Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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This weekend beat the crap out of me, and it didn’t help any that i got in tonight at 8. A lot of stuff transpired in my head but nothing made it onto here. I was walking home from the guitar store on Friday night and i passed the shell of a dragonfly dead on the ground; it was a battered exoskelton with the middles of its wings gone so it was just like a stencil of itself. I had something really profound to say about that on friday, but now i just wish i had a camera with me.

This weekend was exactly that… perceptions frozen in perfect little moments that don’t really click in recollection. Yesterday i swam for three hours straight, and i haven’t swam for more than a minute or two in over two years. It wasn’t easy, and today i’m in all sorts of aches and pains because of it, but i feel slightly more in shape now. I am out of shape. This weekend is the first time i’ve been in revealing circumstances (swim trunks) and people haven’t remarked on my thinness; in fact, they said i looked as though i had gained some weight. People think i’m joking when i say i feel heavy, but i’m not joking. I feel like some kind of parody of a supermodel always saying she needs to lose a few more pounds, but i honestly can’t stand myself at this weight. I know, i have issues.

People think i’m kidding about issues. I remember as far back as age 7 or 8 not wanting to take my shirt off at the beach because i didn’t like how i looked in just swim trunks. In middle school i got changed in the corner of the locker room because i was afraid that i was chunky enough that i looked like i had breasts (definitely not a valid concern). In high school i wore hospital scrubs in gym so that no one would see the round hairy legs that betray the rest of my build as being something other than slim or wirey. There’s a backstage picture of me from senior year where i don’t have my shirt on, and it looks like you can fit two hands around my waist or roll a marble down the center of my chest and it would stop in the puddle of my belly-button in the middle of my unreally flat stomach. I love that picture. I know that i was unhealthy and too-thin and that it made people uncomfortable, but i felt comfortable and didn’t mind showing my body off. Now i hide it… people at parties remark that i am spectacularly unglamorous latlely and laugh it off when i seriously reply that i feel too fat. And now everyone else is comfortable with my body except for me, and i don’t know which i prefer.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4459359/

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For those of you who didn’t realize that Philadelphia was the sexual technology Mecca of the East coast, check out this msnbc story about two women who were arrested for running a “sex dungeon” out of their residential “computer solutions” storefront. This local flavour story was brought to national spotlight [sic] by my local NBC affiliate, who didn’t even bother to blur out the number on the store’s sign. Good job, guys.

Philadelphia’s NBC10 news crew is the largest local collection of yellow journalists and hyperbole artists that i’ve ever had the opportunity to witness in action, and their newscast tends to be aimed directly at people who circle Access Hollywood and Wheel of Fortune in their teevee listing every week (which is a double whammy, because not only are those two syndicated gems typically aimed at the lowest possible denominator possible, they tend to be on at the same time every night and thus don’t generally require circling). Lead stories on their news teasers feature (in this order) (without fail) death, fire, breaking news on weightloss, & NBC-centric entertainment news. This station followed each NBA Championship game with a half-hour of local coverage featuring reporters standing in every sports bar in the Greater Philadelphia Area rather than run the normal nightly news or the NBC post-game show. They break into soap operas to report a dusting of snow that had been forecasted the night before. Their anchors are local glamourpusses who marry local politicians and are in-turn reported on by local gossip columns. In other words, it’s a quality all-American news organization that focuses on the subject-matter that an alarming number of Philadelphians actually care about.

Please don’t fail to take note of the wholly unspecific and incidental (though ironically written) reporting on this story by Lu Ann Cahn, who recently reported on a “Flash Fire” at Drexel that was really a small propane tank explosion. Aside from her tantalizing lead-in mention of the women possessing a “large knife,” there’s the explicit name-dropping of “medical bondage.” Unless Lu Ann has mistaken “bondage” for the ever popular “masochism” angle of S&M, i can’t imagine what she meant by “medical bondage” other than maybe wrapping ace bandages around unusual body parts. My favourite part of of the article was, without a doubt, friends and neighbors who didn’t mind the (apparently) openly operated sex shop as long as “they would be dressed real nice” and that their customers were “guys in Mercedes.”

B&D, S&M, E&P, and the shocking news about your favourite Friends star’s personal life, tonight on NBC10 at 11! And, for more unsual explorations of sex and computers, head over to Ernie at LYD, who blogged the article all the way from California.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4364274/

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Almost-kisses are some of the worst things in the world, but generally not a terrible idea in retrospect. Bodies twisted with hands braced against each other and noses touching in their own tiny eskimo kiss so that you can feel the breath pass from her mouth to yours and then you feel that cellular-level inertia telling you that this is supposed to be a kiss but your brain maintains control of your locomotion and a minute later you are just talking again.


I don’t know how much i like my brain. For every almost-kiss i’ve participated in there’s been some pretty shitty consequences to be had in exchange for a kiss, but sometimes it might be worth consequences. However, sometimes almost is enough. And sometimes i might just be an idiot. But, at least i’m an idiot with a brain.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/4317521/

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The office is a tiny quiet forest of brown boxes with giant sideways E’s emblazened across their sides. We are all getting brand new computers to replace our PentiumIIs that can hardly run our admissions software. The counselors are all in a prospect management meeting for the entire day, and we have no visitors, so it’s just the five ladies from the Visit Desk and me.

Next to my desk is a Dell-Computer-Box tree that towers high above my head and i am waiting anxiously because i am sure someone is about to yell “TIMBER” and send it crashing down upon my desk. There is a small Dell-shrub across from me next to Fran’s desk. The sound of breeze through the leaves on branches is replaced with the dead silence that almost infers the tiny whirring of microprocessors that will proceed it. I feel as though tiny foraging animals should be roaming around to replace our single office-rodent, who has been rendered obsolete by these unedible towering monoliths.

My mouse is due to roll down the side of my desk to escape into the brush any moment now, i’m sure.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/4267537/

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South Philadelphia is a place everyone should have to experience on a post-rain sunday at thirty seconds to noon. Coming up the orange steps from the subway all i could hear was a cacophony of bing-bongs as all of the churches on all of the corners rang out their different tell-tale noon-rings at once, and i twisted them round and round in my head pulling forward sets to duet in perfect harmony and listening in one ear to others sounding like dueling blacksmiths.


After the perpetual rain all day yesterday the humidity is gone and Philadelphia just feels clean. I’m sure we’ll manage to muss that up tomorrow, but right now i want to go lie in my tiny rowhome backyard and smell that unmistakably city-smell of rain evaporating out of concrete sidewalks and watch the odd little weed with tiny blue flowers try to prove itself a rosebush through the cracks in the cement. Creeping up past the tiny china-cracks into the very bottom of a blue sky.

There are worse Sundays spent worse ways than this.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/4109963/