Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

stories

I Can See Clearly Now…

by

When I first got braces (an event I bless and rue) my mom’s best girlfriend told me that she had wanted braces as a kid. So bad. But, her teeth were too nice.

She wanted glasses too, but her vision was nearly perfect. She was healthy, and pretty, and she just had this need to have some sort of artifice between her and everyone else. Why wasn’t she allowed a disguise, she reasoned, when so many other people were afforded them?

She never said it in as many words, but that’s obviously what I would have thought if I was nine year old girl in 1964.

Having had my fair share of wearing braces, I didn’t think I wanted glasses; I had pair in high school, just for reading. I thought they looked like John Lennon’s, but in them I looked look a great owl.

It was bright in California when it wasn’t raining, and Justin and Sara shopped for sunglasses with me. I subsequently became so enamored with the tiny square frames of my pair that I didn’t like to take them off. The indoors are brightly lit anyhow. I wore them in Amoeba on my second trip, peering over them at the most used CDs I had seen in my life.

Returned for LA-land to my primarily indoor habitat here at home, I promptly scheduled an optometrist appointment. And, well, when I said I was worried because I use a computer eight-to-sixteen hours a day the doctor was convinced immediately. I needed to protect my assets.

(When was your last checkup?

Um… during the Clinton administration?)

Three days later, I had indoor-appropriate glasses (I could only get away with wearing the square ones on my head at work; even on the way down in the elevator I got looks). I feel as though I have located an entirely new me, a me as sharp as I used to be, as precise and witty. I attend meetings, dinners, and soirées in them exclusively. I wear them to bed to scan through magazines. I look better in them when I sing.

I think I might call my mom’s best girlfriend to let her know that I finally get it.

This Message Will Self Destruct…

by

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.

Postal Service

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In grade school I found the concept of Pen Pals stultifying; try to find one kid to strike up a slow-motion exchange with via handwritten letter? Handwritten letters took too long to write, were too hard to read. Why not just trade phone calls? Or, at least, typed letters.

It was third grade, and my teacher absolutely refused to allow me to type my letters. I had a typewriter at home, my little blue manual on that folded into its own suitcase, on which I would peck away grade school murder mysteries and horror stories. Having recently received a note from my incredibly square Wisconsin friend, I anticipated a dreaded letter writing exercise in class the next day. In a pro-active academic turn (still rare, to this day) I got out my steely blue friend, and pecked away.

The next day in class, when the teacher told us that we would be writing out our replies, I raised my hand. I had brought mine, I pointed out, and it was already neatly typed.

My teacher was not amused. I couldn’t get out of the exercise just because I could type. I would still have to write out my letter.

Defiant, I struck back; I would love to write my letter in the horrible, awkward, cursive of third grade, but surely I would be allowed to place my wonderfully neat typewritten note into the massive envelope that would shuttle letters to our sister-school of hopelessly sheltered born agains in WI?

She was aghast. A typed note? No no no.

At this point the details become a bit muddled; to the best of my recollection, I may have refused to write out my letter so that she would be forced to use my typewritten one. She may have taken the typewritten one from me and insisted I write one from scratch. All I recall is that I was flustered, and made to turn my desk to the wall and write my note by hand, possibly in duplicate.

I can’t remember if my mother found out, but I suspect if she did she probably just had a hearty laugh. For all of my critique of her, one principal she has stood by is that no child should be restricted by a lowest common denominator (she knows the phrase, but god help you if you ask her to show you what it means with fractions), in the same way refused to let teachers force me to show my work on repetitive addition tables in first grade when I had already figured out how to multiply.

I hate when I figure out how to do things the fast way but am restricted by a classroom (or a world) of slow movers.

Mornings in Carolina

by

I can’t help that I am naturally enthusiastic to meet someone new, fascinated with their life story, and immediately inclined to invite them to see a concert or a movie or a show. It isn’t flirting, it’s my obsession with finding like-minded people.

There is a woman who rides the trolley with me, if I am running five minutes behind schedule. She is pretty, with a slight frame, lightly freckled with dark hair that seems meant to be tucked behind ears, and lips so thin that they disappear when she smiles.

A few days ago she waved me down from across fourty-third street. “I thought I was running late,” she said breathlessly as she matched pace with me, “but then I saw you.”

I’ve been fascinated with her for a month now, her thin-lipped prettiness and her mysterious destination after she gets off the trolley at my stop. In our last conversation I learned she was from North Carolina, which explained her slight accent. I went fishing for more.

“Where do you work, anyhow? You get off at nineteenth, right?”

She works, as it turns out, at the Art Museum. She made her job sound clever and enviable, talking about scurrying around the photo archives like a mouse, climbing up two stories of filing cabinets to just barely glance the sun peeking through a basement window. It sounded altogether romantic, and she seemed to think so, describing the tunnels that connect from one building to the other – catacombs. As as she spoke I found myself utterly fascinated, wanting ot ask her for coffee or lunch so I could listen to that wonderful romanticism some more. And then I realized that that would sound an awful lot like asking her on a date, and that the last time I did something like that the girl in Borders though I was either stalking her or actively advertising that I was hoping to cheat on my girlfriend.

So, I suppose I’ll just have to wait until the next time I see her on the corner.

Oh, What a World

by

Despite the dreary day, I was singing to myself as I left the house. What’s a dreary day in the face of good sleep and getting paid today? Nothing, I say.

Anyhow, the day, it was dreary, and I was turning the corner, being Rufus Wainwright under my breath when, quite suddenly, a squirrel comes tumbling down the screen door of the pizza parlor on my corner to land at my feet, a nut secure between it’s jaws.

We exchanged glances.

Not wanting the squirrel to go into a mad panic when he would effectively have to run through me to get away, I continued my musical stroll.

Much to my surprise, the squirrel began to follow me.

Odd, I thought.

Still singing under my breath, I returned my glance from my new companion to the ground in front of me only to noticed a smattering of tiny birds pecking away at the sidewalk. As the squirrel and I approached them, they sedately looked up at us and then took wing – not in a mad escape, but to rest in the limbs of the tree I was about to pass under. And, one of them began chirping a lovely, regular melody, which caused me to pause in my walking (but not my singing).

Yes, in fact, it did sort of work as counterpoint to the Rufus Wainwright song I was singing under my breath.

Rodent sidekick, check. Flock of cooperative melodically gifted winged friends, check. Unassumingly singing a beautiful song, check.

Life was playing some sort of peculiar trick on me, and that I was in the middle of a Disney cartoon musical. A very peculiar, live-action, Disney cartoon musical, with “Gay Messiah” on its soundtrack. So, really, more like Moulin Rouge.

Taken with the whimsy of the moment, I began singing out, and sweeping my overcoat around me, which seemed to fairly alarm my squirrel friend, still with nut in mouth, but he did not flee. As he had yet to be spooked, I went into all-out pirouettes, now singing more or less at the top of my lungs.

It was around then that the construction workers renovating the house on Osage must have noticed me. I felt their dreary-world glares weigh in on my cartoon musical extravaganza like sopping wet cotton blankets. I stopped mid-spin, letting my voice catch in my throat, and looked to my animal backup-singers for some support.

Squirrel had fallen several steps behind me, and was idly munching his nut, paying me no heed. My aviary chorus had ceased their song, and were nowhere to be seen.

The construction workers continued to stare, quite dumbly.

Hands shoved into pockets and intently showgazing I resumed my walk.

I hate musicals.