Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

identity

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I happen to really need a razor. Like, alot. I am down to my last disposable razor, and it seems to have lost it’s sheen. This is not to say i suddenly have some sort of mutant five o’clock shadow or anything of the kind, but i definitely start looking like a gang-member if i don’t shave in any given 36-hour period. It all would seem to add up … lack of razor, razor in the checkout aisle, me with a large margin between the price of eggs and saran wrap and the $20 i have in my hand. But, do i buy the razor? The shiny, new, rubber-grip, extra-blade, sleek, black, razor? Do i?

Of course not. Why? Because i am too embarrassed to pick up a razor and have it rung in the middle of a supermarket. I might get away with it at CVS, where they deal regularly in those sorts of things, but i feel like if i had attempted to buy it last night the cashier would’ve responded in the fashion of “Damn, boy, if you’re gonna buy your daddy a razor for Christmas least you could do would be get him an electric.” Or, you know, something else to that incredibly embarrassing and demeaning effect.

I’m afraid to buy men’s toiletry products in public. God help us all if i ever have to go and buy condoms*.

It’s just as if i’m done being a boy, and we all know i’m not a boy anymore, but the Man-Fairy will not come down and wave his magic wand to make the whole thing official so i can do things like buy shaving cream, or fuzzy-handcuffs, or anything else a man might buy.

I mean, i…. um, did i just say Man-Fairy? With his magic wand? Was i seriously blogging about that for, like, an entire second there?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7924530/

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I have become totally domesticated in my living with the gals. It’s not as though it bothers me, but i just feel like they’re intruding upon my messy bachelor years, or something. For example, yesterday i actually called home from work to see what they would prefer my nighttime culinary endeavor to be. So, not only did i premeditate my potential meal (based upon leftover supplies from the dinner i made on Tuesday!), but i decided that i needed to clear it with the roomies before i made the decision on my own. Sadly, I didn’t catch either of them, and seeing as i had the sneaking suspicion that one of them was highly alarmed by eggplant i refrained from shopping for the supplies i had in mind until i got a verbal “okay” from them. After a few hours of lounging on the couch when i should’ve really been doing the Business final i’m taking a break from now i was greeted by Erika, who came bearing groceries of her own! I started helping her with dinner until we realized that we were out of eggs, and so off i went (in my pajamas) to the grocery store — without a second thought.

It seems likes common courtesy or just being thoughtful roommates, but i really feel as though i’ve gone from being one of those cats that the neighbors leave food out on their porch for to being a house cat that occasionally struts around the lawn just to affirm his outdoorsyness. It’s not that it bothers me or anything, i just think it’s incredible what a difference a year makes; this time last year i was spending $60 a week on takeout food and eating a box or two of granola bars every weekend. Now i’m spending $60 a week on making dinner for the three of us, and eating leftovers all weekend.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7924253/

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There is a tiny spice cookie echo at the back of my mouth, and a similarly worn in feeling of comfort in my too blue attire — locked in from hours just spent on Lindsay’s floor. My birthstone is sapphire, and blue is my comfort color; today i am all in it, with just the tiny red racing stripe of interruption down each side of my jeans.

Today was Accomplishment Day, with my brain like a slot machine that just lined up three perfect cherry red pairs of cherries, and all of my accomplishments were quarters sliding shiny out of my mouth. To wit, in Critical Reasoning we talked about the gambler’s fallacy, which would seem to indicate that just because i had a successful day today doesn’t mean i should anticipate having another one tomorrow. Of course, my brain is not quite the polished chrome model of a casino machine or the red-black-red of a roulette wheel, even if sometimes it’s wrinkles and turns would have me believe that it was as random as all of that. There is a bias towards winning in this system, because every time i do something right i am more convinced that i can do it again. Two weeks ago i got one quiz back marked with a fat red A, today i got three; i am a man convinced.

Like dawn welling up over New Jersey in the early morning sky, today in Communication Theory i realized that all of these numbers and letters on my papers won’t mean anything when i’m thirty, unless i’m still in school then. Drunken scholar Kenneth Burke informed me that it’s all about my inherent guilt-redemption cycle at nine o’clock in the evening. It felt like someone had hit the pause button on my academic life in the middle of a press screening to wonder aloud at how the writer/producer/director had just made his first (fatal) flaw. I was standing outside of myself watching my accumulate checkmarks and superlatives; i was my refrigerator door, magnets gleaming as they lay in wait for another tidy 10/10 quiz to get tacked on.

At nine thirty someone brushed up against the play button by accident, and a scant score of frames later i pirouetted down the divide between our campus and Penn’s singing at the top of my lungs: the cumulative total of red letters and accounted-for numbers and solid notes and actually getting something done, just this once. For once my day made a dent.

(Bang!)

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7109153/

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That’s (read the last post first, silly) the encapsulated story of my life… find out about something, fall in love with it, remove it from any sort of social context, and then watch it wither and die on its lonesome. That’s how all of my crushes work too… find someone i adore, remove them from their life to insert them into mine via the insides of my head, and then watch the actuality of us wither and die because i’ve separated it out from the social soil it was once rooted in.

I never had sleep overs. I never had to share my toys or play with a second person. I never permanently traded or anted up anything to anyone in my entire life. I never learned that the whole point of having a life of my own was to share it with anyone else, and so in highschool i marched home every day to dutifully ignore my homework and read my email while other people hung out and messed around and dated and did drugs for the first time; i was my own intensive after-school program. Eventually the internet grew into its own social structure so much that i was discarding friends who i couldn’t keep up with via IM and starting to have online-only acquaintances who i looked forward to talking to. And, eventually, this happened.

I can’t really decide which is the magic card: this page, or this life. On one hand, i pour my heart and soul and free time for no kind of compensation into something that not more than a couple of hundred people see on any given day. On the other hand, i have this wonderful spark of existence that i am mostly busy keeping to myself… emotions and voice and song that i’m bored with from all the times i’ve sat through them, but that amaze other people.

Either way, i figure i am still living the life of an only child… i create my own personal fantasy where the sharing is always one-sided and shun any interruptions of it. In that respect, this page mirrors my life. The things i say are the toys that i have earmarked so carefully to be touched by other children in the sandbox while i keep Jinx and my Nightmare card secreted deep in the pockets of my memory. I am spoilt and selfish, but i do not learn. You’d think i’d know better by now than to be selfish, and i might have figured out that i like going to parties better than i like sitting and staring at the blank white box of blogger, but i apparently haven’t caught on that i have to be a real person-shaped-person here if i expect to be treated as such by an audience…. blah. sleep needs to happen now. i’ll continue this tomorrow… ! in fact…:

to be continued…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/6906529/

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In Com Theory last week we touched upon Mead’s Theory of Symbolic Convergence, and one of the primary principals of it is the concept of the “Other,” which is the version of ourselves that we create based on society’s view of us. Without delving too deeply into the theory, basically when we refer to ourselves as “me” we are referring not to what we are, but what everyone else has labeled us as. And, in light of all of this, i just feel like i am in a constant power-struggle to keep “I” somewhere close to “me.” If you take that a step farther you could imply that people’s definitions of me inevitably reflect on my behaviour because i am either conforming to their expectations or trying to subvert them.


If you can’t see how fucked up it is for that to be imposed on a still-developing person for the entirety of their adolescence and young-adult life i’ll have to lend you my textbook sometime.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6486287/