Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

adulthood

The Belly of the Beast

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The closest I had ever been to a casino prior to Saturday was my twice-yearly reading of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, so when we stepped onto the floor of the Tropicana I half expected a neon carousel full of lizard-people to greet me.

It would have been better than the real thing; shabby carpets whose patterns snaked from side to side as they stretched across a hazy room filled with a fleet of leggy middle-aged waitresses in weird black corsets and hundreds of chain-smoking, hollow-looking gamblers, with a few cigar-smoking rotund gamblers thrown in for good measure.

I suppose I could have inferred the haze and the zombie-like patrons from Hunter, but i had been hoping for something more psychedelic.

In Vegas, maybe, but the nine of us were in Atlantic City. Wes and Karen sat down for winning streaks at black jack while I milled back and forth, nearly having my legs broken when i mistakenly wandered into the service-space between two active craps tables.

It occurred to me that there was really no instruction for the beginning gambler; I couldn’t have even sat down at a black jack table, let alone craps or some poker variant. While the hollow-cheeked undead of Atlantic City elbowed their way past me to get a closer look at the craps game I wondered if they all just expected me to buy some chips and lose until I understood … until I realized that anyone who spent any amount of time wondering about that wasn’t fit for gambling in the first place.

Eventually the more serious boys headed to poker while the rest of us made a pass at the slot machines, where I spent my first (and perhaps only) $3.25 on gambling before declaring that the fleet of corseted grandmothers were not going to keep me inebriated enough to make my gambling cost-effective.

We retreated towards the sports bar and, as the whir and hum of the shabby casino room faded behind us and as the ceiling gave way to rows of wicker fans and then impossibly-bright false-clouds, I thought that perhaps I liked casinos very much so long as I didn’t have to go into the casino part.

Either that, or calculate just how much I had to gamble in total to have my drinks and roomage completely comped and spend exactly that hour-by-hour over the slow course of a day. Because I’d rather spend my money on a steady and sure flow of Southern Comfort than whip it away on the whims of an eight-deck shuffler.

Eight hours later and we were all thoroughly drunk (some of us already hung-over) and mourning our poor Eagles while singing karaoke, me and Gina and our entire table screaming back the pitches of Bohemian Rhapsody at the pitch-deaf lump who had the (intentional) misfortune of selecting the song, and then carrying our scream-singing into the cool night air and back to Philadelphia as i sang the pitches i still could with my husk of a voice.

It took me the better part of Sunday to recover from the experience – just sleep and water, no speech or food, until finally this morning I felt as though the rest of me had returned from AC, where it had somehow become entangled in the hazy air on the casino floor.

Taking Back Giving Thanks

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I don’t enjoy celebrating most holidays. They aren’t really holidays anymore – just treacly Hallmark imitations of the celebrations they once were.

Part of my resistance is societal – a rebellion against Hallmark and Christmas radio stations – but part of it is familial. As children we are subjected to the whims of our family’s traditions with little room for our own opinions. When i hit college i decided i’d start having things my way – i rebuilt my holiday schedule from scratch.

I usually deign to observe a standard July 4th, since it holds historical significance, and Cinco de Mayo, since it kicks off my Corona-drinking season, but everything else is fair game; one particularly defiant year I celebrated Passover instead of Easter.

However, I haven’t fucked with any holiday as much as today’s – Thanksgiving – because i didn’t really feel as though i had been giving very much thanks. It had turned into Turkeyhaving and Footballwatching or, worse, LaststopbeforeChristmasing.

Rather than touch any of that, i co-opted it for my own, never doing the same thing twice. Once i carried a balloon in the parade. Another year i dined with Gina and her family and friends. Two years ago i spent Thanksgiving alone, drinking martinis and watching old movies. Each iteration was superior to the alternative of a dead bird and getting stuffed just to get stuffed.

Over the last nearly-five years i have been gradually assimilated into Elise’s family, which dichotomizes every holiday between a split set of parents (a phenomenon with which i am all-too familiar). I am now an expected guest at their holiday celebrations and, as a result, here i am in NJ celebrating a second Thanksgiving in a row for the first time since the nineties.

At first i was reticent – this was exactly what i had been trying to escape! Yet, the view, the culture, the traditions, the food, and the thanks are all different here than what i gew up with. Admittedly, I don’t like them all – i was especially upset to realize that not every family in America accompanies every holiday turkey or ham with lasagna or baked ziti – but in total they have definitely refreshed my thanks… thanks for who i am, and where i am, and that i am free to choose both and everything in between.

I think holidays should be what you need them to be, especially a holiday about thanks. And sometimes the best way to realize why (if at all) you are thankful is change your perspective.

The Curse of Smart

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I don’t necessarily think of myself as “smart,” but the evidence often points in that direction.

When I was very young I was always bright. Good grades were effortless, and thanks to that over-achievement I attended one of the best public middle- and high schools in the state (and the country).

It was a shock to my system: my peers weren’t just peers in age, but in intelligence. I was no longer the smart one, just a smart one. I increasingly saw myself in the middle of the hyper-intelligent pack figuratively and, in class rank, it became literal.

College was that shock in reverse – i was no longer surrounded by a crowd of smart.

It took some time to adjust to being above-average again. I expected to still commiserate about having a hard time and getting average grades, because that was who I accustomed to being.

In retrospect, as my confidence and ability increased so did my aloofness as a student – i eschewed or altogether ignored classmates in an effort to insulate my ability to be right without feeling guilty. In a way it was like returning to grade school, where I had free reign to wield my smarts with no regrets.

I have been dismayed to learn that in a post-collegiate world the insulation of isolation just doesn’t work; you don’t get anywhere by eschewing possible connections or alienating co-workers with your know-it-allness.

That’s the curse of smart – everyone respects your intelligence until you are a peer or, worse, a competitor, and suddenly “smart” is a derogative term, and you are left scrambling to cover it up.

As a result, I often find myself feigning misunderstanding or painting myself as a little bit bumbling … handicapping my A-Game just to fit in to this so-called “real world,” and living in constant fear that the facade is starting to stick.

Is that the line that separates smart drones from smart successes? Am i supposed to stop caring about people, and start caring about being right?

I guess i’m just not smart enough to understand.

Happy Birthday To This

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With less than a month until my twenty-fifth birthday I am left pondering – am I ready to be an adult yet?

The conclusion would seem to be foregone. I’ve certainly been paying my own way for years now; I have a steady job (actually, a new one, as of Monday). I live in a beautiful house. I’m in a long-term relationship. I own plenty of adultish toys I could never before afford.

In short, I would seem to have attained some sort of stablity. A steady state. Does that make me an adult? How do I measure my adultness? How can i quantify it.

The answer to that quarter-life birthday riddle lies in this day, also a birthday – the birthday of this blog. At this moment I have been blogging continuously under a single title for six years, now entering my seventh.

That has nothing to do with being an adult. But, my blog tells me all sorts of things about the person i used to be, in contrast to who i am now. It tells me about slogging away at a coffee shop for CD money. It tells me about living in dorms rooms and ghetto apartments. It tells me about uncertain crushes and the blossoming of a more permanent romance.

It reminds me of when I only owned one ugly, thick-necked, out-of-tune guitar.

Obviously i’ve seen some progress. And, if you’ve stuck around long enough, you’ve seen it too. You’ve also seen the evolution of my writing – both in what I finding inspiring, and how I get my message across.

This year you’ve seen some new things – two out-of-state, out-of-comfort-zone adventures that I documented via my camera phone. You’ve also been left out of a few details, like my joy in seeing friends and co-workers experience the thrills of marriage and childbirth, my re-emergence at local open mics, and my excitement over my new position at work. I just don’t have the will – or the time – to report it all.

And, the nature of the internet has fundamentally changed. No one wants to wander out a domain blog when they can stay in the safety of LiveJournal or MySpace to read about their friends. And, with that centralization comes the dawning realization that all of this is in fact permanently archived (duh), leaving everyone frantic to carefully cover their electronic trails so future dates or bosses can’t find out every dirty little secret.

Has that changed me? I can’t really say. I’ve always tried to blog what’s important to me, even if only to remember something that might otherwise drift out of my memory. So, while other blogs are created and deleted, while other bloggers become LJ-checkers and MySpace addicts, me and this digital mirror still remain.

I wish I had time every day to devote to this. I wish i had tricked out special features and new songs for you every day. But, i wish that every year. No matter what i wish for, what i already have is what this means to me, and what you mean to me for still caring about it. And, if you need to go away for a while – to your MySpace or your real life – that’s okay. I’ll still be here, still growing. If it weren’t for this, i might not realize just how adult i’ve become; if i don’t keep it up, how will i ever know how far i have left to go?

Thank you for watching (and sometimes listening) as i’ve inevitably and inexorably grown up. And, happy birthday to this.

Never Again To Enter the Cabbage Patch

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With the Lyndzapalooza landmark passed on my yearly calendar i’m in a bit of a drift. Bonnaroo, maybe, St. Louis in July, and then my birthday and Christmas and the whole thing starts all over again.

It’s a bleak outlook on the rest of a pretty good year, but i can’t seem to help that i’m starting to understand why everyone loves to complain about their jobs and longefor their weekends. You know what i mean; as a child they’re half the grownups you know and the majority of the adults on sitcoms, and even now it’s half your friends and half your co-workers.

My job is actually enjoyable, and it’s not that i like Saturday or Sunday any more than any of the other five days of the week. It’s just the centripetal force of circling around and around each week in the year. If you work a 9 to 5 job you can help but be drawn to the weekend like water circling a drain.

But what’s in that weekend? If you’re some people i know, the weekend is so packed full of activities – otherwise unachievable on a weeknight – that it’s just as much work as work. If you’re me the weekend is the same wasteland of exhaustion and listlessness as any weekend, just without intermittent workdays to break it up.

I’m starting to think that the key to adult happiness is staying away from both of those poles: don’t waste your weekend, but don’t lay yourself across it like a martyr either. Because, those fifty consecutive hours of “off” aren’t any different than the sixty-some non-consecutive hours of off you get during the week, which aren’t even that much different than the forty-some hours of work except that you get to do exactly what you want to do with them instead of what you should do with them. Except, maybe if you did what you should do they’d be more satisfying.

What do i know? I’m still pretty new at this grownup thing.

Ikea & e-tailing, the twin inflators of my revolving debt

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Inexplicably, we now seem to be in possession of lawn furniture for our concrete back yard. This is possibly linked to our cultivating what has now become a mid-sized container garden. (I found out that it’s just not chic to call it a pot garden. go figure.)

Being the son of “Elaine of the Black Thumb,” my experiences with gardening are limited to vicarious horticultural exploits with my father and grandmother. My father and I have the same way of needing to know everything about specialized or slightly obscure topics, and one of his major topics is growing tomatoes and peppers. At some previous point I seem to recall him having a pot garden in his basement, but I was always assured it was specifically for making superior quality rope.

In any event, i’ve managed to decimate a trio of strawberries, grow a tray of marigolds and eggplants from seeds, and keep alive a cheerily expanding blackberry bush that’s so cute that i might buy another.

Equally as inexplicable as my participation in the greenery, i am days away from being the owner of a brand new acoustic/electric guitar. I’m still not really sure how it happened. Something about having a day off of work, homemade cocktails, and eBay. I’ll report later this week on the results.