Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

Never Gain Weight

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Do you ever feel as though you are consciously flinging your well-being aside for some sense of reckless self-gratification? That you’re doing something self-destructive, but you don’t care?

Maybe you’re charging something to your credit card that you can’t afford. Maybe you’re eating something you know you really shouldn’t have. Maybe you’re drinking more when you’re already pleasantly drunk.

I have those moments every so often, though on a much smaller scale then I used to. Sometimes as I catch myself doing them – handing over my credit card, or heading into a second row of cookies, I think. Why does it seem so inevitable? What makes this compulsory?

I’m not sure what they’d teach you in counseling for any of those problems but, for me, just asking that question can change my mind. Am I getting the junky donut because I feel like I need energy? Am I buying ten new CDs because they’ll make me happy? Am I strengthening my drink because I think I’ll have more fun if I’m more drunk?

Maybe the difference between someone with an occasional bad habit and someone with a problem is the ability to honestly answer that question, and to evaluate the result.

Some days I just really feel like eating a donut, though.

This Message Will Self Destruct…

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For a few years of my life I despised the phone, somehow convinced that picking it up could only result in unfortunate news (or telemarketing). I’m not so afraid of it now, but for a few minutes this morning I felt as though I was right back in that place.

The feeling owed to an emotionally draining weekend, and from this side of Sunday it seemed to me as if every phone message was a loaded gun waiting to fire a little bit of conflict or a touch of bad tidings – waiting to sidetrack me with more bad news or bad karma.

As a result, when my mother left me a message on both my cell and desk phones with terse instructions to page her without delay I was concerned. Not only was the lack of verbosity completely unbecoming of her, there were children screaming in the background all the while.

Where had she found screaming children, and what was I supposed to do about it? Naturally I imagined the worst. She had found a baby abandoned in a dumpster, and needed me to alert the media while she whisked it to CHOP to have it nursed back to health. She was trapped at gunpoint in a daycare center, unable to stay on the line for long. A school bus had overturned on the 95 South, and she was triaging the children until the paramedics arrived. She had to avert a national nuclear disaster in less than 24 hours of consecutive screen time, less commercial breaks.

I soon learned that, in reality, she was in Sears portrait studio, arguing with the receptionist because the software on their picture discs isn’t compatible with Windows XP (presumably holding up a line of screaming children all the while), and she called me to consult. As the anxious knot in my stomach quietly dissolved into an afternoon case of agita (odgida), I calmly explained that though the hopelessly proprietary software might not work on her computer, the pictures would probably be BMPs or JPGs scanned directly from the negatives, and that she would definitely be able to open those

I wonder if working in the hospital for so long has rendered her immune to the dramatic connotations of such terse messages. Is her day so typically filled with a string of human tragedy that she has lost the ability to discern the difference? Does she find everything to be tragedic? Or, worse still, is everything so commonplace that her emergent response is a tacit reaction?

I refuse to react to all things as catastrophic, or to live in the specter of fear – fear of the phone, or of anything else. I refuse to, unless that same fear can illustrate to me what it is I love so much about the moments after and before it. I am in love with walking, and with singing, and with loving, and with you, and I would not have it any other way.

So, call me.

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My iPod, almost completely out of battery power, didn’t seem as if it would want to scroll very far to find an album for my morning commute on Wednesday. I obliged by only descending as far as Ani DiFranco.

As the trolley whisked through its underground tunnel, I marveled that an Ani Difranco album came out on Tuesday. It’s the first one that I haven’t bought on (or before) its day of release. In fact, I used to pride myself on being able to recite Ms. DiFranco’s release dates as if their were birthday’s of favorite cousins, or political revolutions.

As Ani releases an album nearly every year, it’s easy for me to associate every one with a certain bit of my life, as many people as there are songs strewn across her dozens of discs. Standing there on the trolley a line caught my ears, a line I’ve heard so many times before: I owe my life to the people that I love.

It’s a strange concept to me who, by any account, is at least halfway centered on myself. I measure my life in personal milestones and, in Ani’s case, in albums, but rarely by other people. But, as those songs passed by I thought of some of those other people. How Ayelet put an Ani song on a mix tape before I even know who Ani was. How freshman year I sat on Alison’s floor and traded Ani concert stories as we carefully cut out the tray-art of my demo cd. How sitting in Lindsay’s room (really Laurel’s) and singing “Falling is Like This” I realized that I had met someone of a completely like mind.

All of those people, just by invoking Ani DiFranco albums. If Ani’s music has partially made my life, then what about the people who brought me an appreciation for those songs? The people that are unavoidably invoked every time one of them is played.

I am happy to say that I’ve spoken to all of the people in that paragraph since Wednesday, but what about everyone else? What about the ones I associate with Tori, or with the Beatles? I am so eager to cloak myself in a fluency of all things musical that I seem to have forgotten the importance of what allows that music to be meaningful to me.

So, here’s a new initiative. Every time I hear a song for the next week, and it reminds me of someone, or someplace, I am writing their name down. At the end of the week, I’m starting at the top of the list, and talking to one of them every day. Will I have their phone number? Their email address? Will I even know where they live, or if they’re alive? Who knows. But, if an iPod can allow me to appreciate music in a whole new way, maybe it can help me appreciate people again, too.

Do you think I associate you with a song? Do you have one for me? Since my comments are currently irreparably broken, why don’t you drop me a line and tell me what it is.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2005/01/110702514846232122/

Sucker (OALD-P)

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I had assumed that the squealing coming from outside of my window was one car hopelessly mired in a snowy parking spot, which seemed a little incongruous, as it’s not really snowing hard enough to create mrie. After over an hour of the squealing i decided that i would go and push the car out of the damn spot if that’s what it took, but a look out the window revealed that it was no one car but actually any car that was conscientious enough to stop at the stop sign at the top of the hill of my street. Because, apparently, stopping there in this light dusting enters your vehicle into some sort of anti-gravity zone where traction means nothing and you have to spin your tires for five minutes to get into the intersection.

After ascertaining that it definitely wasn’t the same car squealing (via watching three different cars experience the problem), i decided that the squealing didn’t bother me nearly enough to stand outside for an hour giving the reticent vehicles a push like a short-legged child on a high swing.

Speaking of children (man, can i fucking nail a segueway), i am a sucker for baby blogs. I love’em. Love reading about the too-cute exploits of children who i will never have to interact with (thus making them infinitely cuter). I think it’s PRECIOUS.

(wow, that car sounded really angry. jeeze, even i know gunning it to 60mph isn’t gonna help you in the anti-gravity zone)

Anyhow, child-blogs: hoochie-coochie coo. Yes. Aside from the obvious choice of Melly, who i consider to be queen of the acerbic baby-baring wits, Dooce also has a good bit of baby material (her’s is too young for much mischief, though). If you require some mayhem with your cooing, trying Bairn-Raising, written by longtime member of my extended blog-family/mafia, Funky Helix. And, um… i can’t think of any more, but boy do i read those three a lot.

Also, tiny sorta-ugly dogs are sortof like babies, only i COVET tiny sorta-ugly dogs (only when i see them in pictures, though, as then they are silent).

Damn hill.