Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

stories

by

I didn’t think my question had been rude; after all, I would be missing half a day of work to attend their silly “Honors Day.” I just wanted to know what I would be honored for. My outstanding GPA? My flawless academic writings? My strenuous extracurricular schedule?

The associate dean was mum on the matter, somewhat indignant that I had even asked. Apparently the invitation itself should have been honor enough. After our exchange I might have skipped out on the ceremony altogether if not for the fact that Elise had also been invited. And ,she knew why: she was receiving an award for a particularly spectacular paper she wrote on the topic of style and pacing in James Joyce’s Ulysses. So, at worst I would be a pretty applauding face in the crowd when Elise took the stage, and at best I would be crowned as the most dominating intellect in the Liberal Arts program.

The event program was huge, listing all ninety honors that would be conferred during the ceremony to seventy-some individuals. It even listed the title of Elise’s paper next to her name (“Oh god, I’ll die if someone reads a passage from it”), though I could not locate the indication of my achievements as easily.

I finally found my own name, in the midst of a small group at the top of the last page, listed under The General Electric College Bowl Award. The image it summoned was that of the Alex Trebek hosting the National Geography Bee, which I absent-mindedly audited on PBS last week. I remember thinking that those kids were either geniuses or freaks of nature, and that either way I would gladly get them liquored up to avert their almost inevitable descent from middle-school smarty-pants to high school social reject.

Yes, I know that they’re mostly twelve. I’d still show them a good time. But I digress.

Being on the last page, my award was near the end of the ceremony. My trip up to the stage was unremarkable: two quick handshakes and I was down again, tiny envelope in hand, back to my seat. Like the Oscars, only without any movie stars or acceptance speeches. I opened my envelope and scanned the letter inside. Congratulations, blah blah blah, esteemed, yadda yadda yadda, deposited in your account, blah blah huh, call with questions.

It was not just a dorky award given in the memory of a former Junior-team-Jeopardy style television show that all of our parents apparently watched on weekend afternoons. Not just recognition for my two year string of As, only broken once. All of that, plus an anonymous faculty nomination in light of some distinguished facet of those efforts. And the end result was money. Cash, dollars, paid on my behalf directly to Drexel University. Not an alarming amount of money, but enough that I made my advisor assure me that he could deliver a thank you card to my anonymous benefactor. It’s only the third scholarship I have ever earned, and the first I had not applied for on my own.

In retrospect, missing out on a few dozen dollars from work was definitely worth it.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/05/200363453/

by

The Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts show was absolutely wonderful. “Are these people,” I reverently asked Melon, “really our age? ”

Maybe I could have believed it after looking at the odd-shaped photorealistic paintings of clouds, or the conference of nearly a dozen porcelain toilets in the middle of the room, or what looked like an drawing Shel Silverstein would have done while taking acid named something to the effect of “A Beautiful Woman Shaves Her Hairy Gums.”

What stunned me were the pieces of art that looked timeless, looked beyond my ability to conceive of. A canvas, as big as my bed, depicting an armored female set against a descending purple twilight. A classical sculpture, in wood and maybe bronze, of a man wearing a boar’s skull. Painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media, all from people who are a part of my generation. Did the student who painted the female warrior watch the same He-Man cartoons as I did? Or, have I lived in a world apart all of these years, separate from the dimension where these artists exist?

In the gift shop I became enamored with a sketching set, suited for the artist who is constantly sketching in the margins of her notebooks. It combined a simple book illustrating how lines form to create simple things like cats, people, and chairs with a neat black sketch book, three pre-sharpened pencils, three sticks of charcoal, and a black crayon of wax (I forget what those are called).

I was determined to buy it for someone – almost everyone I spend my spare time with is an artist of some degree. Any oft hem would appreciate it. But, as I held it in my hands longer, offering it to Erika and Mellon to examine, I realized that all of the people who I wanted to give it to had made it past the margins-of-a-notebook stage of art. I had seen their art, in their rooms, hanging from magnets on my refrigerator, and even decorating their furniture.

No, the set was not for them. It was for me.

So far I have drawn a paper bag, Erika springing from the ground like a tree, a page full of felines and rodents, and a sketch of a Waterson painting. All of the images are imitative, even Ent-Erika, all trying to achieve an image that I have accessed once before. Every time I turn my glance inward I am rewarded only with blank white space, which is mirrored by the empty page in front of me.

Do the artists have a verdant jungle of imagery inside of them, pressing against the backs of their eyes and the insides of their fingertips begging to be rendered into real time and space? Or, is it that they see the same world as I do, yet are inspired to capture the fleeting and intangible beauty of it so that it can always be seen?

I suppose you could ask me the same question about my songs, and my answer would be that it’s all of the above – sometimes they spring from within and sometimes I observe them outside of myself. Sometimes, though, they really do spring fully formed from the proverbial thin air, begging to be formed into something more.

I bought myself a sketch book so that I can learn where to see.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/05/200356828/

by

Recently I’ve had a couple of people tell me that you start to feel old when one of your exes gets married. Of course, I really only have the one ex, and we all more or less lovingly refer to her as the Queen of Darkness, so that particular trauma has already passed for me. I didn’t feel old, though – I think she had been betrothed to the dark side even before she started seeing me.

I guess the thing that makes you feel old when a former significant other ties the knot is that you could have, theoretically, stayed with that person, forcing them to wind up knotting with you rather than some other person. Instead, not only have they successfully replaced you (with their spouse), they are several spins ahead of you in the game of Life.

Despite not having an ex for this to happen to, this weekend someone told me something that still managed to make me feel old in that same way – only a little bit different. Because, you see, I found out that a girl who I had never even kissed got married.

Of course, if I was counting the social evolution of every girl I ever had a crush on but never kissed against my own I would have to have some sort of leader board hung in my room to keep track of it all. In fact, this girl is a little bit different because I could have kissed her. I really almost did – as I remember it, we were all lined up for the moment, lips aimed and everything. We didn’t kiss, though. I didn’t kiss her because she was seeing a very nice boy who she seemed to like a lot, and I didn’t want to make myself a chink in their relationship’s armor.

I didn’t kiss her, even though I wanted to, and wound up thinking about it for the rest of the week, hovering by my computer in case she sent me a message of any kind. I’ve talked to her since, hugged and laughed with her, slept on her couch, and rode in her car.

I haven’t heard from her lately, though; we haven’t spoken in months. But, this weekend at our (yet-to-be-blogged-about) cast party, a friend of hers who was in town stopped by to say hello, and she off-handedly informed me that this girl, who I never even kissed, got married. Married to the boy that kept me from kissing her.

It’s not quite the same feeling of being old. Instead, as her friend’s words reached my ears, they manifested as a strange quiver in my stomach. Something about fate? Or karma? Would that kiss have made a difference? Would she have really kissed me if I had leaned in? Would I have been a bad person for doing it? Could it have ever even happened In the first place? Would I be who I am today if it had?

I really ought to save the tough questions until after lunch, huh?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/05/200321905/

by

Every time I attempt to sketch some odd facet of my corporate life for you I find an equally strange element of it inside myself. Today I sat down to regale you with a story of in-building encounters with the socially inept, but as I described each character in punishingly amusing detail, I began to make myself queasy. Who am I to observe perceived shortcomings of innocent co-working bystanders only to reveal them to the internet at large when the whim overtakes me, rendering real people into surreally abnormal characters like Neckless and Clenching Lady? Would I be able to award myself with a new moniker as easily? I wonder.

I am not the most socially healthy person on the planet. My compulsion to wash my hands after I touch anything to be found in public borders on obsession. My fear that I will not reach the doors of the bus before it closes up again to carry me far far away from my intended stop is overwhelming. But, foremost among all of these, are my elevator issues.

It’s not the claustrophobia so much, though sometimes I find myself in the back row of a sixteen-person deep load gasping for breath behind a blissfully unaware suit yapping about first quarter losses or decreasing corporate spending. That comes with the territory. No, instead it is the conversations — the simple, witless conversations of nicety that are grudgingly targeted at any rider who looks even vaguely familiar.

I live in abject terror of those conversations. Weather. Sports. Television. As one creeps up on me I feel as though all of my internal organs are slowly sliding into the crevices behind my knees, leaving only a the hollow thump of my heart, captive to its highway of veins and arteries, to hold court in the preternatural vacuum of my chest. Rain. The Phillies. Survivor. Each topic can leave me in a dead sweat, especially when initiated on a relatively early floor.

I don’t know what it is, really. The utter casualness, I guess, that people attempt to tune in to the channel to which they are homogenized on. With glee, they discover similarities that they share with tens of millions of other Americans. It is the conversational form of Walmart, and I am not sure if I am more horrified by how alien the topics generally seem to me or by the few with which I have intimate familiarity.

I occasionally attempt to play along. Last week someone asked me what I had in my discman, and I replied: “The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. They’re sort of a post-post-post-punk (so much so that they’re actually punk again) three piece lead by a woman who strikes me as a messy reincarnation of the, yes, entirely still alive Chrissie Hynde, which is not to say that the sound like the Pretenders at all, because they don’t, but sometimes you just get a vibe, huh?”

My rambling monologue took us from 22 down to 4, at which point the questioner returned a glassy stare. I smiled back. We rode down the last three floors in silence.

Funny how i am terrified of overwhelming homogeneity and they are petrified by anything heterogeneous. In a way I guess they are more afraid of me than I am of them, but it doesn’t make the ride any easier.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/05/200312092/

by

Halfway into what should have been my lunch break i found myself with five very short minutes to mock up a fold-out publication layout from a few simple black and white pieces that a colleague had expertly laid out, and i came to the near epiphany that i would be utterly and completely fucked without a glue stick. Yes. A glue stick. Which, incidentally, was the first piece of non-standard-issue office supply that i specifically requested for my desk. Much to my delight and relatively small surprise, said glued mock up was the toast of our meeting with the Medical department, praised as both “sturdy” and “informed.” This was reflected by a congratulatory email was circulated within our department afterwards.

So, basically, my job description involves an amalgam of both my pending Bachelor’s of Arts and tricks i picked up in third grade art class. Don’t ever let anyone tell you education isn’t important.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/05/200302119/