Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

self-aware

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I somehow forgot to mention the two neatest things that happened to me yesterday, and god knows they’re pretty neat. so excuse me while i switch into banal-blog mode to update you on some happenings in my life.


Firstly, i manged to snag myself vocal lessons for next semester. Now, i don’t know how much this shows through my incessant prattling, but i’ve wanted voice training for years. Long before i became musically inclined singing was one of my favourite things to do, but i was horrible at it and was constantly being persecuted by my friends for my lack of ability. Playing guitar gave me the most basic of confidences in singing, but i’m still unsure of myself when singing on my own and i still have no formal training on how to sing. So, the fact that one of our voice instructors wants to make time for me in her schedule is very cool.

A bigger compliment came from Bill Hull, who’s currently in charge of the aforementioned Eight to the Bar. I mentioned off-handedly to him that i was finally starting voice training and he replied that i ought to audition for the next opening in Eight to the Bar. Audition! For an all male a capella group that’s half composed of Vocal Music majors! I tried to deflect what i thought was an obvious attempt at flattery, but Bill was quick to point out that he is one of the few people on campus in possession of a copy of my demo, so he knows full well that i can actually sing when i put my mind to it. He tempered his compliment by admitting that i certainly have plenty of technique to learn from voice lessons, but then reiterated that i would stand a good chance of being a member of the group’s new lineup in the fall.

Eek. I’m not used to feeling this good about myself all at once. No wonder i keep writing songs tonight…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/03/2686603/

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Brant, i know what you mean when you talk about friends and acquaintances and how to tell the difference between them. Sometimes it’s hard to keep a perspective on what’s happening outside of yourself – like the disorientation you feel when you play a first-person shooter game from the camera angle that floats behind your own head. Sometimes you need to remove yourself from what you’ve got stewing inside and view your friendships from the outside, because then you realize how good some of your “acquaintances” really are for you. It’s not their fault that you can’t share all of your private life with them, and you need to accept them on the terms of what they do know and love about you rather than what they don’t. I went through a miserable and lonely couple of months last year when i decided that i didn’t have any real friends, until one of my real friends pointed out to me that it’s not her fault that i won’t share anything personal with her.

Of course, if we would share personal things with our friends, would we need the internet anymore :p

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2456103/

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I’m sitting here with a bag of frozen white bread and a tub of hummus that i accidentally stole from my girlfriend’s roommate two weeks ago snacking away while my ftp server mysteriously blinks in and out of existence. To get the white bread defrosted enough so that it’s not similar to eating cardboard i’ve got to hold it close to my mouth and breathe into it slowly, feeling the frost evaporate onto my fingers on the other side as my snack gets soft and flexible like it’s meant to be. I’m not sure if you’re actually reading this at this point because of my FTP issues, and that surely explains the lack of a new Trio despite my obviously having new material to work with.

The play goes up next week … 10 days from now. That’s scary. I mean, i can track my entire experience with the play through this log and it just doesn’t seem long or substantial enough. Not so long ago in the archives i was contemplating whether or not i should audition and now i’m contemplating if enough my extended family are going to want seat to gets a group discount. Maybe it’s because i haven’t had such a large role since high school, where we’d rehearse from January to nearly the end of March every single day, that i feel so grossly underprepared for this show; i don’t know my lines well enough, i don’t sing my song well enough, and i’m still finding my character. Of course, none of that really matters when i’m on stage, because somehow i just make it all work. I’m looking into getting some digital video to post to the page, so… we’ll see. I’m off to munch more hummus and rehearse for my rehearsal; take care of yourselves.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2455899/

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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/