Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

self-aware

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I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with a reader who actually listens and responds to my Trios named Grant since i got out of the hospital, and it’s brought something about myself to light that is central to my current unhappiness. In short, i am imprecise. It isn’t because i lack attention to detail, or the intelligence or skill to see such details through, but because they require too much time and energy. Why do i like to act but not to do shows at Drexel? Because i like the thought of acting as getting on stage and portraying a character, but i don’t like doing the same lines and the same movements the same way every time.

Of course, in almost any semi-professional theatre the entire point is to assimilate the direction and be able to replay it in a consistent fashion. Last night the roomies and I went to see Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Wilma Theatre, and i was in awe of not only the acting that i saw, but the very precise physicality of the acting. The flounces, the scoffs, the deep breaths … all things that add tremendously to a performance, and all things i tend to gloss over without noticing.

I don’t pretend to be much of an actor; in fact, i quite hate it. Looking back at all of the shows that i’ve done i cannot honestly say that i enjoyed a single role that i’ve portrayed. In each occasion my happy memory is connected to the people i produced a show with rather than my performance itself. As such, i can hardly fault myself for not enjoying the intracies of acting … i simply don’t give a shit.

Where Grant comes is is my songwriting. I might claim to hate acting, but i don’t think anyone can be convinced that i dislike writing and performing my own music; in fact, most of the time it would seem to be the only thing i like to do. Grant has been listening to my songs in in his last email he posed the following question: What do i have against finger-picking? My composing is, almost as a rule, devoid of all riffing and picking unless it’s been specifically inserted. In fact, any song of mine that has acquired a set pattern of picking is by definition in a higher stage of evolution than a song without (see Under My Skin vs. Tangling, or an older Never Say Goodbye vs. its demo version).

My first response to the question was simple: i don’t like to finger-pick. It’s something i’m capable of, but if you listen to my musical influences they are not fluttery pickers — i don’t like the shimmery sound of it. However, there are a vast majority of Peter Mulvey and Ani DiFranco songs where they punch out precise riffs in the midst of their frantic strumming, and of late these riffs have been absent from my songs (examples of which can be found in Lost or Bridge). Suddenly my defense just isn’t; in the past i’ve riffed and rocked, so why don’t i do it all the time?

I don’t know where i was going with this. I don’t fingerpick; i don’t like to fingerpick. I don’t act; i don’t like to act. So, if i’m not doing the things i don’t like, why am i so miserable?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/7703915/

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I feel like… i don’t know, Third Rock From the Sun? Do you remember at the very beginning of the show when the four of them didn’t understand anything at all? … Taking coats at parties, kissing, slapping, cheerleaders, and breasts? Lately when i go back and look at the archives i just feel like a visitor in the shape of me trying to emulate the behavior i’m supposed to be representing. Is that circular enough for you? The change happened somewhere around when co-op began, because you can tell the difference between the computer being a constant companion and just something to stare at in-between doing things. And then i started doing a few things and talking about them, instead of just talking about not doing anything. And now i do things all the time and have nothing to talk about afterwards.

What’s so interesting about my life, really? Obviously i do things… last night i went to the movies, i can talk about that. I walked to the movie theatre, which is three blocks from my house. In the lobby Laurel was waiting for me (along with her roommate and Jeff (as if i went on a date with Laurel and didn’t mention it (obviously i only mention Laurel because you know who she is at this point))). She asked if i had gotten my haircut and i responded “Not for almost a month.” We saw Monsters INC, which involved a lot of giggling. Afterwards i bought some sushi and talked about X-Men with Erika, who was reading Carrie.

So, there’s two main theories of journaling that i can discern. The one is that obviously my night was pretty freakin’ boring when it comes to reading about it, so i should either talk about something else or learn to do more interesting things. The other is that it doesn’t matter what i’m doing, just so long as i put my own spin on it people will care about reading. I’m not sure which of the two i subscribe to, but my first journaling connection online was the ever-present Gus, who resides wholly in the second school of thought. Gus basically just writes one post a day, each and every single day, and he weaves it all together so that you’re not only interested in what he has to say, but you honestly want to know what he’s doing with himself. Frankly, Gus is one of the only people who employs this technique who i enjoy, the others being Alison and Meg, though they use their narrative voice a little more pervasively.



The way last year had been going for me, i just merrily trolled along with my own script of things to say and would talk about parties and things if and when i went to them because they were typically unusual and exciting. But, at this point, going to a party is like “wow, another party. i wonder who’ll hook up tonight?”, and afterwards i’m always tearing out my hair thinking “how can i tell an interesting story about that lapdance…?” So, now i have a daily existence and i suppose my big question is whether i’m supposed to talk about it, or me, or some other nebulous thing — because back in the day i was talking about my life, but it was a lack of a life, so it was just me talk about me.

Wow, now i’m dizzy. Tell you what… you sit and stare at the screen for an hour thinking about what i’ll write next, and i’ll go get some ice cream. Cool? Cool.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/6976582/

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That’s (read the last post first, silly) the encapsulated story of my life… find out about something, fall in love with it, remove it from any sort of social context, and then watch it wither and die on its lonesome. That’s how all of my crushes work too… find someone i adore, remove them from their life to insert them into mine via the insides of my head, and then watch the actuality of us wither and die because i’ve separated it out from the social soil it was once rooted in.

I never had sleep overs. I never had to share my toys or play with a second person. I never permanently traded or anted up anything to anyone in my entire life. I never learned that the whole point of having a life of my own was to share it with anyone else, and so in highschool i marched home every day to dutifully ignore my homework and read my email while other people hung out and messed around and dated and did drugs for the first time; i was my own intensive after-school program. Eventually the internet grew into its own social structure so much that i was discarding friends who i couldn’t keep up with via IM and starting to have online-only acquaintances who i looked forward to talking to. And, eventually, this happened.

I can’t really decide which is the magic card: this page, or this life. On one hand, i pour my heart and soul and free time for no kind of compensation into something that not more than a couple of hundred people see on any given day. On the other hand, i have this wonderful spark of existence that i am mostly busy keeping to myself… emotions and voice and song that i’m bored with from all the times i’ve sat through them, but that amaze other people.

Either way, i figure i am still living the life of an only child… i create my own personal fantasy where the sharing is always one-sided and shun any interruptions of it. In that respect, this page mirrors my life. The things i say are the toys that i have earmarked so carefully to be touched by other children in the sandbox while i keep Jinx and my Nightmare card secreted deep in the pockets of my memory. I am spoilt and selfish, but i do not learn. You’d think i’d know better by now than to be selfish, and i might have figured out that i like going to parties better than i like sitting and staring at the blank white box of blogger, but i apparently haven’t caught on that i have to be a real person-shaped-person here if i expect to be treated as such by an audience…. blah. sleep needs to happen now. i’ll continue this tomorrow… ! in fact…:

to be continued…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/6906529/

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Every time i see my mother she has a plastic bag for me, without fail. It always contains a potpourri potentially exploding with tissues, snack bars, cds, mail i’m still receiving at home, household items i probably won’t ever make practical use of, and any special requests i had from home. On Friday when i slid into the back seat of our car while in mid-sentence of bitching about the length of my day and not quite remembering how to tie a tie and not really being able to do anything spectacular with my hair i noticed that the normally expected plastic bag had two familiar long boxes in it, and that’s when i remember that i had asked my mother to bring my Magic Cards with her.

As a frame of reference for this you should know about my first and last experience with Magic. The latter was in Boston where Rabi‘s brother had a deck of 7th Edition cards and i played him in two games at the kitchen table while Rabi idly surfed the internet The former was at my first year as counselor in training at the good day camp, where i watched one of my camper’s older brothers play his friend in what had to be Unlimited edition. So, now that i’ve established those two floating points in space, let’s look at what’s within.

Going from seventh grade to eight grade i really didn’t have very much of anything in my life. I wasn’t especially tight with anyone from Masterman yet, and i only had Monica left over from grade school; i had no life after i got back from camp every day. That was way before I had a website, let alone a computer, and I’m honestly not sure what I did with my free time. My only hobby at that point was … um… i want to say that it was some RPG on Super Nintendo, but i think it might have actually been masturbation. We’ll just let that one lie. Anyhow, point being that Magic excited me… it was like keeping my entire army of GI Joes on tiny shufflable cards and being able to wage war against other people’s collections. I made haste in pestering my mom to buy me some cards as soon as 3rd edition saw wide release, and by Christmas of 8th grade i really did have my veritable personal army which soon included two nearly infallible decks.

The thing about infallible armies is that, no matter how infallible you claim them to be, you’ve eventually got to pit them against another army to see whether they’ll fail or not. And, being the introvert that i was, i wasn’t exactly heading out to comic shops to play other people on gaming nights. My foes were just classmates who randomly got hooked on the game, and they played by all sorts of non-conforming rules on slimy lunch-tables that my cards wouldn’t be caught dead on. So, i just kept buying cards in a vacuum, without any practical use for them. I finally stopped at Ice Age and 4th Edition, because i felt like nothing i really wanted or needed was coming out anymore. The cards went into boxes, the boxes went onto my bookshelf, and with mostly no interruption that’s where they stayed for the entirety of highschool.

And now they’re back, spread out on my floor in a fabulous array of five colors and the names of Anson Maddocks and Melissa Benson calling me back to a hobby meant for multiple partners that I somehow made just as self-contained as masturbation. As a spectacular example of an only child, I suppose that everything I did was like social masturbation, and so now all I’ve really got going for me is that I’m really good at interacting with myself and that hardly anyone else does it the way I can do it.

But, anyway, all I meant to say is that I’ve been playing Magic all night, and that I have to remember to send some cards to Rabi’s brother later this week.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/6905888/

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I’m typically a two meals a day kind of guy, at best. It’s really more like one meal and a package of pop tarts. I haven’t gone an entire week of eating what amounts to breakfast, lunch, and dinner since before the beginning of highschool. Even when i was in Boston where i was sure to eat breakfast and dinner (typically the hardest meals to get me to sit still for) i still managed to skip out on lunch each day. Sometimes i come upon unusual days of low energy and high appetite, but they are few and far between. Until last week.

Within the last week i have slowly but surely been sneaking ever-so-close to three meals a day; not the most solid three meals in the world, or the most healthy, but three distinct servings at three separate times of day. In theory i’m all for this; i have no problem spending money on food if i’m actually going to consume and enjoy it. However, there is one slight problem in this situation…

I’m pudgy. There, i said it. At first it seemed like a subtle kind of thing, and i thought that maybe that i’ve had a few beers in the past month, but all of a sudden i have this tummy and it sticks out past my waistline and magically i’m twice as hungry as i ever am. I get just as much exercise (more than last year) as usual, and it’s not as if i’m getting any taller, and my meals vary from cereal to chicken to giant salads (no pizza, no hoagies), so unless this is my body’s way of preparing for some freakin’ seasonal hibernation, i’m not a happy camper.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6764951/