Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

flicks

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I walk into the bathroom on 35 and it seems empty, but as the door closes i hear a strange rasping noise from the open stall at the end of the row. I slowly approach the stall and peer around its corner cautiously, hoping not to find any half-naked strangely rasping co-workers slumped Elvis-style over the throne. It is empty.

As I wash my hands I hear the noise again, but do not bother to investigate. Maybe if I am lucky I will find myself cast in a real world retread of the classic Gremlins 2, where the sneaky critters invade an otherwise innocuous office building and precede to wreak havoc upon its unwitting staff. A worthy sequel to an already campy first flick.

Careful not to touch anything that might re-germ my now sanitized hands, I think am I unwitting?, closely followed by Surely there were a couple of people who died in bathrooms. I really ought to buy the DVD to check that out.

Two minutes later I am back at my desk firing off an email about compiling a master style guide for our department. So, essentially, you’ve just been missing out on my trips to the bathroom.

Oh, and I won a wine-drinking contest, bought four pairs of shoes, saw X2, passively participated in buying a new house, and wrote a song with Gina. But, really, that’s about it.

sigh

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/05/200279537/

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There’s something about watching nearly four hours of the overwhelmingly attractive overwhelmingly male cast travel their course on middle earth that makes me want to write slash fiction. And, not any kind of slash fiction, but sleazy interspecies Tolkien slash-fiction. I found myself mentally noting all the places it could be deftly inserted, to the point where i almost took out pen and paper to start writing down times. Frodo and Sam are easy, half the time they’re shown they seem like they’re about to make out or are recovering from quite a session. Pippin and Merry are just as easy… obviously out in that field doing something other than hunting for carrots when Sam and Frodo came upon them. Legolas is a little harder to work in, as tempting as he is. Apparently the slashers out there have an affinity for hooking him up with Gimli, but i could never pair such a fair haired sprite with that warty overgrown garden-dwarf. Perhaps Legolas could comfort Aragorn as he regrets his elvish bride? Or slip off with Frodo to help him improve his marksmanship?

Snow days do odd things to the brain.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/12/90020300/

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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/

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The way things were headed i seemed due for either a complete mental breakdown or halfway shaved head. And, having just had a complete mental breakdown two weeks ago, i decided that looking like half-hearted punk rocker was better than lying in the middle of my curled up floor sobbing and speaking gibberish.

Subtract half an hour. I was sitting on the stairs averting my eyes from the television because Nicodemus has always scared me. As her hair fluttered down to a white trash bag spread out on the linoleum one razor-sized strip at a time Kate said that none of us had ever seen her natural hair color before. Grinning, she stood up and and walked out of the too fluorescent bathroom as Ross turned to me and asked if we were just trimming up the back.

Add twenty minutes, and i was attacking it with scissors while he shaved off the back with a half-inch blade, pulling at my thick hair so hard that i was crying. Tears carried shards of hair down my face like tiny rivers as we all laughed out loud. I wish that i could blame our hysterical laughter on being drunk or stoned, but we had all stopped drinking hours beforehand. They were laughing heartily, rolling around on the floor outside the bathroom, and i was laughing at myself.

Subtract fifteen minutes. They voted five to one for my haircut, but add twenty-five to that and they all drifted away. Bored with me, though i played the comedian as i tried to get Ross to pay attention to how short my hair should be. Elise won’t like this, i said, and they all laughed at my antics as i complained about the hair that was in my eyes and how much it all hurt. She won’t like, i thought, because i’ll hate it. I will never be able to convince her.

Plus thirty minutes. Standing in front of the mirror with the clippers wielded like a dagger, and it was almost perfect. Ross had left, Kate was in the shower. The top was excellent, the back was a little shaggy, but the sides were all wrong. They needed to blend from the top, and loop around my ears. The left side slowly conformed to my wishes, but on the right i came too close in front of my ear and was left with a tiny bald spot when i pulled away. It just won’t do, i thought.

They had joked earlier about giving me a mohawk.

Six months ago today was the third night Elise and i slept beside each other in the same bed. Six months before that i was packing up what there was of my life and wondering if it meant anything at all. Six months before that i was already saying what i refused to let myself figure out. And i don’t remember what happened six months before that, other than that it was a week before i started using blogger.

After Ross left, Kate wanted a shower, Lindsay wanted me to sweep up the hair in the bathroom, and Erika wanted to go to sleep. I just wanted my curls back, to save them for winter when i can be pretty again, and now i am just teary and wide awake waiting for the train to take me away from here in the morning.


I will not forget this feeling.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/08/85355930/

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Still digesting Star Wars after seeing it tonight; the story was excellent, the graphics were stunning, and the dialog was better than bearable. However, one thing i’d like to mention before the details become hazy to me is that it is entirely obvious that George Lucas had at some point considered scripting the rape of Padme by Anakin (click for spoiler). It was often remarked upon on spoiler boards well before a working print of the movie was ever screened, so i have to assume it never made it out of the scripting phase. In fact, large portions of the script would not have worked out properly had their been a rape. Despite all of this, i definitely regret that the SW franchise is PG by definition, as a PG-13 version of the film would have taken several very interesting turns. Otherwise, Ewan is absolutely stunning, Jar-Jar is exactly as evil and stupid as we had already surmised, and Natalie Portman has some really delectable abs.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/05/85120178/