Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

selfy-stuff

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I am not liking people very much right now.

I do this about once a month, which makes it sorta my version of PMS on as-of-yet i have no chemical and harmonal imbalances to blame it on. Basically, all of the people in my life just start to feel like cardboard cutouts and Gap manequins that i don’t really have a ton of emotion tied up in, and i’m not sure if it’s because i don’t communicate with anyone well enough or if they were 2-dimensional and posed to begin with. Right about now i almost wish that Blogger was just a major metro city and all the happy little bloggy people i talk to were just down Market street or across the river or something, because i’m not even remotely talking to more than one or two of my actual friends on a regular full-disclosure basis. Shall we take a head-count? I have the theatre crowd who i keep swearing off and rejoining, and the admissions/drexel crowd who i go incommunicado with even though they’re genuinely nice people, and the music crowd that suddenly turned into one big couples vacation, and the highschool crowd who i never see, and after all that i’m just feeling crowded and there aren’t really any individual people in there just bunches. Like grapes. Do you ever see a bunch of grapes and stare at one and say “i want to buy that bunch of grapes so i can eat that one very special grape?”

And, to make this all just as pathetic as it is annoying, i claim to be feeling more lonely than usual as of late. I think i just need one certain person (not necessarily romantically) to be cool and nice and not dramatic to get me through this bitter little stretch, but i don’t know who they are. Sadly, they can’t be Benjy or Nancy or Rabi or any other internet person i talk to more than i talk to my actual friends, because this person needs to be actual and physically available to do things with. And, the sad thing is, i have people who would be that person for me, but i’m not totally interested in being that person for them. Of course, this is just a symptom of bigger issues, like my grass-is-greener kind of capriciousness where i hop from interest to interest without ever delving into anything… only instead of albums and hobbies we’re talking about fleshy & feeling people. I can tell if this has been developing ever since my last ditching of the theatre crowd and ignoring all of my other friends for Selina, or if this is a direct result of having just gone through an “acquire” phase where all the people i really like consistently got shelved like cds from last fall, but either way i”m here with this constantly compiling mass of new people, and new things, and new music, and i just hate all of it.

I wish someone would formally diagnose me with some of the problems i’m a walking case-study for so i don’t feel quite so self-concious and insipid talking about them here, but what is blogger if it isn’t the pop-psychologist that doesn’t talk back for the inner only-child of us all?

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4592467/

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We are producing two student written plays that are very witty and funny and i got cast as the male lover in both of them against the same female lover. I didn’t really think about the reality of kissing someone night after night on stage when i was auditioning, but now it looks like i am adding one more person to my impeccably neat little list of lips i have locked with, and my irrational fear of herpes alarm bell is ringing like mad. And, chat logs are lame.

Peter: I’m feeling much more apple-pie than normal

Rabi: is it fun?

Peter: No, not really. Well, the kissing thing is very shocking, but of all the people i could be kissing it’s absolutely the person i’m most ambivalent about kissing … which is good, because – no trouble. But, which is bad, because i am a romantic and meeting a girl in a love scene (or a making out repeatedly scene, as the case may be) in a play works out in my head

Rabi: the thing about those romantic fantasyish scenarios is that they have such a slight chance of ever being as good as they could be in a story or a song or whatever

Peter: Well, one of the other people i could be kissing met her boyfriend freshmen year doing the play. So, i didn’t want to kiss her either, cause it would be weird. I really wanted the almost-kiss girl to audition, because we would definitely get cast against each other.

Peter: And, of course, in my head my current partner quits the play in a huff and her replacement is some perfect girl and we fall for each other madly, but that’s just how things work in my head. They have a certain sort of gravitational symmetry

Rabi: kismet ?

Peter: Yes, but Kismet in Peter’s-Head Romantic Gravitational Units (phRGU) instead of Real-World Romantic Gravitational Units (rwRGU)

Rabi: I totally read that as fargo

Rabi: phrgu that is

Rabi: in some ways though isn’t it better to imagine it than have it actually happen? or something?

Peter: Um….

Peter: I think that’s been too much of my life so far. I mean, you read my page, right?

That sums it all up pretty well, i think. And remember, equations involving Crushing Krisis always need to be equated into phRGU. Or, fargos, for short.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4494829/

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This weekend beat the crap out of me, and it didn’t help any that i got in tonight at 8. A lot of stuff transpired in my head but nothing made it onto here. I was walking home from the guitar store on Friday night and i passed the shell of a dragonfly dead on the ground; it was a battered exoskelton with the middles of its wings gone so it was just like a stencil of itself. I had something really profound to say about that on friday, but now i just wish i had a camera with me.

This weekend was exactly that… perceptions frozen in perfect little moments that don’t really click in recollection. Yesterday i swam for three hours straight, and i haven’t swam for more than a minute or two in over two years. It wasn’t easy, and today i’m in all sorts of aches and pains because of it, but i feel slightly more in shape now. I am out of shape. This weekend is the first time i’ve been in revealing circumstances (swim trunks) and people haven’t remarked on my thinness; in fact, they said i looked as though i had gained some weight. People think i’m joking when i say i feel heavy, but i’m not joking. I feel like some kind of parody of a supermodel always saying she needs to lose a few more pounds, but i honestly can’t stand myself at this weight. I know, i have issues.

People think i’m kidding about issues. I remember as far back as age 7 or 8 not wanting to take my shirt off at the beach because i didn’t like how i looked in just swim trunks. In middle school i got changed in the corner of the locker room because i was afraid that i was chunky enough that i looked like i had breasts (definitely not a valid concern). In high school i wore hospital scrubs in gym so that no one would see the round hairy legs that betray the rest of my build as being something other than slim or wirey. There’s a backstage picture of me from senior year where i don’t have my shirt on, and it looks like you can fit two hands around my waist or roll a marble down the center of my chest and it would stop in the puddle of my belly-button in the middle of my unreally flat stomach. I love that picture. I know that i was unhealthy and too-thin and that it made people uncomfortable, but i felt comfortable and didn’t mind showing my body off. Now i hide it… people at parties remark that i am spectacularly unglamorous latlely and laugh it off when i seriously reply that i feel too fat. And now everyone else is comfortable with my body except for me, and i don’t know which i prefer.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4459359/

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

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My mother breezes through the office on the way to the seashore and she is famous. Administrative assistants fawn over her. Tour guides smile politely. I understand people being ungodly nice to my family as if they actually liked me when i’m there to witness it, but the fact that they did it while i was safely hidden away in the bookstore makes me think people here actually like me. She was gone in a flash-bang of blonde-streaked hair and bandages on her arm before i could really talk to her much, and i came back to my office to find this sitting on my chair.
Naturally i assumed that it was provided by my mother… with phrases like “Others find it difficult to accept your domineering and, at times, argumentative manner” that fit well with our generally contentious yet friendly relationship (“there is little demonstration of sentiment, appreciation, sympathy, or encouragement”). However, the piece of paper in question was placed not by mommy-dearest but by Izabelle, fellow admissions employee and all-around partner in crime.

Now, i’m typically the most critically skeptic person i know about these personality indicators, but i think there’s something to this one only because of the combination of my first and middle names. Peter apparently predisposes me to be “not inclined to merge [my] opinions and viewpoints with others” and to be “invariably quite direct and candid, and lacks the moderating tone of tact” (in highschool i was known as the boy who wholly was lacking tact). I find it “difficult to find the right words.”

Right. Which is why i talk so fucking much.

Meanwhile, the more interesting determination is the flavouring given by my middle name: “Your pleasant manner attracts people to you with their problems and you are capable of offering practical advice, though you would probably not follow such advice yourself.” Right. The thing is, the majority of the names i look up have summaries that obviously aren’t applicable to the people they represent in my life, and a quick browse through the site reveals the same sentences used in combinations again and again in different opposite seeming names. So, it just happened to get the combo right in a way that it really struck me. That’s how scam-artists work (they want you to pay them for a more exact description).

Oh, yeah, and “weaknesses in the health caused by [your] name center in the head.” Heh.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4346382/