Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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Three related paragraphs that have absolutely no bearing on anything.

I am so chirpy on the phone. “Thanks so much for your help!,” i expel with force. “You have a great holiday!” i command with enthusiasm. I suspect the clerks in guidance offices across Montgomery County hardly know what to say to me, which is apt, because i hardly know what i am saying. I imagine fielding a phone call from me is like trying to catch water from a great stone fountain in a meager paper cup … the stream steady with random variation, the force and volume too great for the vessel.

Last night i was walking down Walnut street, thinking about how everyone wants to be famous. Everybody does. Not all face-famous, of course, not all actors or politicians, but famous for something; inventing, writing, singing, designing, growing record-sized pumpkins, etc. I always thought i’d be a good famous person, because i think i understand what a public expects from someone in possession of fame. But, to be famous you must become famous, and to become famous you or your product must be recognized, and i and the three or four products that i consider to be eligible are currently incognito, embedded in our stealthy and unnoticed positions until further notice.

Sometimes i think that i will take on a character, change my carriage and manner of speaking, to see if i am somehow different than before. When i arrive in the office to find it full with dozens of perspective students, or when i step into a store i’ve never been near before. What great acting it would be, what a superb lie, to alter myself not according to a script but in every facet of my ongoing self.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/11/106986643165083879/

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A few nights ago i had a peculiar dream, of Ross and i in Texas, me improbably crashing on Alison’s floor, though she seemed somewhat perplexed that she was suddenly responsible to house anyone who has linked to her for over a year, and Ross and i missing our plane back to Philadelphia, and me losing him in the endless depths of an airport bar.

Lately i feel fertile; full of potential. Two songs have come now, in the last week, appearing at odd hours like a radio stations that suddenly tune themselves in as you are driving across state lines, one at work just after lunch, the other at 4am on Saturday night. They sound as though they came from different channels — in fact, the one sounds like it came from two or three different channels all by itself. You’ll hear soon enough; Season Four of CK’s one-of-a-kind feature Trio debuts next week.

I have five days of corporate life ahead of me before this internship, my last, is over. I have become so used to its daily routine, so much more daily and routine than any other that came before, that it seems impossible that i won’t have to keep tying my tie by eight a.m. so that i can make it onto my bus, or swing my chair around with a nudge of my knee when i arrive at my desk in the morning.

Yesterday i welcomed Kate and Lindsay back to the contiguous United States with glee, saying that it had seemed like they had been gone on their paradise vacation forever, and as i said it i knew that it was true. The sensation was just like being young … how everything seemed at once brand new and as if it could last forever. Wonderful bubbling laughter, awful nauseous sickness, and ever just simple sleep.

I think i am broken, my growth impossibly stunted, because i seem to have never outgrown that feeling, and so i remained convinced that i would live forever in that dream airport, in this state of fertility, or at this desk for the rest of my life and i think that maybe some little piece of me will be left behind at each of those places, imagined, perceived, or actual, until i arrive at where i’m really meant to be.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/09/106365163105071240/

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There are eight elevators in our elevator bay, each dutifully shuttling us corporate lemmings up and down between floors twenty-three and forty-four all the day long. I learned quickly to orient myself to their ding as they reach my floor, one for up and two for down. Four months of this, and it was only this morning that i realized that the dings are out of tune to each other; some ever so slightly but some a sour quarter step. I stood for a minute, humming one ding while waiting for the next, only to be greeted by two simultaneous elevators arriving to prove my point.

Afterwards, i found myself in the empty elevator wondering, Does anyone else realize that they’re out of tune? Is there someone we could call to have that fixed? Could they tune them to a chromatic chord? Is there someone out there whose knows all about this thing, this tiny detail that i have suddenly become so transfixed by as an escape from my dreary morning?

It’s either this, or sniffing markers.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/07/105819465762646589/

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Some things about my office.

I cannot bring myself to trust fat, bearded woman. I don’t know what it is; they’re shifty. They’re always changing their answers, backtracking, being contrary just to avoid a solution. I’ve very carefully studied my reactions to these potential carnies, and I can safely say that their weight or facial hair alone does not change my evaluation of their behavior. All of those chubby, hairy parts combine to create a greater, harder to like, whole. Every one I have ever met has been the same: belligerent, defensive, and stubbly.

When I arrived at the muffin basket today, there were blue-dotted pastries as for as the eye could see. All blueberry. I have eaten two blueberry muffins so far, and I may go back for a third before they put out the lunch spread.

My fellow intern and I have been chosen to present about our internship experience in front of the president of our rather large organization, who seems to be a figure of nearly mythic proportions if my co-workers are to be trusted. The two of us beat out over twenty other interns for this distinction; I thought my boss was going to cry when I told her we were selected.

The funny thing is, ever since my introduction to the “Season of Achievement” program I have been consciously eschewing all contact with it. It’s an intern ghetto, coddling where it should be inspiring, with HR people pulling us away from our actual work in shockingly long four hour blocks in order to act as a motley crew of corporate orientation leaders to our group of exceedingly inquisitive, capable (and increasingly jaded) college students.

Either the force of my personality shone through so brightly at the only workshop I ever attended that they have been craving more ever since, or my fellow intern has been impressing the hell out of them every week while I’ve been deliberately scheduling meetings with Medical Directors to make sure I never have to show up.

In other news, two weeks ago i drank a really large latte and became convinced that if I deferred senior year in favor of taking a bus up to Buffalo to camp out on Righteous Babe Record’s front step that they would eventually be forced to give me a job, but then i realized that OH MY GOD, I really want to get college over and done with.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/07/105776358824404144/

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I sit on the end of our row, adjacent to three women from the next department. At first their chatter seemed inexorable, endless, and inconsequential, but now I see that it is what allows them to be here, to somehow reconcile whatever they care about to the reality of sitting in front of their alarmingly lo-fi DOS-like interface.

The woman who shares a cube wall with me talks the most of the three; the smile in her voice hide a constant crease of worry, which somehow makes me picture my grandmother in the next cube endlessly chatting. She is obsessed with controlling her son. I found it amusing, but today as she rambled on I started to see the simple misery hidden at the bottom of her creases.

Her son is headed straight for teenage years, sure to be ripe with youthful misbehavior and sexual experimentation. She talks about him with her creased voice, about how he does not want to wear the shirts she lays out, preferring t-shirts from Hot Topic and loose jeans. About how he tries to play money from her so that he can pay for the older kids to go to the movies with him, and how they in return take him to the drug store to explore the condom aisle. “Of course,” she says matter-of-factly, “he doesn’t have the slightest idea about all of that.”

She has an image in her head of how her son should be; what he should become. It is faceted in her mind, I’m sure, gleaming from every angle. But, maybe not as faceted as he would wind up doing things on his own. I’m not sure, actually, which is why I have become so obsessed with following her endless stories, and why I sometimes feel sad for them both.

If my mother had that image of me, she never revealed it. I think she had the barest of ideas, with no overarching goals or guides to my personality or morality. I never had to make the bed, always got to buy the music i wanted, and never had any restrictions placed on how much or how little time i had to devote to people other than myself. Did she mean for me to value art more than industry, and myself more than anyone else? I was left to fill in all of those details myself, never realizing that there was not an upper limit to the facets I could have because she never thought to impress them upon me. And now, sometimes, I feel as though because of it I have organized my life horizontally — only one layer deep. Not multifaceted.

Who has the better mom?

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/07/105768499661166966/