Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

self-aware

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Okay, here’s some quickies.

#6 is true. I haven’t shared a residence with more than one person at a time since i was 4. My parents separated when i was four, and since i’ve gotten to college i’ve only had one roommate at a time. This streak looks as though it will be broken next year, since we’re looking at 4-bedroom houses.

#8 is true. I have never eaten a cut of steak other than filet mignon when i was little, because my mom liked it. I’ve had all sorts of processed steak and beef products, but to this point i’ve never had a piece of a cut of steak (and i never liked filet mignon either).


#19 is true. In fifth grade i was the only student who decided to drop music class in favor of private (non-musical) study. After the aforementioned Christmas show, we were all given the option to quit music class to do work during that period; this was the music teacher’s way of telling us that we should definitely keep playing an instrument. Of course, i quit without a second thought, and since i had straight A’s anyway i usually just helped Ms. Mann grade tests while everyone else was in music class. Subsequently, i was forced to teach myself to read music from the from the choirgirl hotel book at the beginning of my Senior year.


However, #10 is false! This statement is an utter and total fabrication: for the duration of highschool i claimed i had my first and only kiss to that point playing spin the bottle in 7th grade to avoid further romantic scrutiny. I’ve never even watched anyone play spin the bottle, let alone participated, and i was pretty vocal about having never been kissed all throughout highschool (probably one of the reasons no one wanted to date me… since i was almost proud of not dating anyone up to that point). I made it a point not to talk about my romantic inexperience when i arrived at Drexel, and thus i had to tell my first kiss that she was my first kiss, at which point we kissed again. So… obviously i was only supposed to gab about my romantic inexperience when i stood to directly gain pity-kisses from it (which is not to say i wasn’t offered pity kisses in high school … i was offered them left and right. However, there’s a difference between a pity kiss and kissing someone for real and then having a pity kiss.)


That leaves the requisite 9 truths and a lie. Any guesses?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/3900280/

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One time in first grade we were taking a spelling test, and the word to spell was “kick,” and a boy named Paul raised his hand and asked “Do you mean k-i-c-k?” Of course, everyone giggled and the teacher reprimanded him and the test (and life) went on, and to this day i’m not entirely sure if Paul did it to be a smartass, or if he honestly was thinking of some other kind of kick. I just rememeber being exasperated at not getting points for correctly spelling such an easy word.

But, was i really exasperated? More and more often i find myself looking back at childhood memories that are getting more hazy and more generalized and i’m wondering how much of what i remember is just a fabrication of what i think i felt. Could i have really felt “exasperated” as a first grader? Did i really just giggle like the rest of the class, but in my recollections i make myself out as more mature and collected than i really was at the time.

The subjectiveness of memory frightens me. I don’t mind so much that the colours of everything in my head are getting less and less vivid like a patch of wallpaper that sees too much sun, but the prospect that i’m slowly changing all of my memories to the best representation of how i got how i am rather than what actually made me just isn’t right. Is this why children never believe what their parents tell them?, because their parents have taken all their childhood experiences and twisted them into trite little packages to be doled out before bed? I used to be able to eat candy and sweets endlessly as a child without pause, but now i get a stomach-ache and feel unfocused. Am i doomed to spend the rest of my life making futile efforts to keep candy from the hands of children just because now it spoils my dinner? Or, is this just growing up, and i’m not quite ready yet?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/3886860/

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Of all the beloved sites i’ve ever seen shut down, it’s always been the decision of the site administrator(s). Regular readers can leave and staff members can be bitchy and unhappy, but ultimately the admin makes the decision to pull the plug on the main page leaving everyone scrambling to talk to each other on the message boards before those too fade away or become completely irrelevant.

What is it about being the admin of a site that makes it so easy to shut everything down rather than just make a change? Is it that you’re tied to what the site was and not what it will be? Or, is it that you just get tired of making little fixes to what seems to you a large overall problem. Pulling the plug on a site, whether it be a treasured monument to e/n or the best Ani DiFranco site on the internet, seems like a hopelessly selfish choice. However, i suppose if you take on all the weight of maintaining a page yourself then you’re entitled to be selfish about it’s dissolution.

Bearing that in mind, is the solution to distribute both the joys of being a successful administrator as well as the sorrows? Does having a solid support staff make the difference between giving up on a page or just taking a much needed breather? Of course, having support staff presents nearly the same problem, as their collective vision sometimes strays from yours, leaving you either useless or annoyed. So, what’s the best formula for keeping a site going long enough that it becomes a mainstay in a community and not just a blip?

It seems to me that the easy answer is staying involved in the flow of your site, which is why so many solo blog-projects have become so consistent and venerable. It’s also why so many of them burn out and fail. If you don’t stay involved emotionally or scientifically or anything with your own writing, eventually what you’re creating means nothing and your page is just like the impression your head leaves on a pillow rather than a pillow with a real head on it. The same holds true for a group site … if you let yourself stray slowly from being an active poster to being a distanced administrator, your idea of fun is only based on reading the page as opposed to the real fun of writing it. This is not to say every administrator should be the center of attention – primadonna in their own specially constructed showcase. Instead, the point is that you have to occupy all of the positions at once: admin, staff, writer, and most importantly, fan.

Remind me about this post if i ever start bitching about any of this, if you would be so kind..

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/05/3829478/

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I have this mass creative urge and i don’t know where to focus it.

I used to have these days all the time when i was younger… i’d feel like i needed to output my thoughts somehow or else i would just endlessly spin in place for a whole day getting absolutely nothing done. My relief for this emotion in the olden days was either writing or playing with my G.I.Joes. Writing then was fiction rather than songs and blogs, so both forms of expression allowed me to create personas other than my own and then intermingle them all together in a storm of creativity that i could reflect upon later. If i was really stuck for resources i’d funnel all that creativity back into a pre-made creation like a novel, but that wasn’t ever wise because i could devour those books in a matter of hours and they would only leave me more hungry to create a piece of my own.


Songwriting was the perfect cure for the whole mess in two ways. The first was that even my longest song clocks in well under six minutes, so now i have a library of hundreds of facets of my own personality that i can trot out one after another, delve into deeply, and then end with a simple resolving chord (or lack thereof). The second was cover songs: the perfect way to focus my energy into someone else’s creative work but to still come out with my own product. Cover songs are much more productive in the long run than my old alternative of writing fanfics, which are inevitably not only totally invalid when held on their own but also totally the property of the originator of the universe the writing occurs in. Cover songs are not my own, but my interpretation of them is, and i’m always allowed to climb into the feelings a song portrays for a single performance, during which it’s as valid as any of my own songs.

However, my guitar occasionally fails me and i likewise have been known to fail it, whether it be due to a broken string or a lack of physical motivation to play. In some of these instances i’ve been left listessly strumming a G chord (or the remainders thereof) trying to get up enough rhythm and momentum to have a go at a song, but otherwise all of my energy would be wasted. That’s where this log came in last summer … a way to make sure that none of my creative energy would have to go to waste, and also a way to integrate my other creativity into one tangled web of personal thoughts and experience. However, as i become more and more comfortable with my guitar and my own voice (as a lyricist, as a blogger, and as a vocalist) i’m again branching out into other artistic and creative endeavors, which in turn can seem quite fruitless because i never created a mechanism to tie them back into this log. Shortly before this log came about i wrote half of a novella that ran over 100 pages, but it was hosted elsewhere on the internet and was based on years of other writing, so i left it to itself rather than ever mentioning it. During the run of the log i’ve continued to chip away at the novel i began six years ago in my endless churning loop of revision after revision to the same essential chapters, but it never manages to see the light of day. More recently i’ve been reviewing music somewhat consistently, and that i have managed to integrate into this domain at both jla and cor (though their participation with this page is usually limited).

It’s easy to see that i’m presented with several problems tied into this new creative urge of mine. The main issue is that i feel like any content that isn’t integrated into this log is essentially being forgotten before it’s ever found, and also that it’s liable to simply fade away from beneath my fingertips if i don’t sew it into my daily fabrication. I’ve been known to be hesistant about posting to the Ani Discussion Board, Shafted, or even the BlogVoices at Wockerjabby because i’m afraid that one precious paragraph of mine will fade into the ether of someone else’s site to never be retrieved again (a fate that blogger often forces onto posts of this epic length and breadth, which leaves me rather paranoid at the moment).


So, i have an obsession to track everything i do, and to tie it back into this very page. Is there any doubt about why i want a webcam? But, anyhow, i often lack in the motivation, organization, and programming skill it would take to seamlessly integrate all of my creativity into Crushing Krisis. However, where i fail in those latter two aspects i’ve been excelling in the first, and so things just like cor have been cropping up everywhere offering me and alternative for dispersing my creative output. Sadly and somewhat ironically all of these venus seem to be detracting from their intended nucleus: this very log.

And, so, i am left here with this mass creative urge but with nothing to blog and a currently irreplacable broken guitar string. And, i’m wondering what’s going to come out, and how i’m going to record it for posterity if it’s something worthwhile.

{some of the links in this entry have additional blog-length exposition that will show up in most browsers when you hover over them. enjoy.}

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/05/3808323/

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The dichotomy of my own personality can occasionally shock me. This week I haven’t even set foot in my own apartment before 11pm every night, and all of the intervening hours are spent in the presence of other people. Imagining little self-absorbed self-involved me wandering around from one group setting to another is somewhat unsettling, even though I almost love it. I know I love getting back to my apartment just long enough to check me mail (real mail, not email) and then crash out in the body-shaped dent in my bed full of pillows. I love seeing people I care about every day.

At the same time, I feel empty. My normal enthusiasm for everything from crossing the street to opening doors for people is gone. People keep asking me what’s wrong, and even though nothing feels that way obviously they can read it on my face. I feel disconnected from my songs, even after I spent literally the entire weekend holed up in my apartment with my guitar recovering from all the time I spent outside of it last week.

When I took the Myers-Briggs personality indicator last summer I strongly leaned to one side or the other on every category except Introvert/Extrovert, where my score was nearly centered. All of the people who took the test with me were shocked because they couldn’t imagine me as an introvert, but anyone who really knew me well just chuckled knowingly. I don’t know how to make time for other people and myself in my life, and so right now I’m trapped at one extreme knowing that I’d feel just as trapped at the other. The reason I’m involved in so many performance groups and activities is because I know they’ll always get me outside of my room, and that I’ll enjoy myself while doing them. But, sometimes I give away too much of that time, leaving me feeling as though I’m lacking my own energy and opinions, and I try to fix it by spending whole days holed away from anything else. But, it doesn’t work. I played guitar for nine hours on Saturday with no interruption, but it doesn’t feel like I got anywhere. I need to distribute those little pieces of personal time around my schedule for them to mean anything.

Of course, I can’t necessarily distribute. I know people who do what I’ve been doing every night, and who have been doing it for years now. They’re happy people, but I suppose they just scored higher on the extrovert scale than I did, because I can be just as miserable and depressed while I’m surrounded with friends as I am sitting alone in my apartment. Lately I feel like I’m just circling some sort of desperate emotional low, and that as long as I keep myself moving I won’t have to notice it. But, at this point, moving might just be getting me closer.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/05/3579857/