Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

college

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We listened to Battle of the Bands entries on Saturday. 35 entries. I could hardly believe that 35 bands were floating around on our campus, and took the time to enter our little contest. After listening to the entries, my disbelief continues, for multiple reasons. Firstly, there are some truly amazing bands on our campus (among them Wellington , Petland, & The Unsinkable Mr. Marden), and i had no idea! The three bands i just linked are only a small selection of my favourites, which easily numbered around 10. Punk, acoustic rock, emo, … everything except for women on lead vocals! However, while i’m terribly impressed with many of our entries, a few of them left me totally underwhelmed. Not because of bad mixing, or playing, but because the songs had no forward motion to them … no momentum. Songwriting might not be the easiest thing in the world, but some of these bands had put enough time into it to get their own albums printed up professionally, from which i’d expect a certain amount of professional work. I’m pretty sure that i wouldn’t have stood a chance in the battle given my current acoustic state of affairs, but i still maintain that “Under My Skin” in its band arrangement would’ve won me a slot at the battle. And that’s that.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/03/2662102/

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Nearly a week passes with nary a word from my fingertips, and i’d hope you’d be worried about me. I mean … when i flew to Florida for four days i nearly cried when i last closed down my Blogger screen, and here i am flitting around Philadelphia with hardly a regret? Well, it didn’t work out quite that way… although that was the net effect, wasn’t it?

Last Thursday i was sick. I was totally fine on Wednesday, and on Thursday i was sick. Actually, i’ve been sick for about as long as i’ve been dating my girlfriend, on and off. (That’s sick on and off, not dating on and off). Last Thursday was awful, though. I slept on a tiny green room couch for hours, i dragged my feet through my acting class, and i slept through much of my rehearsal until finally it was my turn to rehearse. Thankfully, my director Bill drove me home, as while i spent the whole day sleeping in the theatre several inches of snow accumulated.


Friday was more uneventful, though i did lose my voice in my first class (that was rather unexpected). The eventful bit was having a largish fight with my darling girlfriend, in which i was a big meanie the whole time because i was convinced that i was supposed to break up with her. It’s funny how in a situation like that my spine is the last thing to come into play; i told Matt i was going to break up with her, i steeled myself against easy reconciliation, and i tried to burn bridges before they could be recrossed. So much for that. All we wound up with was a really hurtful fight that will always be a mark against me. Good job, Peter.

Perhaps as a result of the intense back and forth on Friday (or perhaps it had to do with the small amount of vodka i consumed that night), i was sick on Saturday. Very very sick. Every time i would fall asleep i’d wake up two hours later having soaked through my clothing and the sheets in sweat. My temperature kept spiking and falling, with each spike bringing on a spectacular headache and on the way up or down from it a tremendous amount of sweating or chills. What a spectacular way to spend a Saturday.

By Sunday my body was out of ideas of what to do with itself. Unbeknownst to me, i was completely dehydrated (which was indicated by the fact that i couldn’t muster the nerve to touch solid foods like crackers or granola bars), and running a 102degree temperature. Somehow i crawled my way to rehearsal (a grueling journey for someone in the shape i was in), but once i got there i was a total wreck. I’ve done full dress rehearsals with high fevers before, but i was sweating and shaking and in no shape to sing or do anything else. Plus, there was the coughing. It hadn’t seemed like the central element of my sickness the night before, but it felt pretty damned central at that point.

My director Bill (aka: Guardian Angel) told me that he wanted me to go to an emergency room and come back healthy Monday or Tuesday, so into the scene came Mother. Mother picked me up, carted me to her emergency room, where i had lots of blood taken from me in addition to a trip to x-ray (they wheeled my bed there… wheeled it!). And, the pinnacle of fun and enjoyment was when i was given an IV and hydrated with two litres of saline. I came home that night in better shape that i had been in, and in the possession of Robotussin with Codeine. Yeah.

The capper was yesterday – the day i had earmarked for “catching up on my soap operas and blogging like a whore.” And that didn’t happen, because i was back in the ER, because my chest films showed i had pneumonia! Whee! This time my ER visit earned me my very own room, lots of wonderful breathing treatments, two more litres of hydration, a hospital issue turkey sandwich, and lots of warm blankets.

So, erm, yeah. That’s my excuse. I’ll shut up about my life now. Just wanted you to know that, um, i’ve alive. Which had been in doubt by some people lately. Love ya!

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2555824/

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I’m still on SurvivorBlog2, as improbable as that might seem. All of my net-friends loudly proclaimed that i’d get booted fast when they first found out that i was a contestant, though i don’t recall any of them qualifying their statement with any reasoning. It’s an odd thing,… all the fun dynamics of a group log but with the subtle undercurrent of competition for attention and favour. I actually quite like it. I managed to win immunity from voting all this past week, first with a lovely speech i made in ra/mp3, and then by being the least popular logger still on our virtual slice of the outback. That least popular bit surprised me at first, but it didn’t burn at all; i open up as much as any of the other posters, but i’m not around as much and i’m just not as quirky.

I’ve yet to have a vote against me, but since i was protected for a whole week for all i know i could be voted off by everyone tomorrow. In a way i want to stay around, but i see how much this page is suffering. Yes, i run to them with the hottest sparkling shards of my life, and this is just the bits that fall through the proverbial cracks. For a while the many hits i was drawing from Sblog2 related links subsidized the slow decline of you all (my actual readers), but now it’s getting a bit out of hand. It’s true that i needed some kind of break from this (as was evident from my mean-spirited and belaboured posts in early January), but i never intended to let it shrivel up and die.

When Blogger adds this week’s archive to the page, it’ll be the 26th one; i’ve been doing this for half a year now. Time fools me the same way that physical scale does. This school year seems to be dragging on forever, but it’s a whole month shy of how long i’ve been blogging and that seems like just a tiny dent in the whole of my life. I’ve been rehearsing Good Woman of Setzuan for a month now, and there’s just under a month left. The month that’s passed seems like it stretches back infinitely far, and the one to come feels as if it’s going to evaporate before me, leaving my grasping for my lines tomorrow night under the spotlight.

Coincidentally, today marks the month anniversary of something else too. If you read closely i think you might know what. I’m sorry that i haven’t been as omnipresent on here as i’ve been in the past, but it’s just the way things go. Maybe, finally, my life has gotten up enough momentum of its own that this can’t be just a continuously updated daily log of boredom. Maybe now i’m bringing back the tiny shiny gems of experience i find during the course of each day. Or maybe i find myself a bit too important for my own good. Who knows. Love ya, and i’m off to work on lines so that the spotlight doesn’t catch me by surprise.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2333919/

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I read too fast for my own damned good. Yesterday i decided to go on a smallish shopping spree with my credit card to see how close i could get to maxing it out without being rejected from purchasing something. In the madness, i hit Borders and picked up Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon and a sweet oversized edition of Silence of the Lambs. I’m not sure what suddenly spurred this in me, but recently my girlfriend’s roommate has been powering through Lambs, and i always meant to read it, and i sorta want to go see Hannible. So, i suppose the plan was to get through the two of them soon enough to buy a non-movie edition of Hannibal to read before i go see the flick in a weekend or two. Or, as it turns out, maybe this weekend.

First of all, you have to understand my unholy hatred of movie-edition paperbacks. I hate them. Hate them. While having the image of a main character to aid me in visualization is always helpful, i’ve endured too many ugly movie-photos like the ones on the covers of The Beach or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, both of which previously featured superb cover work. Even worse, the new edition of Hannibal doesn’t even use the creepy zombie-like picture of Anthony Hopkins from the movie posters – instead it substitutes some awful and nearly amusing picture of him preening with a large straw hat on. It isn’t too threatening.

Borders had two copies of the non-movie edition, but i didn’t want to get ahead of myself. Paperbacks cost quite a lot now ($8 for a paperback? Does anyone else miss the 90’s yet?), and i didn’t want to sink nearly $30 into three books that i might not even like. So, i bought Red Dragon so i could finally read it & Silence of the Lambs, which looks nice if nothing else. I finished the dense 450 page Dragon in under 20 hours of intermittent reading; started around 4pm yesterday and completed noon today with rehearsal, sleep, and class coming inbetween. I was proud of myself. I’ve been known to finish 500 page books in well under eight hours in the past, but i tend to lose my momentum when i don’t read a large book all in a single sitting.

So far my impression is that Thomas Harris is a tremendous writer but a nearly equally inconsistent author who relies on too many plot devices and explicit histories in the place of actual suspense and horror. Much as in the movie of Silence of the Lambs, where you become excited by the chase rather than the whodunnit, this novel reveals the killer early on and becomes a book as much about him as about the protagonist (who’s a much better character). The protagonist is vivid, logical, and entangles himself and the reader frighteningly deep into each murder. On the other hand, the killer’s history is boring, contrived, evokes little pity, and surprisingly does nearly nothing to set the reader up for his near schizophrenic behaviour near the end of the novel. In fact, the book took a downturn as soon as it dropped the pretense and mainly focused on the murderer. And, i’ll never look at dentures the same way again.

Lambs is 350 pages in super-oversized soft-cover format, and it looks to be a bit more firmly put-together than Dragon. And, of course, it has a lot more of Hannibal Lecter in it. One thing i’ll hand to Harris as an author is that he crafted the ultimate chiller of a villain in Hannibal; in his new forward to the first novel he portrays the writing of Lecter’s first scene as though he viewed it from a corner where he was huddled in fear the entire time, fending off the urge to bolt out the door as well as the cackling of other inmates in the asylum. His description of writing Hannibal seems apropos, because i would hardly expect someone to deliberately conjure this sort of killer from the depths of their own imagination. A monster is hard to create, and much easier to develop in small strides as he crawls into the cracks of your psyche and makes you scared to even write him. Lecter definitely had that effect on his author, and now i can hardly wait to get Silence of the Lambs out of the way so i can run back to Borders tomorrow to buy a lovely copy of Hannibal.


Who knows, i might even wind up seeing it this weekend…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2296596/