Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

Who Am I, Anyhow?

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With this month being my blog reboot, I thought an appropriate second post would be something resembling my bio.

I am a blogger. My blog is called Crushing Krisis because I crush-on or am-crushed-by anything and everything, and because my longtime internet handle is “krisis.”

I am a singer-songwriter often too shy or too perfectionist to allow anyone to hear my work.

I am an only child, which sometimes represents itself via my stubborn – often luddite – attitude towards change, as well as my frequent joining and discarding of various recreational activities that involve other people.

I am a Magna Cum Laude graduate of Drexel University. While I obtained my degree I worked one and a half years as a full time, fully paid intern as part of Drexel’s Co-Op program.

I am a Communications Representative at a major Philadelphia company by day, having given up a dream of Journalism in favor of making large(r) sums of money.

I am surrounded by a disproportionately talented and liberal group of friends, the vast majority of whom were made through my (often abortive) involvement with different theatre and music groups in college.

I am obsessed with improving the little things that impact my self-perception. I spend every day obsessing over and trying to improve my budget, my writing, my diet, and my musical skills.

I am a believer in karma – i think if you give good you will always get better.

I am currently the happiest and healthiest i have been in my entire life.

A Crisis on Crushing Krisis (or, Welcome to NaBloPoMo)

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You go to Wikipedia to look up one thing and it turns into your entire night. Not a night about that one thing, but a night about all sorts of things you never knew about before.

For example, I never knew that there is a shrimp capable of producing shockwaves with its claws that can kill small fish or break glass. And I didn’t know that DC Comics’ hero Animal Man could manifest that power, or the power of any other animal, proportional to the size of his body.

I do know a bit about DC Comics in general, which came part and parcel with being a young boy in the eighties. I can rattle off the origins of all the major heroes as if reading straight from the origin cards that came with their Super Powers toys: Superman the sole survivor from Krypton, Batman an orphan, Wonder Woman an Amazon, et cetera.

The problem that DC Comics was having in the 1980s was that the origins weren’t really that simple, and neither was anything else. As a new influx of readers emerged from the simplified realm of cartoons and toys they discovered that Superman wasn’t exactly a sole survivor… Supergirl was his cousin, and Krypto the Superdog was his long lost pet. So much for being Krypton’s last son.

Other heroes had similarly puzzling paradoxes. The problems weren’t the fault of any single writer or editor so much as they was the fault of almost fifty years of accumulated comics continuity. Eventually the continuity became so splintered that some of the odder stories were explained away as occurring on alternate versions of Earth, but even this couldn’t solve all of the confusion.

The result was Crisis on Infinite Earths – a DC Comics event whose stage was the entire multiverse (and every comic title), and whose stakes were the very existence of life as we know it. Various Supermen and Wonder Women from other realities were knocked off over the course of the event, along with their confusing accomplices (like the aforementioned Supergirl).

When the dust settled the DC Universe was “rebooted” with a single Earth, containing heroes with discernable backstories that could be easily portrayed by cartoons and toys. Ever since, any continuity-impacting event is a “Crisis.” Last year had an Identity Crisis, this year an Infinite Crisis.

I swear, there was a point to all of that. Hang in there.

Crushing Krisis has been around for an extraordinary six years without interruption; it’s the longest running blog in Philadelphia.

Longrunning blogs are just as confusing as those pre-Crisis comic book stories. Blogs easily mix the present with the past, and the longer a blog exists the more and more of the present becomes the past in the form of archives. Past personal dramas continue to be referenced and – aside from the occasional backlink – a new reader is expected to keep up with the narrative without the benefit of comics standards like toys, or trading cards. Or stories set on alternate Earths.

In honor of National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo), here at Crushing Krisis we are having a DC Comics style Crisis. A Crushing Krisis Crisis. Krisis’s Crushing Crisis. Krisis of Infinite Crises. I don’t know, choose whatever you think is catchy.

The point is that – for the entirety of November – I’m rebooting.

Because of my participation in NaBloPoMo I’ll be posting at least once every day, and my posts will contain everything you need to know about my life. Every character and plot strand will be introduced anew. No assumptions, no backstory, no backlinks – not even to reference things that were really funny the first time around. And, to up the ante, if I want to link to one of my original songs in order to refer to it, I will need to provide a brand-new recording of the song, commissioned especially for NaBloPoMo.

I hope this novel idea piques your interest enough to stay tuned through NaBloPoMo and Beyond, whether you are a regular reader or a random surfer. Welcome to the all new Crushing Krisis!

NaBloPoMo

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I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), because prior to this incarnation of songwriter-Peter there was a lengthy iteration of fictionwriter-Peter who always was slaving away at the concept for a book or two.

Those days of thinking in character motivations and complete sentences have been eclipsed by chord changes and internal rhyme, and every November when NaNoWriMo comes around I wistfully browse its website, wishing that I could have that high school inspiration back for just a month to churn out a completed novel.

I’d also like to be able to fit into my vinyl pants from high school. We should all have dreams.

Since my novel-writing days would seem to be over, or at least on long-term suspension, I was intrigued by the idea of a parallel National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo), which I found on Fussy roundaboutly via Dooce. NaBloPoMo doesn’t really roll of the tongue like NaNoWriMo, so I have for-short deemed it “Nablo,” if only because “Namblo” just made me think of half of “Rambo” and half of “Nambla”, which as a combined thought was not an entirely pleasant experience.

I might not be able to plot a book liked I used to, but surely I can supply meaningless blather as good as I ever did? I mean, lest we forget, I was the #1 Power Blogger on the entire freaking internet on several occasions, and I Blogathoned 48 posts in 24 hours every summer for three years running. (not to mention I remain the longest running Philly Blogger, and the originator of a singer/songwriter “podcast,” but I digress).

So, here we are on the threshold of November, and I’m going to attempt to make an entry for each day of the month. Some of the entries might be photos, or songs, but somehow, someway, we’re going to make it through this, gentle reader. Somehow.

Birds, Bees, Abs, Pees

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Okay, maybe I was supposed to remember this from biology or from the little clear-plastic visible woman I put together when I was eight that came complete with detatchable pregnant belly. If so, I apologize for my general scientific truancy.

If a woman has very defined abs and she gets pregnant, where do the abs go? Are they behind the belly, still intact? Does the belly dissolve the abs?

You have to realize that i’ve hardly known any pregnant people in my life. All of my aunts got pregnant in the same year, in which i recall seeing them only sparingly, and i’ve had one pregnant friend who i didn’t have an entire conversation with for the length of her pregnancy. I am operating on a deficit of facts here. The Internets and The Google have yet to come through for me.

This one is slightly less embarrasing then when, at age eight, I asked how a mommy pees when she is giving birth since she’s somewhat busy down there at the time.

Yeah, I was pretty precocious, wasn’t I? No cabbage patches and storks for me, I was already trying to understand the points of vaginal multi-tasking.

A Picture Share!

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Hair is cute. More importantly, a great example of the sorts of faces i make when not preening for a self pic.