Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

work

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In our departmental manual there are examples of all the different types of health plan member ID cards that our offices might encounter, and i’ve noticed that after a few stock names like “John Smith” and “Jane Doe” that our members are a mix of fantastic heroes (i wonder what we charge to cover Action Jackson and Buck Rodgers?) and names that Bart has used to prank call Moe, albeit with altered middle initials to avert the punchline (I. R. Freely doesn’t have quite the same ring).

It’s nice to know that you work with people who share your mindset.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/06/105655947184665642/

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But, what if being a good corporate employee is not all about knowing who to say yes to and how loud to say it, but knowing why they want to hear yes and if they could be convinced to hear it at a different volume.

This is the reason i, with my year of college left over, am not jealous of my friends from high school who graduated last month: i’ve had a year and a half of nine to five to learn working logic, against their optional three summers of internships.

Well, plus i’m not ready to be a grown up yet.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/06/200432789/

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Cradling my head in my hands at my desk, I inch my fingertips around to the temples, massaging. I sometimes wonder what would happen if i could open up my head, pressing my fingers tightly on either side and pushing up ever so slightly, swinging it up and back, tipping it back to rest on the hinges that would lie buried beneath my thick hair. Instead of a mess of flesh and blood I imagine inside a tangle of color and light, and of thoughts, packed in tightly and giving off sparks of electricity as they rub excitedly against each other. They would have no gravity of their own, their weight inferred by my body. Exposed to the outside air would they be like balloons, floating up in a parade of escaping color? Would I just helplessly grasp at their strings, not even knowing what I was trying to hold on to, but acutely aware that my insides were on display — not just one fleeting thought that would have never escaped through my lips, but the whole of all of my thoughts. All those parts that I would rather keep hidden or leave forgotten, just ascending up, up, up and away, leaving me empty and inexorably heavier without them because our gravity is reciprocal, lending them my weight in exchange for their ability to lift my head nearer to the clouds.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/06/200411847/

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I would just like to share that our initial draft of the departmental intranet site is a Frankenstein of HTML currently sporting hand coded text, dreamweaver coded tables, and the style sheet from Crushing Krisis. Yes, my style sheet, verbatim.

Sorry, i just thought that was hilarious. I just keep picturing someone searching for a publication from last year and getting back some whiny tripe about how the Patient Care Management department sometimes doesn’t think it’s good enough to compete with all the other sections in the provider manual. Although, god help us, if every quilt-like assemblage of design elements took on the behaviors of the many pages that contributed to it, CK would probably make about as much sense as a Dali painting interpreted though the musical stylings of Donovan.

More later.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/05/200328583/

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Every time I attempt to sketch some odd facet of my corporate life for you I find an equally strange element of it inside myself. Today I sat down to regale you with a story of in-building encounters with the socially inept, but as I described each character in punishingly amusing detail, I began to make myself queasy. Who am I to observe perceived shortcomings of innocent co-working bystanders only to reveal them to the internet at large when the whim overtakes me, rendering real people into surreally abnormal characters like Neckless and Clenching Lady? Would I be able to award myself with a new moniker as easily? I wonder.

I am not the most socially healthy person on the planet. My compulsion to wash my hands after I touch anything to be found in public borders on obsession. My fear that I will not reach the doors of the bus before it closes up again to carry me far far away from my intended stop is overwhelming. But, foremost among all of these, are my elevator issues.

It’s not the claustrophobia so much, though sometimes I find myself in the back row of a sixteen-person deep load gasping for breath behind a blissfully unaware suit yapping about first quarter losses or decreasing corporate spending. That comes with the territory. No, instead it is the conversations — the simple, witless conversations of nicety that are grudgingly targeted at any rider who looks even vaguely familiar.

I live in abject terror of those conversations. Weather. Sports. Television. As one creeps up on me I feel as though all of my internal organs are slowly sliding into the crevices behind my knees, leaving only a the hollow thump of my heart, captive to its highway of veins and arteries, to hold court in the preternatural vacuum of my chest. Rain. The Phillies. Survivor. Each topic can leave me in a dead sweat, especially when initiated on a relatively early floor.

I don’t know what it is, really. The utter casualness, I guess, that people attempt to tune in to the channel to which they are homogenized on. With glee, they discover similarities that they share with tens of millions of other Americans. It is the conversational form of Walmart, and I am not sure if I am more horrified by how alien the topics generally seem to me or by the few with which I have intimate familiarity.

I occasionally attempt to play along. Last week someone asked me what I had in my discman, and I replied: “The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. They’re sort of a post-post-post-punk (so much so that they’re actually punk again) three piece lead by a woman who strikes me as a messy reincarnation of the, yes, entirely still alive Chrissie Hynde, which is not to say that the sound like the Pretenders at all, because they don’t, but sometimes you just get a vibe, huh?”

My rambling monologue took us from 22 down to 4, at which point the questioner returned a glassy stare. I smiled back. We rode down the last three floors in silence.

Funny how i am terrified of overwhelming homogeneity and they are petrified by anything heterogeneous. In a way I guess they are more afraid of me than I am of them, but it doesn’t make the ride any easier.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/05/200312092/