Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Year 02

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On on empty stomach and an hour out of the hospital i somehow decided that i needed to take a walk — if for any reason then to remind myself that there is such a thing of fresh air and that most streets are longer than the distance from my hospital bed to the elevator bank. So i walked.


Comparatively, my stay in the hospital will shrink and shrink away until it is finally nothing from a distance, and i swung out each leg in a wide arc in front of the other to add to that distance as i marched down Walnut street. The distance between here and class, that i am dreading the walk of right at this instant, evaporated away and i kept walking. Charging. In my head i was at a solid jog, feeling the in out in of my breath and watching as i passed everyone around me. Honestly, i couldn’t tell you if i was jogging or not.

I got past Drexel and suddenly i found myself at the highway; it borders the Schuylkill on the west side and metro Philadelphia rises in glittering tiers on the other side. Feet planted firm on the bridge, my city looked like an artist’s rendering of itself: flat and unchanging … detailed but with no depth. I don’t know how long i stood there staring at it staring back at me before i walked towards it. I expected to come up against a translucent sort of wall where i could run my hand against the shimmering image of the city and try to press through, but before i realized it i was past it and inside the image i had observed.

Somehow it was different. I still had that flavor of hospital in me, the tiny lines of adhesive from all of the tape that held in my IVs, the ID tag on my wrist. I hadn’t thought to take it off, honestly.


Every word i said came out the way it wasn’t meant, and i’m wondering if i was really ready to leave.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7634418/

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A rare occurrence… me, my mother, and my father, talking about our respective colonoscopies. My mom is wearing a Madonna-style “New York” tank top and just bribed the food services people to bring me extra jello, my dad is wearing a denim shirt from his store that says “Pete’s Gun Shop” and brought me his 1960’s boxed set of Lord of the Rings, and i’m merrily clicking away as i assure them that Everclear would be a totally appropriate clear liquid to mix with my cranberry juice.


Yeah, we’re fucked up no matter how you slice it.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7560454/

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Maybe what’s really getting to me is how different life actually is from television. Of course, we all know that television is just fiction, even when its plotlines are ripped from the proverbial headlines. Still, i know that i’m guilty of always expecting life to be a little more like teevee: constructing killer teasers and opening scenes in my head to neatly wrap up all of the threads my friends and i are tangled up in. Not surprisingly, there’s a theory of communication to match this sensation, and it was coined by a Dean from just down the street.

No, not from Drexel (ha!), from Penn. The man’s name is George Gerbner, and my academic obsession du jour is his Cultivation Theory. Gerbner’s entire study is based around acts of violence that consume a frightening amount of the television we watch every day. His hypothesis, which has been proven again and again through extensive field study, is that the amount of violence we watch regularly on television is an accurate predictor of the amount of violence we expect in our day to day lives. Gerbner even accounts for such an occasional addict as myself, accurately assigning me a low level of anxiety about real-life violence (and, i’m mostly just afraid of being ambushed from around dark corners by vampires).

My current kvetch isn’t about violence, though, it’s about sex. My textbook’s condensed version of Cultivation doesn’t address violence’s sordid little sister at all, and i somehow doubt that good’ol’ George would invite a visit from a random Drexel student just to talk about making whoopee, so i guess i have to field this one on my own.

Does the sexual content of television affect my expectations about life? I’d say that it does, without a doubt. I’ve watched a lot of boob-tube in my life, and i have to say that i expect out of romance what i have been taught to look for. I expect torrid affairs and even more torrid breakups … i expect magical first kisses and even more magical first times … i expect random hook ups and even more random pairings with friends i’ve had forever. Sometimes life comes through for me, and sometimes it doesn’t. All through high school i was waiting for that magic catalyst that all of my favorite characters seemed to have received to get my love-live jump-started. It never came. College came on hotter and heavier, but with a bit of deceit: those big-kid parties weren’t what i had been lead to expect. Despite that, some things actually did come out perfect. And, some breakups are just as torrid as the affairs that precede them.

If life complies just once out of an entire year with what we’re hoping for, suddenly we are infused with a sense of resonance … the feeling of our existence actually breaking down and mirroring the media just like we were secretly long for it to do. Every time we get what we want, we immediately want more; why shouldn’t we get more of what the onscreen couples have? I’ve been sitting on my couch like a proverbial potato this week watching a slew of beautiful people bed down with other people… i’ve watching scenes jump from a few tentative kisses to the morning after. I watched Buffy decide to have sex and follow through on it without coming up for air from her violent kiss. In a way i really do want it… all of it, and i feel like i’m missing something just because i don’t have it. Not because i am missing the companionship they have, or the happiness, but the raw energy that lies between the first kiss and the next morning.

The only problem is that characters don’t seem to worry about consequences, mostly because consequence is what keeps them on the air. In reality, people pay for consequences with more kinds of currency than i like to keep count of.

And, here i am, all alone in my room putting off another phone call to the one person i have the tiniest inkling of any relative interest from at all. What am i more afraid of, that it’s bound to fizzle out unlike my onscreen brethren — or that it might snowball into something i’m not ready to deal with faster than i can deal with it? I suppose it’s just like asking if i’m richer or poorer for hanging on to so much of my so-called currency.

One thing’s for sure… George Gerbner is right about television: it isn’t necessarily about real life, but it colors our perceptions of it a lot more than we initially let on.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7491037/

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I didn’t watch very much television last year; it’s not as though it plays a very important role in my life. I think our local news is insipid, i don’t pay for cable, and i don’t like to feel like my time is being wasting by a gaggle of fictional half-wits every week just so they can make People list of beautiful people.

Having established my general indifference towards the idiot box, i also have to admit that i love watching it in social settings. I love heckling it, and arguing over which character is cuter, and screaming in horror or delight at the newest contrivance of plot that leads two characters into one bed.

I think i could get by just on the WB, as long as i just pretend that Buffy isn’t actually a couple of channels away (though it’s still at the same time, on the same night). I’ve gotten used to despising Buffy, but lately she and the Scooby Gang have been delightfully on: on with their humor, on with their schlocky demons of the week, and on with a level of acting rarely exhibited on 20-Something dramas… namely my other two WB regulars, Dawson’s Creek and Felicity. Yes, i know they’re boring, insipid, insulting hours of teevee. Yes, i set aside Wednesday night just to see them.

This week i managed to catch all three of the aforementioned programs, and there is one theme that joined them all: sex. I know that it “sells,” but the current fixation with it is astounding. Buffy and Spike. Pacey and that waitress. Dawson and Jen. Noel and that floozy. Ben and Felicity. I’m sure even more whoopee was going on off camera. The thing that’s so unusual is the way the sex happens… on television, foreplay is equivalent to the kiss after the shirt comes off but before the groping starts. Buffy skipped it entirely, instead just unzipping Spike and climbing aboard. Pacey seemed like he might just fool around, but in the next scene it was obvious his clothes had been taken off and then put back on. Felicity and Ben shared a make-up kiss, laid down on the bed, and the next thing we knew they had been “in there for an hour.”

But, the most shocking of all of the intercourse i’ve witnessed in the past two days was Dawson’s. Dawson, one of the few remaining Virgins out of the long-running formerly-teeny-bopper shows. Dawson was my hero because, in the 90210 of my life, i am Dawson … i have plenty of potential romantic entanglements, but they’re all fizzle. Yet, in this inescapably well-scripted episode he goes from joking about dating Jen, to sortof dating Jen, to kissing Jen. And then… well, we know what comes then.

It’s the lack of foreplay that gets me, i suppose. Here’s Dawson, my V-club buddy of primetime, and he melts from one kiss down to a tangle of limbs and lust. This is not to say i would not be similarly tempted by Michelle Williams, but to have lost it in such a blasé fashion totally outside of any sort of relationship seems to defeat the entire Virgin thing to begin with. Of course, it’s not like Dawson and I were waiting for marriage, or even for the right time and place. We were just waiting.

Up until tonight, that is. And, despite the questionable circumstances of his tryst, i’m happy for Dawson … he slept with someone who he really loves as a friend, and immediately afterwards he felt right about it (which is less than we could say for poor Pacey earlier in the episode). It’s just the quantity of the sex, and the apparent quality of the sex, … and the way that five or six kisses immediately lead to sex that’s … starting to get to me.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7490475/