself towards the great beast and push back against its power, slamming into the ground and whipped by sharp streams of rain, it combined unbearable pressure and swirling wind to tear the breath right out of me.

I remember it tumbling walls down around me, feeling the snap of ribs giving way against the onslaught and debris, and my last gasp for air as people shouted in the background, alarmed that I might be defeated outright. And i was.

Just because I am a superhero in my dreams does not mean I always win.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/05/200316143/

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I feel as though there’s something i have to tell you — i really owe it to you. It won’t be easy, but i have to. But, first you should know that when i got back home last night from Lyndzapalooza i felt as if i had bruised everything that i had: fingers, muscles, voice, brain, and heart. I was, as i put it so eloquently to Elise, “a piece of hurt.” Not that it’s any excuse for what i’m about to tell you, but i just feel as though you should have an idea of the state i’m in.

I cried at the end of Armageddon. There, i’ve said it. I cried, not only for the characters on screen, but for myself — for having so knowingly bought in to a written-by-committee tearjerker that barely aspires to B-movie status because of one thing: Bruce. Bruce Willis. The man doesn’t always make the best movies out there to be made, and he isn’t always the best actor that could be found, but you just don’t kill him. Do you understand? Don’t kill Bruce. Because, in killing him, you force him to let loose, to lose control, to unlease all of the pathos and weariness that he has built up during the shooting of countless Die Hard movies as well as the physical emotiveness he reserved while dubbing his voice into the Look Who’s Talking series. And when you let me know that for the entire population of the Earth, including those of us spending our waning hours watching this bland by-the-numbers Bay/Bruckheimer creation, the only thing that stands in the way of our imminent deaths is the noble self-sacrifice of Bruce Willis then by god maybe the end is nearer than we think, because i will be blown into a thousand pieces by errant space debris before i’ll watch Bruce sacrifice himself again to save a pansy talentless hack like Ben Affleck who draw the straw of death fair and fucking square! Do you hear me?!?! Straw of death.

Like i said, i’m not especially emotionally stable right now. Apologies. Hopefully you don’t think any less of me for it.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/05/200308389/

200176393

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It’s very corporate. I remember the qualifications that i set when i started college: nothing where i primarily spend time with computers, and nothing too corporate. I cannot help but wonder: did i compromise, or just change my mind?

I am usually the first in the building from my department, save for the other intern. At eight fifteen i dutifully check all of my email accounts and scan CNN and Metafilter for news as i drink my Paradise Lust, though i tend to stretch my muffin (alternately blueberry and chocolate) until quarter of nine. Really, though, my working day starts the previous working evening, because i have been staying late. Not obscenely, workaholic late. No. Just late enough to finish whatever i have in front of me. It is the business world’s version of the Clean Plate Club. Which means that the next morning at nine, after i have resolved my urgent emails and made myself some tea, i have to start the process all over again. From a clean plate.

The hours between are immaterial, marked by endlessly attentive hard work punctuated by trips to the water cooler, bathroom, director’s office, and outside world. To the latter there is but one venture, which i prefer to enjoy in solitude (though i am not rude enough to turn down anyone’s invitation). My co-workers are adamant about this: you really ought to escape while you can. For lunch, that is. I found their warning ominous at first, but i understand it now. Air is out there; air that we can only look at through our reinforced unopenable windows. Yet, once i am outside i always want to return — how is it that i can feel so lost and alone in the middle of my city during my hour of lunch?

Thus, every day i return with a half an hour to spare, always with some iteration of chicken caesar salad. One day it was in a wrap, the next on a sandwich, the third with a side of salmon sushi. Somehow the predictability cheers me in how it thwarts the tiny “what did you have today” conversations that crop up around three-thirty when everyone is sated and ready to leave. I am usually ready to leave at ten thirty, but i change my mind by lunch, opting instead to stay late… to power through… to clean my plate.

In my first paycheck i cleared eighty two cents on every dollar, which is one and a half cents better than i did in Admissions. I do not get upset; i do not tithe on the behalf of god, and so i tithe to capitalism instead. Even after that, i am left with an unreal amount of money. Did i earn that? For my work? Really? I boggle myself for a second, too excited by the spending possibilities of my modestly large check, and marvelling that i could be worth over fifty thousand dollars a year with a bachelor’s degree.

I have yet to deposit it. There are so many things to buy, to see, to hear, that i am afraid to turn their numerals and decimals into cents and dollars that i can spend. At the top of my list are a four-track, a laptop, a guitar, and trips to the movies. I imagine a different list superimposed on top of my own: a mortgage, a washing machine, car insurance, and trips to the movies. People making less than i am have that list rather than my own, yet cannot afford to be paralyzed by indecision between buying an actual four-track or simulating it with mixing software.

Indecision is a priceless luxury that earning potential can often afford, and i am indecisive by my very nature. So, did i compromise, or just change my mind?

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No, I don’t know why it is snowing in Philadelphia in April.

Someone actually asked me about it this morning – in disbelief that it was happening, i suppose. Unless they thought that i might somehow know something Philadelphia’s meteorologists don’t. And, well, i do know things that they don’t, but those are all about responsible journalism, and not about explaining the weather.

It wasn’t so much snowing as the wind was blowing about a frigidly icy mist, which i encountered at length on my lunch break. This should not have been the case; i did not have any reason to get so well acquainted with today’s weather. All i wanted was a salad. I thought, Surely there is a salad to be had in close enough proximity to my office building that i will not have to encounter enough weather to be forced to comment upon it when i return to my desk.

Actually, there was (a salad to be had); my coworkers recommended me to the “Oh-So-Good” eatery, which sits directly across a relatively easy-to-traverse intersection outside of my building. In fact, someone had just come back from there, and none of us even bothered to ask her about the weather. Perfect.

Oh-So is one of a new urban trend: it is like a lunchbox that packs everything … salads, sushi, soup, sandwiches, and also some things that do not begin with S. I not only gleaned this from my coworker’s description of it, but also because it proudly proclaims its one-shop-feeds-all nature in a series of simple-to-the-point-of-being-semiotic advertisements along their outer walls — they had vaguely registered in my memory from my walk to work, but i didn’t really connect them to whatever they were meant to advertise.

(Knowing me as well as you do, i’m sure you can sense that i’m about to complain about the advertisements. It is rather obvious that that’s where i am heading… why i even both to set these things up so dramatically is beyond me.)

As i exited the lobby of my building, the first advertisement to enter my field of vision was (yes) semiotic in nature. It was so effective that the pictographic on it screamed one and only one thing at me: PENIS!

Yes, it screamed penis. And, the picture that was shouting was not some virile erect vegetable of a penis, that carrot or cucumber that i might have expected since this was meant to be a sign for food and not for… well, not for genitalia. No. It was a remarkably unerect little penis.

Actually, it more resembled a shrimp…

A-Ha!, i thought, it must be a sign for shrimp!. Then, thinking some more, i thought: Surely their advertising people realize that the shrimp looks like a prepubescent penis that just participated in a Polar Bear Club activity. I mean… it barely even looks like shrimp. Or, at least, it definitely does not immediately register in the “yum, i want to eat that” category of my brain.

I continued with this line of thought as i neared Oh-So and it’s Oh-So-Shrimp. Something about the situation bothered me; it wasn’t as if i was suddenly (and uncharacteristically) having a typical male homophobic moment that lead me to fear or revile the shrimp. No. And, i wasn’t experiencing some sort of intelligence deficit that would suddenly render me offended based on some sort of right-wing moral obligation to the public to protect it from lude imagery. No, not that either.

Ah, yes, i had it. It was simply that i was bothered by the fact their advertising people were either too moronic to see that their primary food-glyph looked like an underdeveloped sex organ or too excited by its implication to make it look a touch more shrimp-like. Despite having isolated this, my problem, i found myself physically incapable of entering the building; every time i approached it i was overwhelmed by a lingering contempt by their idea of trendy advertising.

Long story short (too late), i learned all about today’s weather as i walked the two grueling ice-mist filled blocks to Lindsay’s favorite deli to get a salad there, and then another two blocks back into the wind to get back to my building so i could actually eat.

Despite this enlightening journey of the body and mind, i still have no idea why it was snowing in Philadelphia in April

In other cock-related news (ha! a pun!), i went rooster hunting when i returned from work this evening, after an unbelievable alarm-clock-like round of crowing this morning that ran on regular half hour intervals starting at five. I was unable to locate the foul fowl, despite some leads indicating that what i previously thought to be an errant chicken walking around behind CVS was actually said rooster, a pet of the man who lives on the corner. A thorough stalking of his premises revealed no such terror of a bird. I have resolved that if i am woken up at any point before 7am tomorrow by its crowing that i will go outside, find it, and shove it through its owner’s mail slot.

And still i’ve managed not to talk about my new job. Shocking. Maybe tomorrow i can squeeze it in between a discussion of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings and my discovery of an Oh-So-Sign that is implausibly meant to resemble a peach.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/04/200111619/