Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

stories

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I am not terrific at balance.

Last night a whole slew of assorted roommates and cast-members went ice-skating down on Penn’s Campus just past midnight. I don’t know what made this sound like such a good idea to me, considering that my only first and only experience on rollerblades was one of terror and a bruised bottom, but for whatever reason i gleefully laced up and hit the ice without giving too much though to how i intended to get anywhere.


Skating didn’t wind up being much of a problem, really … neither was locomotion. Ice is so different from gravelly road, and it was easy to just glide along on momentum or dig in to stop my locomotion. Mainly i was having issues with balance — with keeping my feet planted firmly on the ground. And, although falling really isn’t so bad, the whole time i found myself just striving for balance. And not finding very much of it.


By the end of the night i was admittedly pretty miserable, but as i glided off the ice and onto the blue rubbery comfort of the floor beyond i realized that i had done so without so much of a nervous thought about crossing traffic or moving smoothly; somewhere in there i had found a way to balance it all out, even if it was just for a few seconds at a time.


Falling is always easy. Falling is not so bad. But standing on my own two feet… it was something different.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/02/9272446/

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Speaking of which, try to follow this one:


At the start of Fall Semester i was in a student written/directed play. After our second performance, we had a reception, during which i was introduced to a pair of incredibly attractive roommates and a boy whose cuteness i considered a personal affront and challenge. I saw the three of them again at auditions for Lysistrata, where i pointed out the roommates to my own roomies, remarking upon which one i found especially distracting (despite their separate but equally stunning attractiveness). The other one of them was cast in the play, and shortly thereafter i was informed that she “wanted to marry me,” which struck me as strange since we hadn’t ever really spoken at length. I proceeded to make a sloppy drunken mess of hitting on her at a party, while i had the majority of my conversation with her uninterested roommate. A month later i asked said uninterested roommate out on a date based on her interest in paying attention to me upon further meetings. It was the perfect date, but did not seem to result in anything romantic, which i lamented at length. Lest i have the chance to put this crush behind me, she wound up being on the Stage Management staff with me for Formicans. Rest assured, it’s been all business. I was encouraged to ask her to our winter Ball, but balked, and when i finally got up the never i found out that she was attending with the cute freshmen guy (obviously my uncharacteristic distraction due to his cuteness was prophetic more than homosexual… who woulda thunk it?). I immediately swore off attending the Ball, only to have my mind changed by (drumroll, anyone?) her roommate, who asked me to go the next day.


So, i’m going to my winter formal with a girl who had a crush on me even though i sortof went on a date with her roommate and only didn’t ask said roommate to the formal because she was already planning to attend with the cute boy i met only seconds after meeting the both of them. Hors d’oeuvres at eight, dancing until one.

Drama served throughout.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/01/9029502/

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My mother, ever the intrepid homemaker upon the once-a-year occasion that finds me in our house for three consecutive days, rose with dawn this morning to acquire the last few items on our Italian Christmas Grocery List. We do not make ham. We do not eat turkey. For us, Christmas is all about a inordinately large pot of gravy, some sort of homemade pasta, and upwards of a dozen eggs worth of scappels. However, since i left for school, Christmas has also been the chance for the two of us to collectively gorge ourselves on high-cholesterol Italian desserts. This was the reason Elaine was out of the house just after eight this morning.


While i am a cheesecake addict through and through, my mother tends to veer more towards pastries and chocolates. This year she decided that my jumbo-cheesecake would get the axe in favour of an equally massive tiramisu, and the bakery informed her that she’d have to arrive “pretty early” to secure a nummy liquor-soaked cake for herself. They literally told her that people would be lined up around the block before the subway started running; she took it with a grain of salt and got in the car during the back half of Good Morning America.


8:25 — “Hey, it’s me… i can’t believe you actually woke up this early. … Whatever. Listen, i’m just swinging by the pastry place and running some quick errands. … Yeah, i’ll be at your apartment by ten.”


Much to my mother’s chagrin (and my endless amusement), the line at Isgro’s was around the block … not only around the block, but nearly motionless in a dead-pan imitation of its ticket-line cousin i endured while flying last week.


9:30 — “Peter, hey, it’s me … i’ve been in line for about an hour. … You should see it, it’s a madhouse … I’ll call you before i come to pick you up. … Yeah, i should be there around ten-thirty.”

And, not only was this line packed to the gills with a cheery assortment of dietary die-hard degos who had the presence of mind to bring along folding chairs and thermoses, but it was being patrolled by a Mr. and Mrs. Claus — her with pastry samples, and him with a tray of Amaretto in tiny disposable shot-glasses. Furthermore, the local news was interviewing people up and down the line, kindly declining several offers of liquid warmth … via Mr. Claus as well as the crowd at large (who apparently came equipped). Did i mention it was about 43 degrees outside?


10:35 — “Um, Peter, it’s me … Yes, i’m still in line. … No, i can’t even see the doors from here. Santa keeps asking me if i’d like a drink. … Oh, no, I should be in by eleven.”

Upon her finally arriving (let’s call it @ twelvish) my mother had bought half our housecat’s weight in Italian desserts, and she blithely informed me that she was going to be on the noon and five-o’clock news, the latter of which she was taping at that very moment.


I skipped over the bit where i hid all of the liquor in my apartment so my grandmother could come up and see it (“Jesus, do you have enough steps in this place? I swear, i’d have a heart attack with all these goddamned steps.”), and also the bit where i got zero sleep to finish my mother’s freaking Christmas present that she had better appreciate.

Does anybody rememer last Christmas? I seem to remember it being cuter than this…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/8174145/

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So, i’m in Florida. Hi.


Florida is entirely queer is basically what i’ve decided. I feel like an endless cliche saying things like “well, in Philly…” every other sentence, but it’s honestly a entirely different culture than what i’m used to. Case and point: cars. Most of the peope i know at Drexel have their licenses, because where they live they basically need a car to get from anywear to anywhere. However, these people mostly don’t bring their cars to Philly … there’s just no point in it.


Here if you don’t have a car you’re stranded. Going to the movies last night was utterly unaccomplishable via bus. Getting to the airport would involve a pricey cab ride or a ride to an out of the way rail-station and then a pricey cab ride. Today was like the Greatest-Hits of lacking public transportation: getting to see Martha involved a lengthy car ride to the out of the way train-station, followed up by a doubly pricey cab ride down the highway. And then i got lost in Jupiter.

Well, really, this tiny development inside of Jupiter that gives one the impression that there was a Disney race in Starcraft who came to Earth to colonize our territory. It’s not exactly the town of Celebration, but’s it’s got that pastel-and-stucco, pre-fab, homogeonized-milk sortof feeling to it. Which, was even creepier when i thought the entire thing was Martha’s college, but then she informed me that it was really just one big creepy pre-fabricated expensive housing development — where you can pretend that you live in an amalgamated every-state of the USA minus anything with a population density higher than… oh, shit, what the hell do i know about population density.


But, anyway, now playtime is over and i have to do the pricey two-hours journey back to the geriatric imprisonment that is my grandmother’s condominium.

On the bright side, Martha is as obsessed with Buffy as i am, and tomorrow i’m having lunch with JillMatrix!!! Rock on!

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/8085417/

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I was essentially at a loss for words, sitting at the quaint restaurant table with Lindsay and Dante trying to explain. I couldn’t figure out how i felt about New Hope… i felt like we were trapped in one of those quaint tourist trap towns and that it was like walking around in a life-sized dollhouse where nothing was real. It was more than that, though… more surreality like rose flavored ice cream that made me feel like i was in a novel somewhere other than circling around Washington’s Crossing of the Delaware.

So, we were at dinner and Lindsay decided for me that i should have brought a notebook with me, and i’m sure that i should have because i lost everything i had meant to say. I suppose i’m just so obsessed with being in a city and being metropolitan that it seems impossible to me that people live just around the corner from these shops… selling strange musical instruments and fantastical ice cream and ultra-hot salsa only to walk back home and lay down to sleep under those same stars.

Oh yeah, you could see stars. Everywhere. Our trip straddled Pennsylvania and New Jersey and we walked back and forth across a bridge whose wooden foot path was so worn that it seemed just like walking on a dirt road. We all wondered at once where the state lines were drawn… the middle of the river, or the middle of the bridge? I finally figured that they’d probably be indicated on old claimer’s maps, but then it came down to where exactly those hand-drawn maps would set the border in real life and we were back to where we started.

Other things happened too, that i can’t quite put back together into the blog they were meant to be. There was an armor store that was selling arrowheads from 200bc, and i couldn’t fathom how just anybody had the right to own something that old and have it sitting in a display case with a “please inquire” pricetag on it. I kept arguing with Lindsay that nothing could taste like a rose after we first passed the ice cream shop while still in the car, and finally she just replied: “it tastes just like it smells. You can taste anything you can smell!” And that was that until i actually bought my triple scoop and the owner made me try it first because “some people taste it and then just walk out on me.” And it tasted like… rose petals. It was flavored in that subtle way that green tea ice cream is, with the ultra-dark pastel color and the taste that slides off of your tongue while you’re trying to absorb it.

After we had walked around for a while i finally got used to the idea of everything being real, but i still can’t figure it out. It feels like it should be some tiny historical town tucked into Massachusetts because i always forget that Philadelphia is the exception to the rule of Pennsylvania and not the other way around. Everything in New Hope was vivid… all the local teenagers we saw working in the shops were like caricatures of people i know… three times as many piercings or hair twice as outrageous or poise that’s so much more postured. I realize that somehow it’s their reaction to living in a sort of suspended time where all of the shops and streets stay the same and people from outside come in to gawk, but at the same time it felt like i was looking at a catalogue of teenaged stereotypes trying to find the ones that matched my own friends.


Of course, those are all just snippets… glimpses into my surreal afternoon, because i should have bought a notebook instead of the two cds i bought. Live and learn.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/6883375/