Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

tweeting and flying like birds

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I’m presently two miles away from the Pennridge airport, the site of today’s insanity. (see also: last night and this morning)

You can follow along live on twitter up ’til jump time with me or our ground controller amanda nan, or the #blamedrewscancer crew: drew, schmidtultra, mikeyil, & brimil.

I know I have yet to explain why I am jumping out of a plane with the #blamedrewscancer crew. That’s another story entirely. Monday. Seriously.

I’ll check back in after I’ve flown.

breakfast of champions

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I’m awake at 8am, just like any other day of the week.

I briefly debated if I should eat some sort of special pre-jump meal, but given my general lack of stomach for breakfast it seemed like an unnecessary temptation of fate to eat anything unusual before skydiving. I settled on my favorite meal and number one comfort food, Special K Red Berries with Silk Soy Milk.

(ps: Why is it called “Red Berries” when it only has strawberries in it? Wouldn’t you say that strawberries are the red berry with the strongest draw? Like, “OMG, I’m going to get some red berries today, I hope there’s some strawberries in there!” Did some other cereal copyright “strawberries”? Anyhow…)

I’m also a bit torn about how to style my hair and what underwear to wear – two factors that are clearly not going to have a net effect on my jumping experience

A few months ago I was yelling at my mom for not having a living will. The most dangerous thing she does is perpetuate a three-decade long smoking habit. So, jumping out of a plane made me feel like a bit of a hypocrite for not putting any affairs in order.

(PS: No one, under any circumstances, should tell my mom I am skydiving. This is one of those occasions that justifies my blocking her on Twitter. If she finds out she will hit me with the Italian fear/guilt combo so fast and hard that I won’t even let the man strap himself to my back, let alone jump off of anything with him. Anyhow…)

On the off-chance I die today, here’s all that I could think of while I was brushing my teeth:

I don’t like coffins. I want to be disposed of in a green way where the earth can just reclaim me. If that’s not readily available in Pennsylvania I’d want to be donated to science – with the caveat that they can’t dissect or otherwise alter any of my boy parts, because that is just weird.

I don’t like funerals. We went to a beautiful wake for Wes’s father last year that was full of music and might not have mentioned the “G” man even once. I really liked that.

If I get killed doing this I blame Drew’s cancer.

I didn’t get to far past that, because (a) I don’t think I’m going to die (and would like to keep it that way so, please mom, no calls), and (b) I was really hungry for that bowl of Special K.

I’m going to go take a shower now, and mull more over the hair and underwear dilemma.

no fear of flying

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In less than twelve hours I will jump out of a plane.

I’ve wanted to skydive for a long time. Forever? Since before I started having the flying dreams, I think, so frequent and tangible that the power of personal flight started to feel familiar.

The flying – the being high above the ground part – is familiar. Even the rushing quickly towards the ground part, because, honestly, sometimes I am not quite so pro at the dream-flying. It always turns out okay.

The voluntarily leaping out of a plane in midair, no so familiar.

Mildly terrifying, actually.

That’s the paradox. There’s this thing I want to do, and I know I’m going to love it because I’ve dreamt of it for years. Yet there’s the tiny problem of getting underway. One second of hard part – the difficulty of taking one step and letting gravity take its course, and then fifteen thousand feet of dream.

That first step is the only thing I’m afraid of. At the moment. And not just tomorrow. In general. I’m afraid of single steps, but obsessed with what comes after.

Just afraid of that one step.

Poll me again on that one in the morning.

still holding. always holding.

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I’m on hold with Sprint right now to make sure my old cell account is really cancelled so I can go on my merry way with my spiffy new android phone.

(imagine a world where we could just trust this stuff to happen)

Sprint’s hold music is always super-anonymous – very sincerely strummed acoustic guitars. Just now I got to wondering about how this music gets born.

Is there some closet rock star out there proudly strumming this little number in a coffee shop, being moved by its elementary melodic qualities, maybe prefacing with, “you can catch this tune on hold with sprint once every hour, and now we’re in talks with a major bank to get some plays with them as well”?

Or, is it some studio hack locked in his closet of equipment, churning out variations on a placating theme like arithmetic tables, thinking, “I have to suspend a second at least once every eight bars to keep the caller docile” because that’s the equivalent of painting a jail’s holding cell a pale pink?

Finally, am I the only person in the history of the universe to have this thought?