Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

selfy-stuff

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Today is my last day at the coffee shop; just another tiny end-parentheses in the string of open ones i’ve managed to create in my life. The funny thing is, i open a lot more things than i close. Maybe it’s just the packrat within me, but being the drama-king that i am i always thought that i really did sever as many ties as i’ve made. But, i haven’t. I don’t end friendships, or memberships, or hobbies, or anything. Sometimes some of them get put on hold for a little while to make room for other things, but nothing ever goes away; i still have boxes upon boxes of comic books at home and a years-old saved campaign of StarCraft on my computer. So, the feeling of something ending is strange to me – powerful and relieving and bittersweet. No more free bagels. No more trying to entice customers with free music. No more coming home with the scent of ground coffee and too-sweet pastry ground into my fingerprints.

Off to work i go…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2358316/

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I’m still on SurvivorBlog2, as improbable as that might seem. All of my net-friends loudly proclaimed that i’d get booted fast when they first found out that i was a contestant, though i don’t recall any of them qualifying their statement with any reasoning. It’s an odd thing,… all the fun dynamics of a group log but with the subtle undercurrent of competition for attention and favour. I actually quite like it. I managed to win immunity from voting all this past week, first with a lovely speech i made in ra/mp3, and then by being the least popular logger still on our virtual slice of the outback. That least popular bit surprised me at first, but it didn’t burn at all; i open up as much as any of the other posters, but i’m not around as much and i’m just not as quirky.

I’ve yet to have a vote against me, but since i was protected for a whole week for all i know i could be voted off by everyone tomorrow. In a way i want to stay around, but i see how much this page is suffering. Yes, i run to them with the hottest sparkling shards of my life, and this is just the bits that fall through the proverbial cracks. For a while the many hits i was drawing from Sblog2 related links subsidized the slow decline of you all (my actual readers), but now it’s getting a bit out of hand. It’s true that i needed some kind of break from this (as was evident from my mean-spirited and belaboured posts in early January), but i never intended to let it shrivel up and die.

When Blogger adds this week’s archive to the page, it’ll be the 26th one; i’ve been doing this for half a year now. Time fools me the same way that physical scale does. This school year seems to be dragging on forever, but it’s a whole month shy of how long i’ve been blogging and that seems like just a tiny dent in the whole of my life. I’ve been rehearsing Good Woman of Setzuan for a month now, and there’s just under a month left. The month that’s passed seems like it stretches back infinitely far, and the one to come feels as if it’s going to evaporate before me, leaving my grasping for my lines tomorrow night under the spotlight.

Coincidentally, today marks the month anniversary of something else too. If you read closely i think you might know what. I’m sorry that i haven’t been as omnipresent on here as i’ve been in the past, but it’s just the way things go. Maybe, finally, my life has gotten up enough momentum of its own that this can’t be just a continuously updated daily log of boredom. Maybe now i’m bringing back the tiny shiny gems of experience i find during the course of each day. Or maybe i find myself a bit too important for my own good. Who knows. Love ya, and i’m off to work on lines so that the spotlight doesn’t catch me by surprise.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2333919/

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I read too fast for my own damned good. Yesterday i decided to go on a smallish shopping spree with my credit card to see how close i could get to maxing it out without being rejected from purchasing something. In the madness, i hit Borders and picked up Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon and a sweet oversized edition of Silence of the Lambs. I’m not sure what suddenly spurred this in me, but recently my girlfriend’s roommate has been powering through Lambs, and i always meant to read it, and i sorta want to go see Hannible. So, i suppose the plan was to get through the two of them soon enough to buy a non-movie edition of Hannibal to read before i go see the flick in a weekend or two. Or, as it turns out, maybe this weekend.

First of all, you have to understand my unholy hatred of movie-edition paperbacks. I hate them. Hate them. While having the image of a main character to aid me in visualization is always helpful, i’ve endured too many ugly movie-photos like the ones on the covers of The Beach or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, both of which previously featured superb cover work. Even worse, the new edition of Hannibal doesn’t even use the creepy zombie-like picture of Anthony Hopkins from the movie posters – instead it substitutes some awful and nearly amusing picture of him preening with a large straw hat on. It isn’t too threatening.

Borders had two copies of the non-movie edition, but i didn’t want to get ahead of myself. Paperbacks cost quite a lot now ($8 for a paperback? Does anyone else miss the 90’s yet?), and i didn’t want to sink nearly $30 into three books that i might not even like. So, i bought Red Dragon so i could finally read it & Silence of the Lambs, which looks nice if nothing else. I finished the dense 450 page Dragon in under 20 hours of intermittent reading; started around 4pm yesterday and completed noon today with rehearsal, sleep, and class coming inbetween. I was proud of myself. I’ve been known to finish 500 page books in well under eight hours in the past, but i tend to lose my momentum when i don’t read a large book all in a single sitting.

So far my impression is that Thomas Harris is a tremendous writer but a nearly equally inconsistent author who relies on too many plot devices and explicit histories in the place of actual suspense and horror. Much as in the movie of Silence of the Lambs, where you become excited by the chase rather than the whodunnit, this novel reveals the killer early on and becomes a book as much about him as about the protagonist (who’s a much better character). The protagonist is vivid, logical, and entangles himself and the reader frighteningly deep into each murder. On the other hand, the killer’s history is boring, contrived, evokes little pity, and surprisingly does nearly nothing to set the reader up for his near schizophrenic behaviour near the end of the novel. In fact, the book took a downturn as soon as it dropped the pretense and mainly focused on the murderer. And, i’ll never look at dentures the same way again.

Lambs is 350 pages in super-oversized soft-cover format, and it looks to be a bit more firmly put-together than Dragon. And, of course, it has a lot more of Hannibal Lecter in it. One thing i’ll hand to Harris as an author is that he crafted the ultimate chiller of a villain in Hannibal; in his new forward to the first novel he portrays the writing of Lecter’s first scene as though he viewed it from a corner where he was huddled in fear the entire time, fending off the urge to bolt out the door as well as the cackling of other inmates in the asylum. His description of writing Hannibal seems apropos, because i would hardly expect someone to deliberately conjure this sort of killer from the depths of their own imagination. A monster is hard to create, and much easier to develop in small strides as he crawls into the cracks of your psyche and makes you scared to even write him. Lecter definitely had that effect on his author, and now i can hardly wait to get Silence of the Lambs out of the way so i can run back to Borders tomorrow to buy a lovely copy of Hannibal.


Who knows, i might even wind up seeing it this weekend…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2296596/

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You know, i sometimes get the idea that certain logs are illustrious and powerful just because i know their names. I mean… i don’t really actively seek out new blogs to read; i just happen upon the ones i happen upon. However, in my half a year of happenings i’ve seen a few names pop up more than i’ve seen others. Whether it be on PowerBlogger, or on the sidebar at blogger.com, or on other people’s lists of links, some names are just more visible than others. I think what eternally surprises me is what i find when i visit these sites; i expect them to be masterful works with strong narrative voice and a sense of direction, but most of the time the writers have a lot more in common with me than with my preconceived notion of them.


What’s funny is that i exist on the other side of that notion sometimes too. I mean, this log has been around long enough to give people the chance to see it linked from various placed without actually reading it, and the fact that some of them might come here with the sense that i’m in some way important is pretty boggling. Of course, maybe no one does that sort of thing but me; it wouldn’t be the first time.

Last night one of my best friends turned to me and said “I was sorta afraid to talk to you, because i figured you wouldn’t really be interested in someone like me.” It wasn’t that she thought i was too cool, or anything like that, she just made the assumption that i had enough friends as it was and to try to be befriend me was not worth the effort.


I couldn’t even believe my ears as i had this explained to me, because when i comes down to it i’m a very isolated person with very few friends who i actually talk to daily, and she just assumed that i didn’t need anyone else like that in my life. Well, i did, and thank god we actually wound up talking eventually, because i don’t know what i’d be doing without her at this point.

Moral? I don’t know. How about we try this: today go to your favourite log that always struck you as being famous and popular and groovy, and send the author an email telling them how much you appreciate their writing. You’d be amazed at the response you get, whether you get to see it or not. I’m on my way to my favourite famous-log now; you better be doing to same!

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2280880/

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I really think i might be trying to fail out of school this semester. Of course, by this point i think we’ve established that failing out for me would be equivalent to getting a C in any one subject.

I’m not in class right now. I’m in the building where class is held, i have no physical restraints to attending class, but i’m not there. None of my classes are holding my attention, it’s as simple as that. I’ve managed to pull straight A’s in Literature attending half the lectures and reading a third of the books, my public speaking class is so useless that i honestly think i’m getting worse at speaking publicly, i haven’t learned anything in recording for two weeks (although that’s entirely my own dumb fault for being so tired in class all the time), and i couldn’t even go to Aural Skills last week because i couldn’t hear or sing through my headcold.

Am i trying to fail? Is it just that i already got my role in the play and my co-op position and just don’t want to fight for anything else? Are my classes all so easy that i think the only way i could possibly have to work for them is if i only attend once or twice a week? I’m really not sure, but something’s gonna change – and it’s either going to be my behaviour or my grade point average.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2280491/