Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

college

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It’s admittedly been quite a long time since i’ve sat down in front of after-school children’s programming and really paid close attention, but i definitely don’t remember it being anything like what i just saw.


I had just got back from Creative Writing class with a yummy crepe in hand and i just wanted something to pay attention to while i ate, and in my random channel flipping i happened upon Transformers on FoxKids. I was never a huge transformers fan as a child, but the sheer fact that this familiar brand-name was wedged in-between various UltraRangers and MonsterMons was enough to pique my interest and so i settled back onto our couch and watched the drama unfold.

The episode was titled “The Fish Test,” the simplicity and irrelevance of which baffled me until the opening scene where a SharkBot is taking an online fish-personality test. As another character explains later, it has nothing to do with him being a Fish-Bot and everything to do with the fact that all of us cosmically represents a certain kind of fish. As if the online personality test wasn’t deep enough for the tiny-tot viewers, the entire episode was about the SharkBot attempting to show up his rival Decepticon by playing the role of informant and foil to the Transformers, with his greek-chorus of sidekicks chiming in with verbose deprecations all along the way. There was the surface level child-play, but also a lot of tightly wound jokes about sexy red sports cars, women driving SUVs, and the fact that SharkBot was labeled by the test as a jellyfish even though sharks are fish and thus have a spine.


The short commercial breaks were barely long enough to contain my laughter. Aside from the too-frantic ADD pacing of the show, the modern update on beloved toys of my youth was scathingly funny if not wholly coherent. The irony of SharkBot trying to prove to his evil master that he was worthy even made the title into a double entendre, much to my delight and pleasure.

Oh, yeah, i had a test today and i have well over a hundred pages of reading to do for various classes tomorrow (not to mention grocery shopping and laundry). Whatever… all i want to do right now is take a cab home and get my G.I.Joes.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6530968/

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Everyone has learned how to respect me during our time at Drexel insofar as everyone makes an assumption about my sexual preferences and gender identity and then gets themselves proven wrong (by their closeminded standards) by my flirting with girls and watching football. But, i keep them confused, much to my partial delight and eternal chagrin. I give lap-dances to boys at parties, or i mention that there are cute freshmen of both sexes to be had in the play.


People are so quick to assign labels that they often forget exactly how people really work. My friends have learned in the past two years that i generally don’t label easily and so they just leave me be, but when everyone’s sitting around drunk and loose-lipped people say things. And they hurt. A lot. Last night we were playing “I Never” and i was the only person in mixed company who had never kissed a boy — and i haven’t, ever. It’s not to say that i never would, but i am generally not attracted to men and haven’t had any reason to lay lips on another boy in anything other than a friendly manner.

First someone was incredulous… was i sure i hadn’t? Next i was told “that you lie alot anyhow.” And then a third person chimed in that it was ironic considering… “Considering what?” …. “Well, considering that you…”


Of course he didn’t say it, because no one wants to be outrightly awful to me even when their lips are loosened with liquor, but we all heard what he was saying; it was ironic because i was the gay one. The theme repeats. I mentioned that i never had sex with Selina and they all asked why not; i truthfully replied that it was because i didn’t want to be entangled with anyone on that level at that point in time, regardless of whether it was a consideration of our relationship or not. And they laughed. Of course, they said, i wouldn’t have sex with a girl… of course, they pointed out, i would have a good reason not to.

I’m getting tired of these arbitrary social boxes. Yes, my manner of speaking and gesturing has a primary association with “gay” stereotypes. Did it ever occur to anyone to ask me if i enjoy talking like i do? After talking like this for twenty years, and learning all of my tonal and indicative qualities from a group primarily composed of women, can i really change overnight? Did they ever think to ask if i would if i could? For all the haircuts i get and tight shirts that i wear, i still get boxed up neatly — even if no one normally says it it becomes quickly apparent when everyone checks their appropriateness and grabs a beer.


I am so sick of it, and so sick of myself. Everyone else is allowed to flirt with who they want to flirt with regardless of motive. Our masculine male friends get to make out with other guys as a lark at parties and never hear two words about anyone doubting their sexuality. But not me. I have struck such a precarious balance with everyone i know that all i have to do is remark that a boy is attractive and suddenly my box is tightly packed again. I have no option of flirting with people just for fun, regardless of my reasons. I could never kiss a boy, no matter what circumstantial contrivance it involved. I’m too fucking busy trying to get everyone to just judge me for who i am to begin with to do anything else.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6485607/

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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/

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While i rampantly kvetch, whine, and moan about some aspects of the blogging community and its audience, i often forget that i am a member of many subsets of said community. One of those is being Drexel Blogger, and seeing as we are a sparsely populated group i am often the easiest to find. I began to rebut the Noisy Boy of last post about journaling as a communicative act in the middle of the hallway outside our classroom and when i brought up my involvement with the community he said “yeah, i know.” As it turned out, though he didn’t necessarily bring the topic up to bother me he was fully aware that i might have something to say about it seeing as it directly applied to me.

Rabi and I were talking about popularity and how it lends itself to affecting our real life, and she mentioned that she clears her history on public computers at school so no one stumbles onto Wockerjabby, yet she still finds it in the history of a lot of computers. I’ve never done any such thing — i figured that hardly anyone just randomly stalks the history of their public laptop and if they do i could easily win myself a new reader. Lately i’ve checked out a wide array of our Creese Center laptops, and almost all of them quick-completed my address before i could finish typing it. I didn’t think anything of it at the time…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6404477/