Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

off-topics

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I don’t know why drinking always seems like such an attractive thing. I don’t like it, really. I guess there’s just something about being twenty-something and metropolitan and going to a bar that makes me feel like i’m having fun. But, after five rounds of mixed drinks and more hours worth of pay than i’d really like to contemplate right now, last night it occurred to me how silly and meaningless it was — doing something i don’t like with people that i do so that we can laugh and have fun, except we laugh and have fun anyhow, whether or not i’m on my third long island.

I don’t think i need to stop drinking, i just think i need to be honest about what it does (and doesn’t) represent. It represents a childhood of watching Cheers, having my family tempt me with shots of liqueur at Christmas, of watching Karen martini-in-hand on Will & Grace. It represents commercials and advertisements telling me liquor is fun and worthwhile. It does not represent happiness, or success, or friendship, or anything other than getting more and more willing to do more and more unlikely things as the evening wears on.

I had fun last night, and wouldn’t trade the hilarity i had with my friends for anything. However, next time i wouldn’t mind saving my money, avoiding the embarrassing phone messages left at two in the morning, skipping the part where i fall on the street and rip my favorite pair of jeans, and leaving out the bit where Elise is so frustrated with me that she just goes home.

Also, sleeping off the hangover, though not entirely unpleasant, kept me out of work long enough that i could have made up my bar tab and then some. Damnit.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/12/107177270727860385/

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In comments on a MetaFilter post about Democratic Presidential hopeful Howard Dean insinuating that President Bush and his advisors had advanced warning about the 9/11 attacks, there is an interesting link to a extensively footnoted timeline of the President’s actions on the morning of September 11th. I not only admire the extensive research presented here, but am rather more apalled than usual at the picture it paints of the President — rather than implying knowledge, it would seem to actually imply that no one thought to interrupt his grade-school photo-op in order for him to act as a the Commander in Chief during the most major foreign orchestrated attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/12/107074426798247507/

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We break the radio-silence of Term-Paper-Hell-Week to bring you this important bulletin: Record Kingdom, my oft–lamented but still–beloved co-op employer from 2002, is apparently going out of business! Lindsay and I haven’t spoken to any of our former co-workers yet, but we were both sad to hear about it; though we didn’t exactly pledge our undying allegiance to RK, we spent a lot of long hours trying to make them a more organized, more profitable company.

Details of the sale impressed upon me how much work really goes into an eBusiness — L and I were around for much of that development, but i could never so easily rattle it off. Lindsay alone is probably responsible for a third of all of the audio samples they have on their site, and i think i had entered more than five thousand record summaries in the six months of my employment.

It’s funny, because i joke at Admissions events that the best part of working for an eBusiness as an intern is that if the company goes under it’s an educational experience rather than a occupational crisis. However, even over a year removed from my experience i am sad to think of someone other than Steve answering the phone, or someone other than Train pricing up the records. For half a year Lindsay and I were essential to records getting bagged, and bar coded, and shelved, and filling and boxing orders, and even sometimes opening the building in the morning; it’s hard to picture the evidence of that disappearing.

As a note, i can’t even begin to imagine what they’re asking for the whole operation. On one hand, the cheapest records they have in stock (out of 35k+ onsite alone) are $4, and they have an obsessive international customer base. On the other, a lot of the $4-$8 records were bought for pennies on the dollar, and the customer base obviously wasn’t quite enough to fund the four to eight employees it took to keep everything running smoothly. If you know any big record resellers or eBusiness tycoons, have them give a call — it’s a rock solid operation.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/12/107057195429775198/

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Good lord, if i had to write seventy five hundred highly critical, super observant words about theatre every term i think i’d grow to loathe it altogether. I mean, for heaven’s sake, they’re made up people! And, i have to have them act the whole damn thing out in my head, since i only directed one scene from the damned play.

Anyhow, three days spent largely locked in the house with Erika, and 17 of 30 total pages due-by-Friday complete in my campaign to get Winter vacation started sooner than later.

Speaking of whom, we decided a few things while we were in the mall for five hours on Black Friday. Namely: The 80’s are not coming back, no way, no how, we deny that anyone even contemplated it. The color palette was too all-over-the place, the fashions were altogether unflattering, and the music was drenched in too much reverb. We realize that we’re on a two-decade spin cycle, and that the 90’s just rehashed the 70’s, but we don’t care.

Furthermore, women’s clothing with a single initial letter monogrammed over the breast is fucking dumb. I repeat: fucking dumb. We reserve the right to mock any such walking fashion faux-pas until she bursts into mascara-trailing tears. However, please note that giant letters worn across the whole of your chest are highly acceptable, as long as they are at least two thirds as wide as they are tall.

And, for the record, eight straight hours of dissecting a single nineteen page play is not good for one’s overall sanity. Or eyesight. It is good for one’s desire not to write the other thirteen pages starting on Thursday after Friends, though.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/12/107027200237748002/

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iTunes gains even more favor by not only adding Ani’s entire catalogue, but featuring an exclusive download of new tune “Swim,” recorded live at The Orpheum in Boston less than two weeks ago! Also, if anyone has an inside track on being a reviewer at iTunes, let me know; a quick read of the Ani reviews shows deft textual work combined with an overwhelmingly enthusiastic love of music. And, well, if those aren’t two of my best personal traits then i hardly know what to do with the rest of my holiday weekend, because they’re both being relied on to get me through two hellishly boring research papers.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/11/107003127838453408/