Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Personal

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I had had a pretty insular week after returning from my whirlwind boston excursion, so last night Aim and i decided to head down to South Street and see the Beta Band on extremely short notice just to get out of our respective houses. It was great to see Amy again; her presence has been super-lacking in my life since she started her new job and i got back to classes. But, anyway, that’s not the point.


The point is that i returned from Beta Band to find that the roomies were entertaining at the apartment. At first it was superfun… we had a bunch of people around who i don’t always get to chat with, and i was enjoying myself. I even had a beer.


When it comes to parties i am a floater… i very rarely have a strong connection to any person or conversation so i just mingle around until i get miserable and leave. That’s my modus operandi, and it’s inevitable; eventually i’m so frustrated with my inability to be connected to anyone else at all that i wander home and go to sleep. In my own home i figured it would be different… i wouldn’t be on the outskirts of the conversations because i would be in charge… i would be the host.

I was wrong. It turns out, as soon as you amass a big enough group i immediately turn off socially (even if i’m friends with them all individually). Even before everyone started wandering away to their own cliques in different rooms i had reduced myself to tiny inserted comments and laughing along with the crowd. I endured the typical jokes which i do not enjoy, and i mingled from room to room unable to connect to anything that was happening even though i owned the lamps and cushions people were clustered around. Eventually i just locked my door, stripped off my clothes, and went to sleep to Death Cab turned down so low that all i could hear were the upper registers of Ben Gibbard’s voice intoning “highway” over and over on the second track.


It’s not fair. I refuse to have my own home be a gathering place just so i can be trapped there without anywhere to escape to. I don’t know what our social future will turn out to be, but i’m starting to think that it’s out of my hands: i don’t have any say in it, but i’m not taking any responsibility for it either.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6485340/

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I am back in Philadelphia, complete with my newly mellowed red hair and my newly mellowed personality that i have yet to assign a color to and this newly hollow ache for the tiny slice of else i had this weekend. Normalcy and a different city and walking around and being happy — things that i can’t really necessarily apply to Drexel and Philadelphia, but i try. Today i walked into the Admissions Office and everyone fawned over my hair for a solid hour before i got to do any work. Last night i got 100% on my first test of the quarter. Baby steps on a long walk.


There is a door in the frame of my room and it feels so very different to shut it and be insulated from the rest of the apartment except for the hi frequency bleed-through from Lindsay’s room downstairs. I am cocooned in my warm-lit green and white and brick, slowly working through my stack of Boston music and making a point of looking forward to tomorrow and the next day. Because, even though i might not see a point in either of them, somewhere past there there is a day that i want to be on and i’ve got to live the inbetween to get there. That’s how getting places works; you have to endure the inbetweens.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6423711/

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Our trolley stop was smack in the middle of the Boston University campus. As we got on the car and slowly excused ourselves towards the back the conductor came on over the loudspeak in his accent and said “You all need to move towards the back. The NorthEastern students never seem to have a problem with this.” Everyone chuckled, and a few people actually moved and then the trolley was moving and then life was moving.


I meant to go to BU. It was too expensive and far away but i didn’t really care; it was probably the one educated choice i made in the entire college application process. At some point on Monday Rabi and i were crossing a street and she said it was sortof funny that i was here in Boston with her because i meant to go to college there within a five minute walk from her house. I didn’t think it was too funny, though, because i’m not sure that i would have ever met Rabi if i had actually packed my bags and headed out to a college outside of my own state. Joining blogger was the culmination of a chain of events that included shifts in content of my own website and my addictedness to Shafted, and i can’t necessarily say that it would have happened if i was anywhere else but here. Having my own blog was a response to boredom, and a response to needing somewhere to write, and a response with dissatisfaction with Shafted. Furthermore, i only kept at blogging because of the instant gratification of appearing on Power Bloggers and the audience that it slowly attracted. In fact, i never actually found Rabi through searching for other bloggers in the area, but by reading through all of the blogs on PB on one lonely night when she was on the list.


The labyrinth of life can be amusing. Sometimes you can wind up with the same outcome no matter which turn you make, whether that outcome be having a certain friends or spiraling into a deep depression. Other things are so rare that you might have missed them had you taken the long way home from class… a car accident or meeting your future wife. Rabi seemed to think that all those twists and turns would have lead us to each other eventually anyway, but i feel the exact opposite; we would have existed in the same universe, but i don’t know that our paths would have ever crossed.

I still like Boston, and i still almost wish i wound up at BU, but sometimes i reckognize that more things make a dent on your life than just the school you go to and the city you live in. And, those dings and scratches can really add up.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6404651/