Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

Yet another thing I have screamed in the middle of a Target.

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“Oh, because I’m always looking for neon colored things to put in my vagina.”

Seriously, if I was a woman I don’t think I’d be cruising the feminine products aisle looking for a box of tampons that resembles a pack of highlighters. I get the packaging of a tampon being a fun color so it’s unobtrusive in your purse, but the actual applicator? Are we seriously selling this to young women?

Can anyone with a vagina offer some insight?

(Because all tampons are “Tampax” to me, I had to use the interwebs to figure out the brand I encountered, and I must say that the Kotex “How to Insert a Tampon” video is refreshingly frank and personal for something coming from a major brand.)

living in stockholm

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I just packed my first box! And packing will always be inextricably connected to blogging for me.

There is so much more to say about the house we might be moving into in 30 days, but this post isn’t the sequel to the last one (sorry, Erika, I know you are dying in anticipation).

I’m trying not to be enthusiastic or emotional about the house, because it’s not a done deal until we sign the final papers. We have friends whose house was almost scuttled at settlement because the sellers suddenly couldn’t bear to part with it!

(BTW, sellers, in case you are Googling me for bargaining leverage (which I totally already did for you; how did you like living in Clearwater?), know the same caveat goes for you. I am an emotionally unstable, stubborn, only child with a tiny OCD Godzilla tramping around in the depths of my abdomen. Don’t underestimate my pertinacious self-spite. If you are the slightest bit squirrelly in bargaining I might seriously convince myself I don’t want your house just because of that one wall plate that’s crooked.)

What I am allowing myself to be quite enamored with is the idea of not living here, because even if we don’t buy this particular house, now we know we can buy a house. Any house. We have the money and the know how, and I make mortgage people sweat when I open up my laptop and tell them their “revised” offer actually costs more and that they ought to try again.

(That was pretty awesome, actually.)

Here is hellish. It wasn’t when we got here. It was pleasant. A sunny, mostly-quiet block with the occasional midnight drug deals at the corner that mostly kept to themselves with their impossibly small plastic baggies whose ziplocks are bigger than the bags themselves

Now, not so much. Ever since the hate crime we walk briskly, park out of sight, and regard everyone with cool suspicion.

Things we used to complain about now go uncomplained. I remember when we used to shoo people off of our stoop, or call the police for screaming fights in the middle of the street.

Ever since being vandalized, nothing seems to phase us. It’s not fear, so much as feeling completely apart from a community that could sit around and drink beer while someone shoveled cat shit through our mail-slot.

It’s their home, so if the consensus is in favor of their behavior why bother caring? Tiny barking dogs that live permanently in the yard? Awesome. Blasting wall-shaking music from a car in front of our door at midnight? Go right ahead. Using the sidewalk next door as your wood shop, complete with a table saw? Totally normal.

When we walk into the new house, or any other house we’ve looked at, we always get to a point where E and I share a glance that says, “This is normalcy.” No sidewalk shop calls. A car blasting music would be a front yard away from our door instead of on top of it, and the neighbors would call the police on it in a second.

It’s like we’re waking slowly from sleep to come to our senses.

Last night, when some unidentified figure hurled a bottle at my neighbor’s grandmother as she got out of a car, I allowed myself to be phased. Other neighbors were just standing around. I called 911 and said, “Someone is assaulting an older woman on our block. You need to send several patrol cars.” And then I stood in my doorway and stared down everyone on the street until they all tucked themselves back behind their doors and window shades, stared until the cops had come and questioned and gone.

I stared at the empty street and realized that it went from being home because I felt at home to being home because other people felt at home.

I don’t know about you and the stage of your life you’re currently gaining hindsight on, but it feels like that’s been the story of my recent exisistence – assimilating other people’s annoying, unkind whims just so I can say that life is comfortable.

Well, if I can stare down a mortgage agent in his own office until he lowers my rate, I can sure as hell feel at home in my own home – especially if it’s just for thirty more days.

I remember when I lost my mind AKA The House, pt. 1

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Things in my life are crazy and exploding in tiny multi-color fireworks across the backs of my eyeballs, making it hard to focus completely on anything directly in my field of vision.

Due to said lack of focus, I’ll just go in medias res here: we bought a house.

Well, it’s not officially bought. It’s bid for and inspected and on the verge of being paid for by a bank that we will in turn pay for the privilege of living in it, if it is turned over to us in livable condition.

Now that I have you hooked, allow me to flash back to last week.

Last week was the busiest, craziest week of my life, culminating in the most balls-out insane fuckery day of my life, ever. And to appreciate the insanity of our home-buying experience, you have to appreciate the week that began it.

It all began two weeks ago on Thursday, April 29. That day I went to work, went to a goodbye party for a coworker, attended a Social Media Club of Philly event, dined with Cecily and Anniemal, rolled home around midnight to sleep, shot a social video project for work, drove to Atlantic City to see Paramore (always AWESOME), drove back to Philly, kinda slept, attended MarketingCamp (during which I unexpectedly presented a session), warmed up, played a three-hour long gig with Arcati Crisis and Filmstar where we each essentially played our entire repertoires, kinda slept, was at the finish line for the Blue Cross Broad Street Run at 7:30am taking photos and tweeting, and pretty much did run-related stuff for the next 36hrs less a few bits of sleep here and there.

I finally got a decent night of sleep, and Tuesday when I got to work I was like, “Back to sanity. I love sanity!” However, we all know that is a lie. I do not love sanity. I don’t even kinda like it. I like bugfuck craziness and constant deadlines. Hello, it’s called Crushing KRISIS. There’s a reason I like the word – because I function best when I am a hot mess with unrealistically lofty goals and no sleep.

That night E and I were scheduled to look at two houses. We had no intentions of buying either. It was an academic exercise – we did an 80/20 on the range of our potential house spend and were seeing two homes priced around those landmarks to figure out if we had enough liquid cash amassed to buy a home.

The first house was the 20%. Cute, backed up to a state park, and needed a wall knocked out of its kitchen. Rooms were a little too reflective for music. An educational look at what 20% of our buying range would get us.

The second house was the 80%. Single, Tudor, blue outside – all things I enjoy about a house. Hardwood floors, I like that. Shaded side patio, very cute. At that point it was still an educational excursion. Then we saw the kitchen, with its brand new everything and pocket-door powder room and permanent wall mounted a/v system and I was like, Hmm, this visit may not be solely for educational purposes.

And, oh lordy, it was not for educational purposes. Imagine that being a first-time home-buyer is like being a virgin, so our excursion was really like learning about sex, with no intent of having it anytime soon. Working from there, if the first house was like learning about sex in 8th grade from your gym teacher in Health class, this house was like learning about sex in 8th grade by visiting a brothel with a pocket full of hundred dollar bills.

Basically, I am saying the house jumped our bones and quickly deflowered us. It had every single thing we said we wanted in a house. Like, even unusual things like radiator heat for E and her sensitive vocal cords and central a/c for me and my first world aversion to temperatures higher than 80 degrees. Oh, and speakers installed IN THE CEILING of the room that would be my recording studio.

We went home Tuesday night, reeling. Were we just enthused to be re-embarking on the home purchasing adventure, or was this the right house for us?

That was how we arrived at the apex of the most insane week of my life – the single most ridiculously intense, entirely unexpected day of my life

And this post is already too long, so let’s add a cliffhanger to my in medias res.