Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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The Descent

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I used to delight in being mean.

The focus of my anger didn’t really matter – a bag boy at the supermarket, a friend in conversation, a bus driver – as long as I vented my spleen at just the right moment. It was infamous and much-lamentedtrait of mine for many years; even Gina would roll her eyes when she saw that i was headed for a blowout.

Over the past few years my capacity for nastiness has been on a steady decline. Even when I summon up a decent fit of rage I usually swallow it, or at least soften the blow. And, not just for the benefit of my friends.

Over the summer I went to see The Descent, and in the fairly packed theatre I sat next to a friendly, cow-eyed middle-aged woman and her companion. She seemed like a decent enough neighbor, though during the previews she occasionally talked back to the screen. But, so do I.

As the movie progressed the talking-back morphed into a non-stop commentary track punctuated with pleas to her companion, like “I don’t know why you brought me to see this,” and “oh my god, you can’t leave me alone to go to the bathroom, I can’t take it. I just can’t take it.” I threw a few sideways glances her way, but she was oblivious in rapt, babbling horror.

Finally, during the first truly grisly scene in the movie her babbling transformed into incoherent gibbering screams, either at the characters on screen or just for her own benefit. Either way, she was significantly louder than the theatre’s surround sound, and I was not missing part of the movie just to get an usher.

Calm and collected, i turned to face the incoherent beast.

“Could you be quieter than the fucking characters in the movie?”

I immediately regreted venting at this creature of an obviously lower personal fortitude than my own. She turned to face me with her horrified, watery cow-eyes, mouth working open and closed like a guppy. She had no verbal reaction, just the “blurp, blurp, blurp” of her jowls working.

Over time my peers have developed an immunity to my scathing remarks, but clearly I had destroyed this creature’s will to live. I had to do something to bring her back from the brink.

“I’m sorry, you’re just really loud.”

She kept guppying at me, accompanying the guppying with her watery wide-eyed stare. I tried to go back to watching the (excellent) movie, but her stare kept nudging me in the side of the head.

I had become more horrifically transfixing than the golum-monsters on screen. I had ruined her movie experience with my meanness. She just wanted to go out to the movies and yammer like a mental patient because she has no coping mechanism to deal with horror but would be the oldest kid in the theatre for The Ant Bully. Who was I to impose society’s artificial standards about being quiet at the movies on her
As the on-screen violence continued I calmly, sweetly, turned back to my (still-staring) neighbor. One of my professors was a fan of a communications theory where other people would agree with you more strongly if you aligned your bodily reactions (like rates of breathing and blinking) with theirs. It was time for a field test.

I carefully matched her cow-stare and her guppy-breathing until I felt that we had reached a state of true simpatico. Gulping down some air and willing my eyes into giant, mooning saucers, I whispered, “I know, it’s really scary.”

Borderline cow-woman bit her lip and nodded at me. I bit my own lip and nodded along. I had established a connection. Slowly, still maintaining eye contact, still in-character as a cow/guppy with borderline personality disorder, I turned back towards the screen.

As if by magic, or a complex system of gears and pulleys, she also turned back towards the screen. I completed my turn in slow motion, finally breaking eye contact when it felt as if my pupil was going to slide back into my head.

She didn’t make another noise or even remotely glance at me for the remainder of the movie, or afterwards when we filed out. Yet, it was a pyrrhic victory, because I felt the need to temper a successful flare-up at a stranger who was screaming incoherently at a movie screen with an apology. You know, so her feelings wouldn’t be too hurt.

Old-school me would have pressed my attack until she ran sobbing from the theatre.

Of course, I wouldn’t have accumulated any good karma that way.

I like to think that present-day me strives to at least break even on karma, which means i only get to be unapolgetically nasty to someone who really deserves it. And, much to my chagrin, talkers at the movies, along with litterers and people who smoke next to you at the bus stop, are just innocent bystanders minding their own lives.

NaBloPoMo Round-Up #1: #s and As

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We are now one week into NaBloPoMo, and the attrition has begun. I’ve only been through the #s and the As, and already many bloggers have given up, or have resorted to posting about how they have nothing to post.

With some people dying on the vine, it makes it all the more enjoyable to find good reads via the alphabetical participants list, as well as through Lane’s now-infamous Randomizer. [Read more…] about NaBloPoMo Round-Up #1: #s and As

No More Wire Hangers

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What to say about my mother that is suitable to print in a public forum?

She and my father got married when she was the same age as I am. When she became pregnant just a few months later she decided that she had to learn everything about creating the best environment for a baby. And, I mean everything.

Think about it. It is nineteen eighty one. We are talking about a woman who David Bowie could have had arrested for stalking on more than one occasion. A woman who changed into a white pantsuit at her wedding reciption so she could fly across the ceiling of the club on a trapeeze. She and my father were both professional, fulltime bartenders. She was the only-child of lower-middle class parents, one of whom didn’t even finish grade school. She herself had barely found the interest to get through high school.

All of that just makes my mother’s baby initiative – and really my whole childhood – all the more amazing.

She did not take any aspect of her young motherhood for granted – she questioned everything. And, my mother discovered very quickly that just because something was socially accepted, or scholastically average, or even medically recommended, didn’t mean it was beneficial for a baby Peter.

Example #1 – I was not allowed to eat hotdogs or drink soda, and my father’s side of the family was determined to give me both. One one occasion I was convinced to eat half of a hot dog and – predictably – became sick. I have never seen my mother come so close as to devouring someone’s very soul as I did that night. SHE was the mother, and SHE said NO hotdogs, so THERE WOULD BE NO HOTDOGS.

To this day I don’t drink soda.

Example #2 – In first grade one of my classmates got placed into a mentally gifted program because he was smart. My mother pointed out that I was also smart, but got fed some sort of B.S. in reply about how I didn’t carry my numbers when I did addition in long columns. So, she had me tested in a controlled environment. When they checked my test they informed her that I hadn’t answered a tough word problem correctly. She pointed out that I had, but that I had just skipped showing my work because I used multiplication to solve the problem.

Example #3 – When I started visiting orthodontists to consult over my impending braces, one offhandedly told her he would have to pull out several teeth to make things work. I think she physically picked me up out of his chair to leave the office. I wound up without a single tooth pulled and a perfect smile.

Also, my mother never once patronized me just because I was a child – as soon as I was old enough to carry a conversation was expected to do so in all circumstances, and to make change for myself when we played Monopoly. And, so I did. I used to eschew naptime in kindergarten in favor of chatting about current events with the teachers. I watched the nightly news and Johnny Carson almost every night of my childhood.

In my anecdotes my mother is usually painted as comic relief, sometimes as a foil, and often as as a too-patronizing voice of reason. However, She will still devour your soul if you fuck with her, me, or her cat. She still has frighteningly good taste in music (David Bowie included).

And, much to my continual exasperation, she still questions just about everything.

Trio: Season Five, Suite #2!

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Trio: Season Five, Suite #2:
Songs on the Topic of Elise:
Little Love, Wilted, A Little Bit, (and a secret cover!)

Trio – the original singer-songwriter web session – returns for its fifth season featuring my own DIY music. This season each trio of songs will have a loose topic to connect them, which will often correspond to a recent post.

A sample of what I had to say in this Trio…

Little Love
There’s a point of some dispute because one line in the song is about somebody else, and the whole rest of the song is about Elise. … The whole conceit of it (if I can say that about one of my songs) is that it’s about the purest form of butterflies in stomach. It’s about having a crush on somebody just like third grade … more than anything you just want to be near them, and share time with them, and share your experiences with them.

Wilted
Being in a very successful relationship … you have to be careful how you pull from it because that song is going to continue to exist, and so is your relationship. And you have to be careful what you’re disclosing to the other person – and what you’re disclosing to the listener – because it might not be any of their business.

A Little Bit
Elise was having a laugh at my expense earlier, because I kept saying all of these songs were the quintessential Elise song, and I finally arrived at this one and she was surprised … What this song came out of is that I was in the last two weeks of college, I was under the gun for everything, and I was up all night … packing to move out of my college apartment and into my first apartment with Elise. I was so frazzled, and everything was difficult, and I had all this school work to do, and I just couldn’t handle it.

So – in the middle of all the craziness – I just stopped and I wrote a song, because that’s how things happen in my life. It’s fun.

You can download the entire Trio , or download the single of “A Little Bit..” Or, start from Suite #1.

She Said “If”

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Elise and I have been dating since Valentine’s Day, 2002 with no interruption. We are so evenly matched in every aspect from pastimes to taste in movies to scholastic aptitude – that it’s hard to believe that we were meant to wind up with anyone but each other.

Our relationship has been full of many stories, but today’s is actually about an earlier encounter. Our first, actually.

Half a year before we started dating, on Elise’s first or second day of college, the theatre produced two brief shows to introduce the program to incoming freshman. Elise, having performed and produced theatre in high school, attended with her roommate Kat.

I was in both shows, starring – however improbably – as the romantic lead in each. They were my last time acting onstage in college.

In one show I was moody and dark, but in the other show (a farce) my character was essentially me – effervescent, flamboyant, and terrible with women. Elise might have first seen me on stage, but the character she saw was me.

At some point in the evening – maybe during the show, or maybe after, I’ve never gotten it right when i tell this story – Elise leaned over to a friend and whispered, “If he’s not gay, I’ll marry him.”

A lot has ensued in the five years since that sentence but, so far as I know, it’s still true.

(For the record, I believe my first comment may have been, “I don’t know who’s cuter, her or her roommate,” which leads to other, even more amusing stories.)

It’s hard to believe that our relationship has now stretched to envelop the entirety of Elise’s collegiate career, and my entire professional life, and has followed us into our first (rented) house as adults, but that’s how time works.