Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

consume

Weird Is Relative

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Last week at work everyone was buzzing about Emmitt Smith winning some sort of television show about dancing.

Since I am totally divorced from the magical land of time-suck known as television I thought they were just putting me on. You have to admit, it does sound improbable, aside from the fact that it’s altogether blasphemous for such salt-of-the-earth Philadelphians to be happy about a former Dallas Cowboy winning anything.

Yet, strange as it all seemed, it was true. My work friends once again took this opportunity to mock me for my self-imposed teevee blackout, as if i had given up using adjectives or basking in the light of the sun.

I wanted to shoot back, “How many concerts have you been to this month? How many have you recorded? And how many blogs (over a thousand) have you read?”


Of course, my weirdness doesn’t end in my eschewing of the boob tube. Another point of endless fascination is that I don’t drive – I don’t even have my license. I’ve had my permit a few times, and am actually flirting with getting it again, but when it comes down to it I’m distrustful of cars, and moreso of the people who drive them.

Still, people always ask, “Why wouldn’t you want to own/drive a car,” and in my head i complete the sentence “…in the city recently named as the second-most expensive in the country to do so?”

Usually my tv blackout wins out against non-driving as weirdest trait, but a competing one is my flirtation with vegetarianism – which is patently ridiculous, as my current state of consumption is incredibly lax in comparison to when I was a rules-obeying vegetarian for my latter teen years.

By comparison, my current rules are so loose i can hardly coin a term for them … lacto-ovo-pesco-broth-o-vegetarian? I’m not trying to make a statement; i just don’t like red meat, and i eat healthier on the whole when I can’t rely on variations on chicken nuggets for every meal.

A few years ago it would have all gotten under my skin, crawling around in my subconscious, making me doubt myself. Now it’s more like, eh, if they tried it they’d understand. Because, all weirdness is relative.

Plus, He Hangs Out With Santa

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I really, really have no experience with children.

I was, at one point, a summer camp counselor for four years, but children in a group setting are not children, they are CHILDREN. An entity. You know, like Borg. It’s about managing all of them in relation to each other.

Having no child-skills to speak of, in my limited interactions with wee ones i just do what my mother did – treat them like fully functional small adults who are slightly hard of hearing. I don’t engage in baby-talk, and i don’t engage in tacit little white lies about coal in stockings and Easter Bunnies.

Last night we had a wee pre-Thanksgiving for our friends that happened to include a toddler guest. As Elise and I are both blue state yuppies to the nth degree, dinner was slightly peculiar and entirely vegetarian. Not exactly toddler-friend fare. So, everyone spent the meal coaxing the infinitely cute toddler to try some of the peculiar offerings on his plate.

“Try the creamed corn! It’s like Mac’n’Cheese, but without macaroni. Or cheese.”

Eventually they hit upon the superhero angle. Superheroes definitely ate their food.

“How could the Flash be so fast without eating his fennel?”

They were on the right path, but it still wasn’t quite working. As i had the vastest comic knowledge of all in attendance (and was at this point slightly inebriated on my second or third Rose Martini), i felt the need to chime in.

“You know, Superman doesn’t just eat his vegetables. He eats everything. Superman invented the clean plate club.”

The toddler looked at me, eyes innocent and wide, while the guests regarded me in mute amusement/horror.

“Why,” i posited, “do you think he has so many more powers than all the other superheroes.”

The toddler dubiously lifted up his fork as a tiny part of my soul withered and died.

How the hell do you mommy bloggers do this every day?

And Then I Tried To Eat It

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Note to self: You cannot transform pre-made cookie dough into cookies in the microwave.

This is especially important to consider if your cookie dough has Health Chips in it, because after 17 seconds the chips will briefly spark and go supernova in the microwave before turning into a molten black mass that will slowly shrivel back onto itself while emitting a smell akin two tons of overcooked popcorn garnished with singed human hair. Because, apparently, Health Chips include iron shavings as an ingredient.

Next time either take five minutes to preheat the toaster oven or just eat the dough raw with a spoon like you’ve been doing all week.

The Descent

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I used to delight in being mean.

The focus of my anger didn’t really matter – a bag boy at the supermarket, a friend in conversation, a bus driver – as long as I vented my spleen at just the right moment. It was infamous and much-lamentedtrait of mine for many years; even Gina would roll her eyes when she saw that i was headed for a blowout.

Over the past few years my capacity for nastiness has been on a steady decline. Even when I summon up a decent fit of rage I usually swallow it, or at least soften the blow. And, not just for the benefit of my friends.

Over the summer I went to see The Descent, and in the fairly packed theatre I sat next to a friendly, cow-eyed middle-aged woman and her companion. She seemed like a decent enough neighbor, though during the previews she occasionally talked back to the screen. But, so do I.

As the movie progressed the talking-back morphed into a non-stop commentary track punctuated with pleas to her companion, like “I don’t know why you brought me to see this,” and “oh my god, you can’t leave me alone to go to the bathroom, I can’t take it. I just can’t take it.” I threw a few sideways glances her way, but she was oblivious in rapt, babbling horror.

Finally, during the first truly grisly scene in the movie her babbling transformed into incoherent gibbering screams, either at the characters on screen or just for her own benefit. Either way, she was significantly louder than the theatre’s surround sound, and I was not missing part of the movie just to get an usher.

Calm and collected, i turned to face the incoherent beast.

“Could you be quieter than the fucking characters in the movie?”

I immediately regreted venting at this creature of an obviously lower personal fortitude than my own. She turned to face me with her horrified, watery cow-eyes, mouth working open and closed like a guppy. She had no verbal reaction, just the “blurp, blurp, blurp” of her jowls working.

Over time my peers have developed an immunity to my scathing remarks, but clearly I had destroyed this creature’s will to live. I had to do something to bring her back from the brink.

“I’m sorry, you’re just really loud.”

She kept guppying at me, accompanying the guppying with her watery wide-eyed stare. I tried to go back to watching the (excellent) movie, but her stare kept nudging me in the side of the head.

I had become more horrifically transfixing than the golum-monsters on screen. I had ruined her movie experience with my meanness. She just wanted to go out to the movies and yammer like a mental patient because she has no coping mechanism to deal with horror but would be the oldest kid in the theatre for The Ant Bully. Who was I to impose society’s artificial standards about being quiet at the movies on her
As the on-screen violence continued I calmly, sweetly, turned back to my (still-staring) neighbor. One of my professors was a fan of a communications theory where other people would agree with you more strongly if you aligned your bodily reactions (like rates of breathing and blinking) with theirs. It was time for a field test.

I carefully matched her cow-stare and her guppy-breathing until I felt that we had reached a state of true simpatico. Gulping down some air and willing my eyes into giant, mooning saucers, I whispered, “I know, it’s really scary.”

Borderline cow-woman bit her lip and nodded at me. I bit my own lip and nodded along. I had established a connection. Slowly, still maintaining eye contact, still in-character as a cow/guppy with borderline personality disorder, I turned back towards the screen.

As if by magic, or a complex system of gears and pulleys, she also turned back towards the screen. I completed my turn in slow motion, finally breaking eye contact when it felt as if my pupil was going to slide back into my head.

She didn’t make another noise or even remotely glance at me for the remainder of the movie, or afterwards when we filed out. Yet, it was a pyrrhic victory, because I felt the need to temper a successful flare-up at a stranger who was screaming incoherently at a movie screen with an apology. You know, so her feelings wouldn’t be too hurt.

Old-school me would have pressed my attack until she ran sobbing from the theatre.

Of course, I wouldn’t have accumulated any good karma that way.

I like to think that present-day me strives to at least break even on karma, which means i only get to be unapolgetically nasty to someone who really deserves it. And, much to my chagrin, talkers at the movies, along with litterers and people who smoke next to you at the bus stop, are just innocent bystanders minding their own lives.

Endless Intake (or, Thoughts on Identity)

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I often move through my life feeling as though I have no walls – no resistance to the personalities and pop culture surrounding me.

For years I absorbed the opinions and styles of everything and everything else so much so that I had trouble getting a handle on who I was underneath it all. My opinions and reactions were just a collection of easily identified demographic influences – everything to do with what I consumed or the image that others projected on me, and very little to do with me.

I often manifested this uncertainty of self by acting out – needing to grow out my hair, or to wear flashy clothes and makeup, or to be the loudest most-opinionated person in a room. I still like doing all three of those things from time to time, but now I see that – taken as a whole – they were just my way of trying to create a tangible, distinguishable identity. No one could ignore or forget the long-haired boy in body glitter and black vinyl arguing with you at the top of his lungs.

My outgrowth of that phase might be why explain why I have given up radio and television altogether. People often express shock and horror at the fact that I don’t watch television at all; it’s as if they cannot comprehend even the idea of it. Too many people define themselves by the television show they spend the most time watching, and as a minor-league obsessive-compulsive and a major-league fan I was primary amongst that demographic.

After over two years of media deprivation and gainful employment I feel like I have a better handle on “me” than ever. I’ve found enough of my own opinions, tastes, and stories that I no longer need them to be sublimated by the tightly written copy of others.

However, aside from locking myself in my room I still haven’t found a way to resist the influence of people, and how they make me feel so fuzzy around the edges as their traits osmose into me. I pick up other people’s handwriting as if I am made of silly putty, the curves and splines of my letters easily influenced. My manner and style of speech is just is easily swayed.

I like blogging because it is a way of taking back me. I’ve always been the most comfortable with the written word, and keeping a written archive of my experiences and feelings allows me to re-experience – re-absorb – the aspects of me that matter the most. It makes it easier to get back in character because it represents the most crystalline, most consistent version of me.

I might not ever have a defense against the barrage of media and opinions that greets me each day as I set foot on my front step, but I now also have something much more indelible at my center. And that’s a good feeling.