Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

best of

by

Standing at the deli counter in the middle of Ft. Lauderdale on Christmas Eve wearing board shorts and a bright orange t-shirt that i had inadvertently shrunk to a prepubescent size in the wash, it occurred to me immediately that the striking blond man with the “Got Lube?” shirt was going to hit on me. I just knew. It was like a sign from god.

Christmas in Florida was absolutely bizarre, to say the least. At three in the afternoon on C-day i found myself firmly planted on my grandmother’s couch eating bonbons while attentively viewing the Trading Spaces Marathon while my mother lounged out by the pool. I eventually walked down the hall to the condominium of my retired lesbian 2nd-cousins to borrow a deck of cards, and proceeded to play solitaire.

Those two incidents pretty much sum up my trip to Florida, aside from how my mother was flagged down at the airport and — after an extensive search of her person and property — was forced to discard her “bang’s scissors.” Which, honestly, she was more likely to kill someone with in Florida than she was on the way back from it, but safety regulations are safety regulations for a reason.

Happy New Year.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/01/390155447/

by

Lately i have been screaming my voice thin, pummeling it as i scream for the high notes over and over again. This weekend it was Bb. If i could do that every day i would be a tenor.


There is still snow on the ground from last week’s snow day, though today’s temperatures in the 40’s felt like a summer vacation as it turned back streets filled with ice into soggy puddles to dance around. I remember when i first walked back from campus after the snow, unbroken white covering the field on thirty fourth street. A group of students were just convening a game of full-tackle snow football, and i almost asked them if could join in before i realized that i was wearing clompy boots and sexy jeans and was in no shape to be a pro full-tackle snow football player.


I get so convinced in moments, living out the highlight reel of my life as it follows a split second possibility. Rockstar. Run-away to Australia. Professor. Hit by a bus, Working in the office for the rest of my life. Pro-sno-baller.

Undecided. I wound up going out for some salad and bubble tea.

Typical.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/12/90046945/

by

She let just a dash of irony enter into it. “It’s his, you know.” As if she would keep such a well read copy of Lolita on her bookshelf entirely for the show of it. Even if i had forgotten, it was an easy path to retread: now an English major, then he was fixated on Stanley Kubrick — whose choice in novels turns her stomach in an entirely routine fashion. She’s seen most of them, courtesy of him, parts of which were presumably glimpsed from between fingers pressed over her eyes at the end of the first vignette of Jacket or at any point during the absolute horror of Clockwork (which i refuse to acknowledge as having ever been entered onto film).

I said something intelligent about him once. Kubrick, not the ex. Something about him choosing material that rendered his characters as objects… everything objectified. Lolita is exactly that, so far, and is entirely engrossing in its droll way — though i keep inserting graphic pictures for Humbert’s coy phrases. Slowly the story unfolds as the pitiful nymphophile is slipped into the world of the succulent young Lolita, and suddenly each page grips you as the narrator tries his best to stay satisfied by her charm alone. The tension is dense and sinewed as your literary mind sides with an otherwise likable narrator by force of habit while some other part of you is retching at the outcome that seems to be drawing inexorably near. What author could get so tangled up in the thread that his character drew along behind him like a clever spider that he could weave it so effectively, so that you are rooting for that old bitch of a mother to die and for those tiny sleeping pills to take their inexorable hold on the unsuspecting child sooner rather than later?


Rather than spoil the midpoint of the book for you, i’ll only foreshadow by saying that while you don’t always get what you want, sometimes getting what you thought you thought you needed is in fact not in your best interests… especially because it extinguishes any concept of want at all.

I don’t think it’s a very good book. Yet. Though, i have some hopes of escaping the especially dull clutches of the middle section any minute now. Maybe i won’t like it, though… maybe that’s why she’s dating me instead of him.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/11/85698865/

by

From Copy Protection to Copy Protection, via AAA and a lot of chemistry that i very vaguely understand.

I’ve been alone in the house all day working on a paper on copy protection for my New Technologies in Communication class, and when Gina stopped by to say hello just after the second one a.m. she was only the third human i had spoken with all day . I was on a break from my paper at the time, sitting amidst a tangle of wires on the floor attempting to write a song in AAA form for my songwriting class. Gina inquired into this endeavor, and in my explanation of it i overstepped the bounds of simple differentiation between verse-chorus-verse, ABA, and AABACA to speculate on how song form effects the commercial prospects of an artists — perhaps dwelling on a day spent largely listening to Tori Amos.

I followed this idle chatter across our common area and into her room, by which point the conversation had switched over to inhabit a subject philisophically adjacent to the difference between Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Gina put on her new Donovan hits CD as i tooled around on my guitar in DADGCE, but the conversation eventually turned back to pop construction. After my obligatory monologue about the interrelation of image, genre, and songwriting Gina mentioned how pop music at least kept her awake and functioning during her grueling Saturday 7-hour laboratory class today. This particular exercise in weekly chemical punishment has become a favorite topic of ours, as Gina basically has eleven weeks to play a rousing game of “guess that organic compound” with the five seemingly random samples chosen for her by her instructor. I not only delight in the inherently game-show nature of this particular exercise, but also in the fun things Gina must do in her quest for knowlege.

One less than delightful thing Gina has to do in this quest for knowledge is use an array of photoscopic machinery to determine the nature of her compounds, rather than more traditional means like boiling things and making their colors change. However, Gina did all manner of machine-assisted processes at her co-op job, where she basically spent all day in a lab running reactions on organic polymers. After talking about several aspects of her employment, such as how she spent weeks getting a particular product to the ideal shade of “water white,” we finally came to rest on the benefits and similarities of ultraviolet and electron beam curing of… um… this thing that i’m going to ask Gina to name for me again when i wake up tomorrow morning. Basically, she was testing one element in the process that makes the wierd peely adhesive labels you find on plastic soda bottles, or the gloss and ink sealents on magazines.

This particular thread of conversation went on for a good long time, with several stop-overs for debates of when in their employment life-cycle a worker stops actively attaining/retaining knowledge of applicable technology and begins to merely sustain it. Coming back out of that, i attempted to make my understanding of electron beam curing more complete by asking what it would be more and less efficient to cure. Adhesive labels – good. Magazines – probably. Vinyl flooring – maybe not.


Consequently, Gina brought up that the sealants in questions were similar to those used on fiber-optic wire, which in turn sent me into a five minute discussion of fiber optics based on a presentation i saw in my New Technologies class this week. At the tail end of that it suddenly occured to me that the polycarbonate layer in the middle of a compact disc and the acrylic layer on the outside probably both made use of the chemical technology that Gina had been describing to me for the better part of two hours, and my mention of it lead into a brief overview of how a cd is put together. That in turn lead to an equally brief description of the differences between a CD and a CD-R, which in turn lead to a discussion of how CD-Rs are sometimes hard to read for older units but a cinch for CD-ROM drives. From there naturally headed into error correction and how CD-ROM technology error corrects more than a typical cd drive. And, before i knew what was happening, i was back at copy protection … explaining how sinister it was to corrupt the error correction of a disc to protect it from copying because it would degrade the overall lifespan of a disc.


I knew that extra hour would wind up being useful for something other than sleep.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/10/85607009/