Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

identity

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For a while i was wholly obsessed with maintaining my general anonymity on the internet. I was ambiguous about my sex, and my location, and i never ever used my real name for anything. That’s what the internet was for, after all, escaping me. However, i’m also wholly obsessed with revealing each minuscule detail of my life to everyone on the internet: i’m obsessed with blogging, and obsessed with being on my webcam, and totally obsessed with posting my songs. And, i realized today that my obsession with anonymity must be wholly over if i’m sitting in front of my computer for 24 straight hours posting stories about me, pictures of me, and recordings of my own voice. Somewhere along the line my online persona became less of something to hide behind and more of a distillation of what i’m actually all about. Yes, i do cringe or look mildly confused when other loggers read my name somewhere. However, now i find that i actually have friends – friends who i care about and laugh with and shed tears over and miss when they aren’t on. And, i don’t think i can honestly say i had many of those while i was still some nebulous genderless nameless entity. So, hi, this is Peter reporting back to you after a day spent totally not recovering from 25/24. I somehow competently moved the whole mess over to it’s own page, and i’ve almost worked out what the contents of the Best-Of disc will be, and i mailed all of my sponsors. However, my bills are late, my private life is unkempt, and i still need more sleep. Do i sound frazzled enough? Welcome back to normalcy :p

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4825038/

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I sorta learned to speak by listening to Ani DiFranco; you can hear me hem and haw and um and ahh my way through my sentences complete with lil’ folksinger giggles and breathlessly ended phrases. This isn’t an all-the-time thing, but you can certainly hear the influence whenever i forget who i am and start talking about my music. But, Ani’s not the only person who’s had an unintentional effect on my speech patterns: i pepper my campus tours with twangy southern “y’alls” and attach “ya knows” to the tails of my statements in an unmistakenly Fargo fashion. In the cases of the latter two affectations, i’m not entire sure how i picked them up, but generally anyone i listen to often has an effect on how others hear me – and the surest way to tell is to ask me to talk about music and proffer me a bemused smile as my sarcastically directed patterns take a left-hand turn and suddenly i’m saying “Well, ahh, this song… this song was, um, not the easiest song. Not the easiest song to write… but it wrote itself, i suppose.”


Oh, did i mention i picked up some loopiness from Tori?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4385675/

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The sky is so very grey that i feel like it’s drowning out all the reds and oranges in my personality and just leaving me calm with layers of blue and purple with maybe just a peak of yellow underneath. Or, maybe i just didn’t get quite enough sleep last night and am looking for an excuse to be low-key. Life is moving by very quickly as of late and i’m just trying to put in an appearance in every day and hour so i can at least say i was in on it even though it will be a blur in my memory.

I seem to be performing in a bar on campus tonight for an hour but i couldn’t explain to you how that happened if you were to ask me so you probably shouldn’t. I’ll get a weekly invite if i do well with the patrons this week and next, so if you have id (that’s identification, not the thing that hides underneath the ego and the superego and makes you all primal and stuff) you should come (Buffalo Bill’s, 35th and Lancaster, $5 cover, i’m on near 11pm). Also, my beloved Treble Makers are singing at the Drexel a capella show Saturday @ 4pm in Mandell Theatre, and they’re much cooler than i am even after you allow for the fact that there’s 10 of them and just the 1 of me. But, enough advertisement.

If one thinks ahead (i know, it’s frightening) to me actually being asked to show up with my guitar on a weekly basis, one would realize i’ll eventually have to get up off my ass and learn some new cover songs to play. In the last 24 hours i happen to have learned three, but that’s mostly because i just got an Ani DiFranco guitar book in my teeny metal mailbox and so now i am in study to eventually have an entire set just of Ani DiFranco songs (as if anyone can really tell the difference). I’ll definitely be Trioing my new covers this weekend, so keep an ear out for them. Should be interesting.

In a tangent tangentially related to my slow but sure musical growth and exploration, Gina seems to be moving into the apartment directly above mine for the summer (after which point i’m probably moving out). The ramifications of having Gina and I stacked one on top of the other with all of our various guitars and cds and things are rather exciting (probably more like terrifying to our neighbors), and life should definitely get more interesting. Or maybe just louder. We shall see. But, speaking of vertical neighbors, my downstairs neighbor randomly showed up at my door last night while my mother was fussing over my newly installed air conditioner, and a strange and uneasy conversation ensued. I have never been one to have guests over, especially on zero notice, so my entire third of the conversation seemed to be geared at getting one or more of us to exit the apartment. It’s not that i’m unfriendly, i’m just not really used to people being in my space. But, downstairs neighbor is very sweet and she likes to listen to me through the ceiling, so i won’t begrudge her some time standing on my threshold talking about where to get good 2for1 deals on whole frozen chickens with my mother.

Wow, that post got much more literal as it went along.

Even the music i brought with me to work today is sorta greyish sounding, and it’s all new so it’s just flying past my ears as i try to absorb some little pieces of it. But, i think i come here to actually work, as odd as that might sound, so i’m off for now, into the grey. Wish me luck.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/05/3673273/

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The dichotomy of my own personality can occasionally shock me. This week I haven’t even set foot in my own apartment before 11pm every night, and all of the intervening hours are spent in the presence of other people. Imagining little self-absorbed self-involved me wandering around from one group setting to another is somewhat unsettling, even though I almost love it. I know I love getting back to my apartment just long enough to check me mail (real mail, not email) and then crash out in the body-shaped dent in my bed full of pillows. I love seeing people I care about every day.

At the same time, I feel empty. My normal enthusiasm for everything from crossing the street to opening doors for people is gone. People keep asking me what’s wrong, and even though nothing feels that way obviously they can read it on my face. I feel disconnected from my songs, even after I spent literally the entire weekend holed up in my apartment with my guitar recovering from all the time I spent outside of it last week.

When I took the Myers-Briggs personality indicator last summer I strongly leaned to one side or the other on every category except Introvert/Extrovert, where my score was nearly centered. All of the people who took the test with me were shocked because they couldn’t imagine me as an introvert, but anyone who really knew me well just chuckled knowingly. I don’t know how to make time for other people and myself in my life, and so right now I’m trapped at one extreme knowing that I’d feel just as trapped at the other. The reason I’m involved in so many performance groups and activities is because I know they’ll always get me outside of my room, and that I’ll enjoy myself while doing them. But, sometimes I give away too much of that time, leaving me feeling as though I’m lacking my own energy and opinions, and I try to fix it by spending whole days holed away from anything else. But, it doesn’t work. I played guitar for nine hours on Saturday with no interruption, but it doesn’t feel like I got anywhere. I need to distribute those little pieces of personal time around my schedule for them to mean anything.

Of course, I can’t necessarily distribute. I know people who do what I’ve been doing every night, and who have been doing it for years now. They’re happy people, but I suppose they just scored higher on the extrovert scale than I did, because I can be just as miserable and depressed while I’m surrounded with friends as I am sitting alone in my apartment. Lately I feel like I’m just circling some sort of desperate emotional low, and that as long as I keep myself moving I won’t have to notice it. But, at this point, moving might just be getting me closer.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/05/3579857/

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So, i took the day off from blogging yesterday to do nothing. Sure, i went to work and all that, but otherwise it was wholly uneventful. I wound up sitting on my ass watching NBC reruns and eating salsa all night. Very productive.


It’s just that after spending so much time busy with friends nearly every day, a night to myself becomes entirely meaningless, even though it’s what i thought i really wanted. Sometimes i start losing touch with my “identity” when i’m flitting from person to person and from place to place, but then i get back here and realize that i haven’t got the slightest clue at what was missing. So, maybe i’m just possessive of my free time and want to make sure that i totally waste some of it on my own, or maybe i really do need time along here and there to recenter. Who knows…. anyhow, it’s off to work with me.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/03/2902550/