Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
by krisis
No matter how badass you look with you new buzzed hair cut, scruffy visage, black wifebeater, and “don’t fuck with me” carriage, an entire exercise in acting can be ruined when you remind the dry cleaner not to forget your black shirt because it’s “part of today’s outfit.”
Up until that point i was doing really good character work, though.
But, really what do pissed off looking potential West Philly gang members usually say when the dry cleaner tries to steal their favorite shirt?
by krisis
Dreams amalgamate my life and the inside of my head, suspending my disbelief by showing me what I want to happen. Sky has been a part of a lot of my dreams as of late; the Philadelphia skyline mapped in perfect three-dimensional detail.
Last night I found myself staring out from my IBC cubical view — I saw a strange dark swirling cloud dominating the distant skyline. Something struck me about that cloud — drew me to it, so out of place against the otherwise blue horizon. And, suddenly, the reinforced windows surrounding my floor were gone and I reached out my hand to meet fresh air, thirty-five floors about the ground.
Stepping up onto my desk, and then onto the window sill, I leapt out into the open expanse, the wind catching my body and propelling it upwards, ever upwards. I flew up to meet the blackness, only to find that like a passing plane it was ever higher than I thought. Half pushing against the increasingly distant ground, half pulling myself up towards its swirling vortex, I soon was close enough to see into its oily form.
Face to face with it, I found that it was not a dark cloud, but a nightmare, a nothing, a black bull hidden inside a swirling lightening storm. And I flew into its heart, striking out wildly against the air all around me, only to be driven down towards the earth by its horrible breath. Plummeting endlessly, like Gandalf and the Balrog. Unable to orient myself towards the great beast and push back against its power, slamming into the ground and whipped by sharp streams of rain, it combined unbearable pressure and swirling wind to tear the breath right out of me.
I remember it tumbling walls down around me, feeling the snap of ribs giving way against the onslaught and debris, and my last gasp for air as people shouted in the background, alarmed that I might be defeated outright. And i was.
Just because I am a superhero in my dreams does not mean I always win.
by krisis
Every time I attempt to sketch some odd facet of my corporate life for you I find an equally strange element of it inside myself. Today I sat down to regale you with a story of in-building encounters with the socially inept, but as I described each character in punishingly amusing detail, I began to make myself queasy. Who am I to observe perceived shortcomings of innocent co-working bystanders only to reveal them to the internet at large when the whim overtakes me, rendering real people into surreally abnormal characters like Neckless and Clenching Lady? Would I be able to award myself with a new moniker as easily? I wonder.
I am not the most socially healthy person on the planet. My compulsion to wash my hands after I touch anything to be found in public borders on obsession. My fear that I will not reach the doors of the bus before it closes up again to carry me far far away from my intended stop is overwhelming. But, foremost among all of these, are my elevator issues.
It’s not the claustrophobia so much, though sometimes I find myself in the back row of a sixteen-person deep load gasping for breath behind a blissfully unaware suit yapping about first quarter losses or decreasing corporate spending. That comes with the territory. No, instead it is the conversations — the simple, witless conversations of nicety that are grudgingly targeted at any rider who looks even vaguely familiar.
I live in abject terror of those conversations. Weather. Sports. Television. As one creeps up on me I feel as though all of my internal organs are slowly sliding into the crevices behind my knees, leaving only a the hollow thump of my heart, captive to its highway of veins and arteries, to hold court in the preternatural vacuum of my chest. Rain. The Phillies. Survivor. Each topic can leave me in a dead sweat, especially when initiated on a relatively early floor.
I don’t know what it is, really. The utter casualness, I guess, that people attempt to tune in to the channel to which they are homogenized on. With glee, they discover similarities that they share with tens of millions of other Americans. It is the conversational form of Walmart, and I am not sure if I am more horrified by how alien the topics generally seem to me or by the few with which I have intimate familiarity.
I occasionally attempt to play along. Last week someone asked me what I had in my discman, and I replied: “The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. They’re sort of a post-post-post-punk (so much so that they’re actually punk again) three piece lead by a woman who strikes me as a messy reincarnation of the, yes, entirely still alive Chrissie Hynde, which is not to say that the sound like the Pretenders at all, because they don’t, but sometimes you just get a vibe, huh?”
My rambling monologue took us from 22 down to 4, at which point the questioner returned a glassy stare. I smiled back. We rode down the last three floors in silence.
Funny how i am terrified of overwhelming homogeneity and they are petrified by anything heterogeneous. In a way I guess they are more afraid of me than I am of them, but it doesn’t make the ride any easier.
by krisis
Victory! Sweet, sweet, blueberry victory!
In other news: last night i played guitar for what has become a routine four hours, breaking only for the penultimate episode of Buffy and white pizza courtesy of Ross’s new credit card. This morning the skin on my fingers is rind-like and impervious to pain.
You could say that i’ve become a little obsessed with my practice regimen, ostensibly because i’m playing at a backyard festival this weekend and have vowed in public earshot to blow away all of the other performers. Really, though, it’s because i don’t know if i actually can. The recently revealed running order of the event finds me sandwiched between a duo of golden-throated music majors and a terrific a cappella group that i arrange for, with the entire day both book-ended and dotted by talented multi-instrumentalists and Philly pub performers. And in the middle is little old me.
At this late stage drilling finger exercises until i feel as though i’m going to vomit if i have to stretch my pinky to the seventh fret again probably isn’t going to do me much good, which is why i typically leave that until just before bed. The regimen begins as soon as i have stripped out of my corporate skin of shirt and tie, sometimes finding me strumming the opening chords of “Tangling” in an undershirt and low rise briefs. The run through the current iteration of my set quickly (and seemingly inevitably) descends into seething about my inability to pick complex patterns or endless fiddling with my amp tone, and rarely features more than a single complete song. Alternately, i could probably just look in a mirror and scream “you are worthless” for thirty minutes to achieve a similar effect on moral.
After this inevitably crushing warm-up routine, i turn to my Bible, The Complete Beatles Scores. What better comfort could there be to my inability to play my own misbegotten songs than to learn how to play some of the best songs ever written? Last night was a medley of Let It Be‘s A-Side, none of which i can carry all on my own. Still, the practice is useful because i am trying to match a specifically scored and recorded sound rather than some elusive cipher of a rhythm that only plays inside of my head.
After a solid run at the Beatles (always including thirty minutes on the riffing of “Dig A Pony” and at least two renditions of “Blackbird“) I am ready to perform my own set, minus the sniffling and whining. Or, rather, the sniffling and whining is restrained only to lyrical appearances. This set is typically much more affirming, though as a rule “Apart” sounds like utter shit. “Under My Skin” is placed strategically dead in the middle to remind myself that, yes, i can actually (write / play / sing) with some modicum of professionalism on a consistent basis. This is necessary, as my shot at “Seams” typically breaks down shortly after the key change.
I end with “Little Love,” because for a month i had intended to start with it and so bootstrapped it up past all of the intermediate levels of (total shit / shit / lyrical Alzheimer’s / inability to cross bridge / endless descent into ad-lib and riffing / constant Simon-Cowell-ing of vocal performance) to the point where i spent an entire hour last week walking around Center City with a guitar strapped on over my shirt and tie playing it and being asked my name and if i could be heard at any local bars or pubs. It isn’t “Under My Skin,” but it allows me to ignore (or, at least atone for) the two dozen false starts of “Apart” from earlier in the evening. It allows me to believe for a second that the forty or so friends that will be enduring me for a precious half hour on Saturday will perhaps clap out of something other than obligation.
Only after that do i brutally work my pinky fingers until my stomach knots with each effort. And then, sometimes, i go to bed.
by krisis
Lindsay, who just read the entirety of my archives and so is in the position to know these things, has informed me that i just have to write more often. If i write more often, she reasons, i will enjoy it more, and enjoying it will make it better.
This, historically, has meant that you (the reader) has to suffer through all kinds of crapola in the meantime. But, you didn’t have anything else to do, right?
“You’re on hiatus, huh?” It seemed like a funny question to ask me — of course i’m not on hiatus. When am i ever? I’ve only ever took one that i recall. One look at the date on my last post told me why i was being asked, though. Apparently just thinking about witty stuff doesn’t count for much in the blogging game .
As if it’s a consolation for missing out on daily updates from my decidedly droll life, i have somehow managed to notch my fourth consecutive quarter on the Dean’s List. To put that in more tangible terms for all of you literal thinkers out there, i am currently less than .03 away from graduating with honors. Not the dopey kind of honors you get from being in the “honors college.” Noooo. The kind of honors you get for being smart and doing well.
In an intriguing turn of events, i don’t remember a lot of being smart or doing well that happened over the course of this past quarter. Thinking about it is like trying to remember if i’ve blogged lately — i know that i got straight A’s, but i’m a little foggy on the when and the how of it. There was, of course, last week’s two days of hell as i built a Senior thesis paper from the relative nothingness of one interesting Scientific American article into a hulking five thousand word treatise on Globalization and Technology. I got an A in that class… despite not being a Senior and, oh, not even being enrolled in the major that i wrote a thesis for. Ha. And, people in the class talked about how the professor was the second coming of Vlad the Impaler, a veritable vampire of academia, sucking up lots and lots of work and leaving behind only the dried up dead husks of things he once regarded as students.
He seemed to like me, actually.
I could go on. Somehow i’ve gotten to this place, this place where i am successful and smart and yet i feel like some small part of me is living outside of it, wondering how someone could be so successful. And smart. And so goddamn charming.
Okay, so, maybe i made that part up….
