Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

selfy-stuff

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Yes, so, now my emotional life rests on the whims of a four year old, which honestly makes me feel a hell of a lot safer than when it rested on the whims of any number of nineteen and twenty year olds. But, this is just a symptom of my newfound adoration of young children. There’s this question on theSpark.com’s mating test that asks “Aren’t babies special?,” with the obvious intention of trying to suss out whether or not you are interested in having children any time soon. I always answered no, but this week i was thinking about it and i suddenly wanted to get online and change my answer to yes. I think it’s an age thing – i spent the entire week with three women aged roughly 75 who are slightly erratic and senile but also very funny, warm, and engaging. At the same time, tonight the only person who was missing from my family dinner was my paternal grandmother, who is in hospice care and not even 70.

My mother has a 26 year lead on me, so when i’m 40 she’ll be a venerable 66. She had the good fortune of having me while she was young and also forming a career for herself, so she now gets to watch me grow to be an adult as well as working at something she somewhat enjoys. All of my tiny cousins were born to aunts in their 40’s … when Audrey is my age her mother will be on the other side of 60 (and i’ll be 38… dear lord, let me find the fountain of youth before then…). How old will she be when Audrey has her own children?

I’m obviously biased by having such a young mother and father (it’s his 50th birthday today), but in my reflections on when i want to consider children in my own life a very certain and relatively small window of time is developing. I obviously would want to be out of college and securely in a job, but i’d want to have children while i was still young enough in body and heart to truly enjoy the experience and still have a life afterwards. That leaves a span of years that’s something like 26 – 35, which in today’s society (and recently in my family) is relatively young. But, what’s a boy to do? I might not be done living my own individual life by then, but do i really want to be in a retirement home when my kids graduate from college?

These are the thoughts that run through my head when i’m trapped in a condo in Florida at 4am with nothing to eat other than a bag of mini Twix bars and nothing to do except watch teevee or dream. These dreams are almost nightmares in a way, not because they’re frightening in and of themselves, but because they make me realize just how small the span of life really is. I somehow expect myself to mature into a lover and father in the next decade and a half… doesn’t that mean that i need to start dating eventually? Or, that i should start experiencing the things i want to do now rather than assuming i’ll get to them later?

Or maybe i should just start packing benadryl with me when i go on vacation so i’m not left with the time to ponder this sort of stuff. Either that or bring my guitar next time…

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2000/12/1763273/

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So, i think i’m encountering some extremely disturbing male relative of a “maternal instinct” lately. Tonight i spent Christmas Eve with my father’s side of the family, which is populated with five separate children aged 3-5 (by contrast, i was the only child of the family for over a decade before the next oldest cousin came along). While all of my cousins are usually fun to run and throw around, tonight i was a bit partial to my cousin Audrey. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that she’s the only blonde in our family, or because she’s the least baby-shaped of all the young kids, or because she has a personality (rather than the black & white shy/happy most children have), or anything else, but i find myself absolutely delighted whenever she decides that i’m worthy of her attention. After ignoring me for about three hours tonight, she decided that she absolutely needed to sit next to me and watch Winnie-the-Pooh for an hour, during the course of which i wasn’t allowed to get up or even move to the other side of the chair. Afterwards i was allowed to fetch myself some dessert if and only if i’d share it with her.

Now, obviously my rampant & irrational fear of herpes doesn’t come into play when sharing my fork with a four year old, but i still very rarely share anything with my cousins because i don’t want to get sick. I’m very healthy on my own, but generally my immune system falls like a house of cards in the wind whenever i introduce it to germs from some other person. Despite all of that, i sat on the couch with Audrey with the two of us alternately feeding ourselves and each other until my pile of dessert had disappeared. At some point my father captured the moment on 35mm film to be frozen forever, but i hardly noticed him doing it because i was more concerned with spooning up some strawberry sauce for Audrey.

My whole family thought that the whole affair was simply adorable (and very considerate of me), but really i didn’t have the urge to do anything else but sit there the whole time. Perhaps i was just sick of chasing everyone around the room and giving them piggy back rides, but i think it went beyond that. Audrey wanted to sit there with me, and only me, and she rested her head on my shoulder and idly toyed with the curly wisps of my hair, and it made me feel more special than any performance or audition or hits on my page ever will.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2000/12/1763249/

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She stared with these awful cow eyes, huge and nearly rimmed with tears welling up out of the dread obese depths of her neck. She didn’t seem to be able to breathe – not at all.

She kept looking up and fidgeting with that tiny air-vent as if it actually blows anything more than the most nothing little ebb down at you which just fades away four inches from the vent which is surely above your head (cow-like or otherwise).

All through the flight she alternately fidgeted and rested her huge cow-like face against the window. I could see the Philly skyscrapers peeking through the wisps of her bovine hair for a second before she reached up (yes, again) to fiddle with her air vent.

It was aimed at me the whole time, but i didn’t have the heart to tell her. Smoothest flight ever. We landed to PJ Harvey screaming “Kamikaze!” at the shrillest top of her lungs.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2000/12/1755675/

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Matt and I just cleaned. The whole process is really an exercise in futility because i know for a definite fact that i have more stuff than we have room to put it. Despite having thrown out two trash bags worth of discarded handouts and totally reorganizing my bookshelf the overwhelming lack of space remains an inescapable fact of my life. It’s likely that i could live in an apartment where all the walls were lined with shelves and i still would have a pile of something on the floor. However, it would be a smallish pile of something unimportant, which is why shelves turn me on so much.

Semi-pornographic obsessions with furniture aside, the apartment is clean right now. Clean. Saving me from celebrating in any fashion (perhaps through sleep?) there’s also easily my weight’s worth of miscellany covering the whole of my bed, which i’ll obviously have to displace in order to sleep tonght. I have repeatedly bemoaned my unescapable bulk of possessions, but i haven’t ever addressed why i own what i own. Frankly, i’m obsessed with material things; I wish i could just have some massively easy catchall mechanism to organize every little scrap of paper and ball of fluff that i want to keep. Sadly there is no mechanism available to me that would do just that, and i’m not nearly organized enough to be able to make good use of it.

My material possessions fall into three categories: things i use or might use, thinks i need or might need, and things i can’t throw out. The first category includes things like my entire cd, book, and comic book collections, which i could easily condense down so that they would fit onto my shelf space (but what would be the fun of that?). The second category includes clothing, half of which just endlessly sits in my drawers hopelessly relegated to being the bottom layer (and with no rhyme or reason, so that some of my favourite clothes fall out of rotation for months at a time because they were the first ones i folded after doing the wash). The third category features the aforementioned balls of fluff and also includes paperclips, half used pencils, and playbills from every play i’ve been a part of or seen. I generally wouldn’t mind throwing out everything that fits into this category, but generally i’m afraid to because all of it is is marginally useful or important in that way where it’s never actually useful or important.

Today fit into that last category, by the way. And i can’t even end it by going to sleep on my own damned bed.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2000/12/1696365/

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In a totally prescient moment, i went to the bathroom to retrieve my shirt (drying from shopping in the rain) and put it on just as the buzzer rang for me to pick up my dinner down at the front door. Yes, that means i had been blogging shirtless all along. One more reason to buy a webcam for me, darling. Meanwhile, the guy at the grill at Mad Greek’s was the opposite of prescient because he didn’t put extra-cheese on my chicken cheesesteak even after i explicitly asked for it. Grawr! Solution? : Put lots of cheese-fries on my cheesesteak! Yay for my massive intelligence!

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2000/12/1684531/