Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

Slam Dunk, Bitches

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Usually when I read some sort of “organizational self help” type of article I think, ahh, all things I know how to do, just nothing that can happen inside of my house. Because, while I am occupationally an organizational dervish, my home persona is not exactly the paragon of effective time and resource management.

(Maybe if I had my own production buyer a team of Sr. Designers at home things would run a little more smoothly? Oh, and an industrial printer. And a “Send Calls” button.)

In any event, I was tickled to read CNN’s Six slam-dunk time management tips article, because I engage in all six actively at work and at home.

And, then I realized that this is a signal that I’ve actually, puzzlingly, logic-defyingly become good at organization within the bounds of my own home.

I keep trying to figure out how it happened, but I can’t seem to nail it down. My big 2006 personal goal-setting was a nice boost. Being super-autonomous at my job definitely had an impact. So did helping to organize Lyndzapalooza. Of course, regular Arcati Crisis rehearsals with Gina kept me on a schedule, to which I added voice lessons. And, I totally reorganized my home office this winter, and totally re-filled my desk a few weeks ago when I bought my new mixer.

Et cetera.

Moral? Time management is a use-or-lose sort of skill. If I was still in the state of last summer, where I pre-scheduled my entire work-day only to return to a house where my primary task was watching seven seasons of X-Files as expediently as possible, then my time management would continue to suck. If that home life is filled with things you are excited about accomplishing, the excitement eventually trickles down to grocery shopping and doing laundry.

Okay, maybe not doing laundry. I don’t think I’ll ever be efficient at that.

Dying On the Vine of My Mind

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In the elevator we all pushed our buttons, some boldly and some surreptitiously.

Mine came out the lowest. Hard to do only seven floors from the top of the building – like skating out of a round of hearts with a Jack. I shrugged off slight sneers and enjoyed the head rush of expressing past fifteen intermediate floors of the high-rise.


I do my best writing in my head while I’m in transit – in an elevator, or walking down the street – which is maybe why so little of it actually finds its way to the page.

It’s not so unusual; I write the best songs while I’m falling asleep. And, in high school I used the write the best French essays in my sleep.

Composing blogs in wakeful daylight may seem more convenient, but my two sleep-adjecent habits are easy enough to manage. For French it was just a matter of jotting it down when I awoke. For songs, if it’s a good one I wake up, walk down the hall, sing it into a microphone, and go back to bed. (And, I have finally relented and put a pad on my night table, for those occasions where the quality is more questionable).


I had disliked her immediately as she sidled up the bus shelter while taking a long, insistent drag off of her cigarette, exhaling her haze in my direction.

Then, as if sensing she was already on my bad side and had nothing left to lose, she conjured an empty coke bottle from her handbag, contemplated it for a moment (taking another lengthy pull), and then crouched down low on the curb and quite deliberately shoved the trash into the gutter.

Quite involuntarily, my face churned into a sneer; i was hardly inclined to resist.

Why can’t that be punishable by death instead of hypothetical $300 fine, I wondered. Can she really be making a positive contribution to society if she can’t walk five steps out of the bus shelter to throw that in a trash can?


Writing is another matter. I write in my head in my written narrative voice, rather than my speaking voice. It doesn’t necessarily translate to speaking, so recording my thoughts via my cell phone is often for naught – the text doesn’t hang together when I transcribe it. And, since I type three or four times faster than I write in longhand, pulling out a pad doesn’t always capture all of the dimensions of my phrase.

I create too many phrases that wither and die on the vine of my mind. I can’t tell you how many witty blogs and music reviews and media critiques I’ve lost in subways or while crossing streets.

What do real writers do? What do you do?

Now With More Undergarments…

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One of the reasons I love having a blog – especially a longstanding blog that is never revised or edited in retrospect – is the hindsight it offers.

For instance, longtime readers may recall that I used to have a webcam, and on said webcam I would routinely – even frequently – appeared in the nude. Never full frontal, mind you, but everything but. Because, apparently, that’s how I spent most of my time – nude, either pretending i was in a Playgirl spread or playing guitar.

If you are one of said longtime readers, you may also recall that I archived the highlights of said webcam in a conveniently accessible gallery, where they could be viewed by all future employers or pornographic film recruiters.

Well, you may recall it, but it certainly came as a shock to me when I clicked through an old link tonight to be met with very nearly my full monty circa 2001.

Even more shocking, in retrospect my 2001 almost-full-monty was some pretty hot stuff. Like, just now I sorta gawked at myself for a minute or two.

In case you aren’t one of said longtime readers (of which there approximately four that I can think of) I’d love for you to see the hotness that was me for yourself (as long as you are not an employer! or co-worker! or one of my hypothetical eventual children!).

Except… um… actually, I’d rather you not see it.

Let me rephrase: I’d love for you to be cognizant of the hotness that was me, but I don’t necessarily want to direct you towards a venue where you can see the hotness, especially not in a form that can be forwarded via email or posted on your favorite social networking site.

In any event, thank god for my blog, or I would have tottered into my middle age having completely forgotten that I used to lounge around the apartment in the buff, strategically placing bass guitars so that they would show only the tiniest wisp of pubic hair, and that I really ought to consider taking some of those pictures down if I ever decide to run for a political office.

Of Undergarments

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For a significant portion of my adult-shoe-sized life I consented to own only a single sort of sock. Gray Hanes socks.

My time, I reasoned at the tender age of fifteen, was too precious to be spent sorting and matching socks.

(Of course, at the time my mother was sorting and washing socks; I only did laundry when I wanted to work out something on guitar without anyone being able to hear me.)

And, socks were a utilitarian piece of clothing – their selection hardly factored into my fashion sense. Between boot legged jeans and tight vinyl pants no one would ever know or care what color socks I wore

(Around the same time I had deemed that all of my underwear be black, which seems contrary to the whole “utilitarian piece of clothing” argument. Except, nothing spoiled a good semi-goth outfit than a tiny peek of the angelic elastic of a pair of tighty-whities. Trust me.)

My single-sock philosophy developed a chink at Drexel, where our job-interview coaches put our impending job interviews in a plain and dire light: if your interviewer caught you wearing gym socks under your dress pants they would turn you out on your ear, having already seen for themselves your greatest on-the-job weakness and deemed you unworthy. And, if Drexel caught wind of it you could be expelled.

Or something like that.

I carefully shopped around for a black sock I could stick with, eventually settling on Dockers. Generic, easily bought in packs of three or nine. The perfect complement to the gray Hanes. With only two colors, sorting was still not an issue, which I appreciated much more now that doing my laundry involved sitting in molded plastic chairs and sorting on card tables.

I’ll spare you a sock-tinged journey through the remainder of my collegiate and professional career and just cut to the chase.

Friday morning I spent ten minutes rustling through my laundry basket seeking black socks. In the literal sense my quest was fulfilled – I came away from my hunt with eight socks. Yet, practically it was unfulfilled – none of them matched. I have designer black socks, gold-toed black socks, black socks with subtle patterns, and two subtly-different sorts of black Dockers socks.

What’s the moral of this tale? I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps that all of those fussy teenaged whims usually have some sort of obstinately sound reasoning behind them, and if you don’t wind up as an entirely different person as an adult you might find yourself wishing you had never let down your guard.

Although, for the record, I still do not own any white underwear.

i am sounding out the silence

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A few weeks ago I visited Rabi in NYC. It was an relatively ad hoc trip – I owed her a visit, and she was free for a few days. Things just fell into place.

Rabi and I are not the bloggers we once were; both of us allow our domains to fall into silence for weeks or months at a time, when the span used to be days or mere hours. One might imagine, then, that we had more to talk about than usual, having missed so much errata, minutia, and other blog-worthy details of life.

Not quite. In fact, upon my departure I had the distinct impression that we had spoken markedly less than in any previous encounter. The quantity changed, though the quality of the conversations wasn’t any more or less.

It made me think: do I speak less now, in general?

I’m quite sure that I do. At work I am almost entirely autonomous, and spend long stretches of my day quietly creating project plans or proofreading. Elise and I operate on slightly less words than we used to, if only because it takes less to communicate our meaning these days. And, I despise the phone, as ever. Yet, even in public situations – in meetings or dinners or parties – I have the perception that I’m saying a lot less than I used to.

The next question in sequence is: why? The easy answer is “circumstance,” but all of the circumstances that surround me are ones that I manufactured for myself, which leads us to a second “why.”

Do I just have less to say? Am I becoming less self-involved as I (presumably) mature? Am I growing more comfortable with myself, and in turn with the silences that surround me?

Does it mean that I’m listening more? Or, am I more introverted – less likely to expose myself to others?

Looking back into the microcosm of Rabi and I, walking in circles in the East Village and around the Seaport, I can see a little of each reason. I’m sure there are days where one dominates, and others where they are equal.

It just makes me wonder: where did all those other words go?