Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

OL

Life In Cartoon Motion

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A few scant weeks prior to the birth of this blog in the summer of 2000 I had been working as an Orientation Leader for Drexel, helping to guide and socialize pre-freshman during their summer campus visit.

It’s nearly impossible to be a camp counselor to people who are only a few months younger than you, and by virtue of being an Orientation Leader you are a major geek in their eyes, so the only real solution to holding their attention and respect (for me, anyhow) was sheer, irrepressible, unavoidable, kinetic energy.

I had so much of that energy built up the evening before our first group of students arrived that I absolutely could not sleep (this was before the days of Benadryl w/vodka chaser, god bless my 18-yr-old soul). I remember the absolute hopelessness of it – the clock facing my dorm bed inexorably ticking closer to our 6:15 a.m. call time.

Around five I just gave up – sleep can’t be forced. I just enjoyed the lying still in my bed, counting down the minutes.

The intersection of insomnia and excitement worked. Spectacularly. I’ve always been of the manic, excitable persuasion, but that night was the catalyst to a major transformation: my metamorphosis from excitable boy to something akin to a walking cartoon – rabidly energetic, and afraid to stop moving because I might just pass out.

(Probably a contributing factor to my broken collarbone, but that’s neither here nor there. More Germain is that it was tangentially the template for my participation in Blogathon; I would have never dared to believe I could blog and sing and record for twenty fours hours if I hadn’t going through my insomniac-energy boot camp the summer before.)

I’ve been thinking about that all day because it has been one of those days. I put in a twelve-hour shift of mixing and recording last night, and if you consider when I usually get home from work you’ll realize that subsequently I wasn’t left with too much time for sleep between the end of that endeavor and the beginning of my new work day.

I usually dread getting up and out for work with less than four hours of sleep, but today I loved my barely-two. I was up and out of the house like a catapult, remembering all of my electronic accouterments, walking rather than taking the bus, at work and in constant motion.

The only detraction is that I can’t speak anything resembling English while trying to leave a voice mail, but that’s what the “do-over” button is for.

(Except when you call outside clients and bang the do-over button and then mutter “fuck” because you realize you can’t do-over on their system, and then you realize you just muttered “fuck” in a professional voice mail and the tape is still rolling.)

Today was an exception – I don’t do sleepless nights nearly as much (or, nearly as well) as I did back then – but it’s nice to pitch one in here and there to remind myself what it’s like to be not just unwilling, but unable, to stop.

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We’re moving on Friday. I’m not sure how many times I’ve moved that I can remember.

Moving out of 64th Street was a novelty – having never moved before in my conscious life, the idea of categorizing and packing things seemed fun.

Moving from Reed Street to college was a move of efficiency – the dorm room was only oh-so-big, and the hurricane was oh-so-bad. Two carloads would certainly be all that we could manage. I reminisced at length about it previously.

Moving from Kelly Hall to Calhoun hall was my first introduction to desperate, anxious, nerve-rending, nail-biting moving. The orientation leaders hoarded carts and monopolized elevators for each other. Where were my belongings supposed to live, if i was to be out by noon and in at… four? Five? We sat in the piano lounge on our collective piles of stuff and waited.

Ahh, now we come to moves i’ve documented on blogger.

Moving out of the dorm to my first apartment (with a half-week stopover back at Reed Street) was pure misery – i was sick, my future roommate was being less than helpful, and at one point i didn’t even have a lease to prove the apartment was mine. It was also the only time I’ve technically lived with my mother since 1999. A wonderful example of our uneasy alliance can be found here.

Next comes the move of legend: me from Spring Garden Street, and Lindsay and Erika from Race Street. This recap makes it sound rather pedestrian, but it still inspires only-slightly-hyperbolic stories from the five of us whenever anyone moves.

(in here i help Elise move from dorm to Melon’s to 3216 to Baring to here)

Moving from The Grotto to here was disproportionately easy, considering it involved more possessions and stress than ever. How i managed to get all the stuff from there to here, i’ll never know. The day was honestly a sleepless blur.

Six moves in seven years, and also in twenty-three (if you don’t count when i was three).

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2005/04/111404524386168409/

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I don’t know that it’s an idea, so much as simply how my body tends to balance itself out. Left to my own devices during the summer of 2000 i actually split each day in half, sleeping from five to nine in both the morning and evening. This sounds ridiculous, but given a healthy and active list daily schedule it actually suited my needs perfectly and kept me highly energized through my grueling turn as an Orientation Leader.

Of course, there are problems with giving the body exactly what it seems to be asking for. With the exception of my magical two weeks of two-in-one days, my body tends to operate on a clock that is much nearer to 30hour days than 24hour ones, which means if i don’t have a set time to sleep i’ll stay up a handful of hours later every night until finally i’m sleeping the day away because i’m so locked in to my overly long internal clock. Furthermore, my attempts to correct my own sleeping habits tend to make the situation worse; for example, i should have never gone back to sleep this morning rather than do my best to stay awake all day — and here i am blogging about it past 2am.

The solution that has had a larger impact on my days than my quirky sleeping habits (which are endlessly remarked upon in derisive fashion by my roommates) is that i really just don’t waste time anymore. Sure, you could argue that i’m wasting time right now, but i mean something closer to not spending time idly. If i’m on the internet, i’m either writing or catching up on my daily reading … not aimlessly wandering from link to link. If i’m playing guitar i’m either writing or practicing … no idle ad-libbing for hours on end. I tend to break this rule just as much as i follow it, but keeping the idea of maximizing my resources stuck in the back of my head somehow netted me all A’s last semester — something i’ve never accomplished with such a rigorous course load Sure, it involved putting some thing off until the last minute (and stressing my way into the hospital), but somewhere along the way i finally learned to cut down on time-wasting (and unsatisfying) activities like reorganizing my cd collection and rereading my archives when i could be cooking dinner or writing a paper instead..


This semester has an even more ridiculous free-time to work-time ratio than last, and so i’m interested to see how i fare. Also, it would be nice if i could factor actually working into the equation somewhere between sleep and cd reviews, because money is never as evil as they say it is ;)

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/01/8505261/

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Wow, so, okay, you know how i mention from time to time how i need to be more of a bitch? It’s sorta a running theme with me that i love to please everyone; this tends to be evidenced by the fact that no one ever seems to have a serious dislike of me despite me having a stubbornly assertive personality. This recently became a major problem at work because i was overbooking myself for visiting students because i refused to turn away anyone who had a nice phone manner. That ended pretty quickly, after i almost didn’t have a host for a few students. So… now that tiny ability to say ‘no’ is starting to balloon outward slowly in my gut, as if every time someone tries to walk on me i’m breathing hard to inflate it. Is it possible that any of you have been around long enough to remember Viktor? Well… the other day he walked by me and said hello and i told him quite succinctly to “fuck off.” Apparently now he mildy fears me, though he can’t understand what my problem is with him.

The thing is, i shouldn’t have to make him understand. As a human being i have the right to randomly dislike people without giving a single reason. Furthermore, i should be allowed to like it. And,… wow… i do. There’s some tiny little urge inside me to justify my reasons for not liking someone, but it’s getting pushed aside by that balloon as it swells bigger and bigger. Of course, the truly professional thing to do is to have a “bitch” inside you and to harness her and use her when people try to pull a fast on on you, but i figure before i get fine control over her i’ll have to lash out a few times ;)

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/04/3294968/

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I have this idiot clear red poker visor on right now, because our director Bill had this obscenely large box of them (frightening only because it implies he had some sinister use for them in the show that never came to fruition) and he had the entire cast and crew pick one of the garish colors out from the box during our strike. Honestly, it’s sort of like always being under a red spotlight, because it casts the same glow the lighting gels do, and it washes out all of the red coloring of my hands when they’re in the light. Maybe Bill meant to say we’re always under the spotlight, or maybe he just wanted to get rid of thirty ugly poker visors, or maybe he just wanted his whole cast to look silly as they trudged home from the show.

There was this idiot kid dead center tonight. I talk to the audience once at the very beginning of the play, and once at the end; at the beginning i am in character and warming them up to the sort of show they’ll be seeing, and at the end i am totally myself, telling them that there is no happy end to be found. The ending is hard to find humor in, as the primary cast stalks up to the front of the stage one by one to remind the audience that there is no happy end. Tonight i walked forward for my solo bit of the epilogue, and that kid was right there. I remember him from orientation …, he wore this idiot blue visor with all of his chunky dyed blonde hair sticking up behind it, and he kept trying to break dance at night even though he was awful at it and he was getting in everyone’s way. It struck me that he mocked everything because he wasn’t really a part of any of it.


Tonight i walked past him and he wasn’t laughing with me but at me, and not in the way an audience is meant to. I just said my line to him and walked away. “Unhappy endings were expected too…” I had the stage, i was a lead in a play with my own song and my name listed first in a program, and he sat there in the audience and tried to have power over me with his hollow little laugh – as if i was supposed to see him mocking me and just break character and forget all of my lines and break down and let him win. But, he had nothing on me, because no matter how much i might have hated being in this play every night, when i’m on stage i am in charge.

He wasn’t wearing his visor, though. And i’m sitting here, wondering what else i have in common with him.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/03/2635971/