Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

off-topics

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So, hi, it’s fucking spring outside with a vengeance. I just thought it’d share.

This has just been… whacky, lately. I mean, not to meta-blog more than i typically do, but the whole point of this is what i’m crushing on. It’s about those awkward moments, tremendous failures, and tiny victories. But, what happens when this is my awkward moment? What happens if my life is sailing smoothly elsewhere and this is the moment of doubt and trepidation, where i don’t know what to do or what to say?

Last year i kept Selina a virtual secret from my blog the entire time we dated … i’m not entirely sure why. I know it was because i didn’t like that my friends were coming here for news about my life rather than asking me about it personally. And, i know it was because i wanted to have something all for myself, separate from this. And, i was boring as hell. Now i don’t want to be boring, though, because this isn’t boring. There are things i want to say about it.

So…

::deep breath::

So, today we were walking down the street — me on my way to work and she on her way to an entirely late breakfast — and we were laughing and holding hands and i caught myself thinking dear god, we’re every annoying couple at every party and on every walk down the street that i’ve ever encountered. Somehow, though, from the inside it doesn’t seem so offensive … and it’s something i used to be entirely opposed to; i don’t think it’s the public’s business who i’m kissing at any given point in time — which has a lot to do with not talking about it on here too often, i guess. But, there comes a point when the kiss is more important than who is going to see it.

We usually kiss goodbye on the corner of 33rd and Chestnut, but today she had to walk further down the street and i was still on my way to the Main Building. Kissing her halfway down the block was odd … like i had missed hitting my mark on stage, but that the scene still worked. Worked out perfectly.

It might as well be the first day of spring It definitely feels like it. Do you think so?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/03/75014938/

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Sorry, i’ve been having a life.

My view has varied throughout my life, as i never can see the same thing out of my bedroom windows from place to place. As a child it was just the desolation of SouthWest Philadelphia with a hint of the city skyline buried off in the distance, and then it was a calm schoolyard with its swings and endless ranks of row-homes beyond. It was a shock to go from such typical views to Freshmen year, where i could see a postcard version of our entire city skyline from the window above my bed.


Kenny and i had an ongoing joke that year about how i would invite girls up to the room and ask them if they wanted to “see the view.” Of course, they’d have to climb right onto my bed to see what i meant, which played right into my plan of seduction via the illumination of the city lights.

No one ever took me up on the offer of the view, but it might have been because i never really offered it seriously; always packaging it with the joke that it was, in fact, my surefire means of seduction — which tends to diffuse the seductive power of the plan.


Right now it is raining. My neighbor has his blinds closed, so all there is to see is the oblong diamond overlay of his mottled brown siding, and the strange rust-orange of the next house with cabinets backed up against its windows so that all i can see is what’s on top of them. Stricly speaking, it’s the most restricted view i’ve ever had … even last year’s view of rowhomes sometimes came through with something a little more noteworthy. So, my window isn’t much to be proud of . . . except, between here and those houses on the other side, there is a tiny backyard world that is separate from the people in the houses that surround it. Staring out into it is like watching the interior of a snow-globe, only it is the outside and we are the in, and we are staring out at it through the protection of my tiny back window.

Right now it is raining, and the patter-splash-patter of it on the world below my window is easy to pick out from the street sounds and the sighing of my heater. On Monday all that was out there was sun, and in the afternoon it had reached its zenith and was headed home to sleep as its light was projected down through that tiny window.

My bed was magnified; all warmth and comfort. And, i’m thinking… it might not be the most impressive view that i’ve ever had, but it could be my favourite.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/03/75009809/

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Driving can seem exotic to me sometimes, especially out on highways that i don’t frequent. Cars aren’t something that are especially typical of my Philadelphia routine, other than various friends and acquaintances saving my ass from the winter chill by driving me back from the theatre at night. I got us to my house okay, but after that i was blind as to where we were or how we got there … just desperately trying to align myself via the river and signs pointing North to New York.

My romantic life being what it is, my mother has never had a girlfriend of mine to meet, and so we stopped by my house on Reed street on our way to New Jersey to see if she was around. She was, albeit barely in her underwear when i first opened the door unannounced, but mom was not about the give up the chance to meet an in-the-flesh significant other of mine who drives her own car and is bringing me home with her for the day.

I played chameleon as best i could in blue jeans and grey shirt against the hood of her car as my mom engaged us in idle chatter, trying to understand how she must come off the first time you meet her without my nervously cracking jokes to get in the way. My mother and i live on our torment of each other, mocking back and forth as we breathlessly converse, and to other people we seem too entangled in this strange familial subculture to be penetrated or understood. Idle chatter it was, about the rain that seemed to be on the way and where we were going. We finally ran out of steam (left without too many of our typical sarcastic remarks; on our best behaviour), and my mother gave me a kiss and a hug and, before i could turn around to walk back to the passenger side of the car, my mother gave her a kiss and a hug too. Hope to see you again, or something. That’s what she said.

Back in the car i was just madly grinning and fiddling with my seatbelt until my mother was safely across the street and back into our row home before i turned around and said “Well, that wasn’t so bad afterall.”

And, all of that was before New Jersey.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/03/75004495/

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I cried twice in a single twelve hour period, and in retrospect i’m not really too bothered by either. People are meant to cry; it releases the pressure that builds behind your eyelids — builds from sideways glances and offhand comments. And sometimes it is like a broken dam, and sometimes it is the trickle of a leaking faucet.


It is practically spring, and i will definitely ride with the windows down if she lets me.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/03/75002372/

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I have been shocked as of late when it comes to the quality of relatively new blogs that have been linking me; case and point: the brand new and witty Still Life With Woodpecker and the DIY retro-spacecrafty Secret Rocket 13. A coincidence that both blogs linked to Rabi and various members of the GangBang family, plus the as-of-late awe-inspiring BlueLikeThat? Sure… and maybe it’s a coincidence that one of them links to my girlfriend too :p

Meanwhile, a cruise through GangBang reveals discussion of respected blogger Heather losing her job (via an always-crushed-on Shaun). Shaun speculates that that Heather’s kvetching about in-house incompetence in this post is involved in her termination, which her above post seems to corroborate.

The crossover from blog to real life has been brought into sharp focus lately through a boggling round of events that do not begin or end with my girlfriend-related link, or even the fact that my girlfriend has her own blog (which, if you were wondering, makes her exponentially sexier than your average girl, as she also plays a bit of guitar). It’s more that both her roommate and her boyfriend also have blogs (which i’ve recently linked), and that one of the boyfriend’s hallmates figured out that he was the boy behind the blog after he found the link on my page, of which he’s apparently a semi-regular reader. It’s about how the shower-guy messaged me to ask if he was the shower-guy who i was talking about. It’s about my page being on the history of half a dozen computers in the Admissions Office. It’s about Sara, Laurel, Lauren, Elise, and god knows who else spending couples of hours each catching up on my archives. This has become the virtual 500-pound-gorilla of my hobbies and interests, and try as i might i can’t seem to keep it separated from my real life at this point for longer than a month or two after i meet someone new. And, honestly, i’ve always wanted it to be exactly that … something you have to take notice of … but, i suppose i never really thought it through until now.

The GangBang post combined with these recent events hits especially close to home today, as earlier i interviewed for a very tech-savvy co-op internship with a Fortune500 company based out of Philadelphia and was quizzed at length about my level of internet know-how. While my interviewer whole-heartedly agreed that my personal site talking about brushing my teeth and other such navel-gazing nonsense wasn’t something he wanted to use for or against his decision to hire me, he did perk up at my descriptions of Blogger and Little Yellow Different and furiously wrote both addresses down on his legal pad (presumably to surf to later). While i’m not exactly the featured link on either the big B or LYD, i do figure rather heavily into PuppetMaster and SurvivorBlog2 on the latter … blathering endlessly about purity points and my opinion on drugs on one & being a whore and hitting on Ashley and James on the other (not to mention that i’m relatively easy to find via Google, which he was definitely familiar with). I could tell that i definitely garnered points with him by talking about learning HTML on my own and coding the basics of my site in PHP, but i’ve definitely got to stop mentioning Ernie at job interviews.

Quite a conundrum to find myself talking about the page with Lauren in Admissions today and be told that all of my recent philosophical wanderings on the subjects of Cold and Real-Audio pale in comparison to the expression of emotion. A bloody heart is the reddest kind after all… i’m just afraid that at this rate that even my oft-spied-on neighbor might wind up reading about what i think of him.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/03/10429976/