Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

anything but a.m.

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This is an actual thing. Or at least, an actual thing in development. I would consider buying it, but I think there would be a lot of commensurate psychological trauma involved with waking up every morning. Of course, that is a good motivator.

I remember clearly the abject horror that child Peter had at waking up early in the morning.

I would do anything to delay the inevitable. Play dead. Let my body go limp so that it could not be dragged out of bed. Agree to relocate to a chair or couch and then promptly go back to sleep.

When all else failed, I would plead. Ten more minutes. Five, even. Any stay of execution to stand between me and a fully waking state.

I'll admit a certain affection for waking up every morning to the banshee screams of Ms. Love before dawn. Given the choice, I think that's what I'd still be doing.

I look back and wonder how I ever got myself to high school on time, let alone every day. It’s the same way I look back at sophomore year of college and wonder how I stayed alive when all I remember consuming was vodka and chicken cheesesteaks.

My attitude towards waking up has improved as an adult. Slightly. I don’t like sleeping late, per se. I can even be up ultra-early to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for a special event.

Still, my preference is for my alarm to begin ringing in the form of some terrifying, unignorable noise an hour or two before I have to set foot on the ground. That gives me some time to come to terms with the psychological ramifications of waking up.

E is not so much a fan of this arrangement. We’ve negotiated it down to a normal alarm ring within 45 minutes of actual waking.

I don’t know that I will ever be able to delight in dawn. I hear there are some people who are in the gym by the time the sun comes up.

Still, there is some satisfaction to starting a day early – if only in that I’ll manage to squeeze in so much more of my life than if I had woken up an hour or two later.

breaking the painful cycle

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I have mentioned my dermatological struggles in the past on the blog. While the potential disintegration of my epidermis seems to have been staved off at the moment, my skin-care needs are (ridiculously) one of the major worrying factors about my health care and costs.

Yesterday, one of my favorite Twitter friend, @JerseyShoreJen, mentioned she had booked another media appearance from her recent EdOp on Eczema. Being a fellow lifelong battler of it and its fiendish cohorts, I congratulated her and asked her to share her article from the NYT Health Section – “The Painful Cycle of Eczema.”

In the bathroom, I try not to dwell too long at the sight of myself in the mirror before patting my skin dry and slathering it with lotion. I wrap bandages over the raw and weeping patches in the crooks of my elbows — a stopgap, really, since the bandages will soak through in several hours. I take Benadryl to calm the itching, and ibuprofen to temper the swelling and pain, before heading to meetings in an antihistamine haze. I hope no one stares, but they do.

…

I wore long sleeves and pants to school, even on the hottest, most humid days. … When I passed through puberty and still had outbreaks, I viewed my eczema as a character flaw, something I brought on myself for not being perfect.

After I read her story, Jen and I got into rapid-fire exchange on Twitter, gushing over our challenges and successes with our conditions. Though my collection of problems do not manifest as violently as Jen’s, I see so much of myself in her story. I never once wore pants to gym. I’ve ruined pillowcases and sheets when my medications have bleached out their color. When I have an outbreak I worry that people will stare and judge in meetings.

There’s not an immediate happy ending here – Jen and I are both continuing our respective struggles and our treatments. However, the silver lining is the connection that Jen created, and the relief I felt in talking to someone who relates to what I’m going through.

Jen writes at Down The Shore With Jen.

all the blue jeans you ever wanted

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Do you know how many pairs of jeans you own?

About 80% of my total collection of jeans, blue or otherwise.

This is a decidedly first world sort of question to even need to ask. Personally, I would love to have some sort of smart phone app to track and rate my jeans, because I have completely lost the plot when it comes to knowing how many I have or which ones make my ass look just right for bass playing.

I remember my first pair of jeans – in fact, I still have them and wear them as cutoffs. They were UnionBay jeans, and I bought them in eighth grade.

I am not telling you that to make you feel fat, although that is frequently the reason I still wear that pair of jeans.

My point is that nice jeans – attractive, durable jeans – are not cheap. For much of my life, acquiring a new pair was a momentous occasion. In college I owned a finite number of them. Four, typically – two identical newer pairs that were more for dressing up, and two older pairs for bumming around.

Now there is the distinct chance that I may come home with four pairs of jeans from a single, manic shopping excursion.

This morning as I worked to stow an overflowing basket of laundry I tried to explain my jeans-shelving methodology to E, but it is the sort of process that warrants a flow chart for proper understanding and I did not have a PC with PowerPoint or Visio handy. My jeans are no longer a strictly finite affair. I have about as many jeans as a Gap display shelf with a svelte mannequin standing in front of it. I need a set of those clear sticky tags to label one pant leg of each with the relevant size and style information.

I am not telling you this to make you feel inadequate about your own personal jeans collection. No. My seemingly infinite jeans are an allegory for my 2011.

2011 was awesome. I loved it. It featured so much stuff that I barely remember it all. Stuff to do. Stuff to buy. Stuff to remember. Stuff to play music on or through. Lots of stuff.

Honestly, it was a bit overstimulating. Now that I have my own house to house my seemingly-infinite jeans, approaching-infinite music collection, my actually-as-infinite-as-possible X-Men comic books, and many other precious things I love to acquire, the mere act of directing my attention at a single group of them can sideline me not just for hours, but for days – and that doesn’t take into account the possibly-actually-infinite other things I could be doing with my life, like writing songs or spending time with friends I love.

That observation doesn’t equate to a neat resolution for 2012. Do I want less stuff? No. I love my stuff. Do I want to be less stimulated? Good god, who would ever aspire to that? I am incredibly proud of my overstuffed, overstimulated 2011. I played a show every month. I paid off a student loan. I got promoted. It was awesome.

I suppose with a new year stretched out invitingly before me I simply want to offer both myself and you, my dear reader, the simple moral of my 2011 fairytale – that getting everything you ever wanted or needed just means you’ll want something new afterwards.

Don’t make your whole life about wanting.

Do. Create. Give. Love.

Live.

And, if your ass looks great in the pair of jeans you wear while living, more power to you.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Best wishes from your oversharing author and the CK family, here to christen our dining room table on my one carnivorous day of the year.

Devils in the Details

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This weekend I have spent a not insignificant amount of my time researching the following engrossing topics:

I think I am still feeling some of the psychological ramifications of reading this book today.

  • relief maps and rivers of the Ozark mountains
  • construction of single story log cabins with a chimney and attic
  • zip line harnesses and the weight limits of various carebiners
  • the physiological effects of breathing nitrous oxide, and if it appears spontaneously in nature
  • diagrams for simply tree houses

I also spent fifteen minutes standing at sink, lighting matches and throwing them in at a set of house keys, counting how long they would burn and checking to see if the keys got hot.

Am I going on an adventure vacation in the mountains of middle America?

No, I am writing a book. Again.

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When I was in ninth or tenth grade one of our reading assignments was Lord of the Flies. I hated a lot of the other things we were forced to read, but this was a book I could get behind. I consumed it in a single weekend.

Our final project was to create some sort of derivative work, with the book as our source material – like an interview with one of the survivors.

I loathed this sort of teacher-approvef fanfic assignment. At age thirteen I was already writing fanfic for things I actually cared about and novellas of my own. I was fine with a research paper, but the assignment (and its brethren) felt like the equivalent of assigning us to a chain gang in an attempt to spark creative brilliance. I considered the whole bunch of them to be a waste of my time.

In my orneriness, I decided to protest the assignment via dutiful completion of the best assignment in the class. I would write the correct ending to the book, because (SPOILERS!) most of the little hooligans living through the end was far too precious of an ending. I felt that it spoiled the morally gray original to allow these murderers to be returned to children in the eyes of their rescuers.

I'm getting verklempt! Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic...


(Next on Coffee Talk: The Hunger Games has supplanted Lord of the Flies despite lacking the measured allegory of the latter not only due to its similarly unsentimental look at moral/ethical behavior in young adults, but because it follows the realistic outcome of their actions much wider in society and much farther in conclusion. Discuss.)

I set about creating my groundbreaking and teacher-baiting work of subversive genius. I was a scrawny pre-teen, so I had that angle well-researched. I spent a lot of time tracking the various spears through the book to see where they were and who held them, considered how quickly a forest woud catch fire, and gave some thought to how you could behead a boy with the rudimentary tools the tribe had fashioned.

(In other news, I’m happy I went to high school in a pre-Columbine, pre-9/11 world, because afterward I would clearly be labeled as a dangerous potential murderer and/or terrorist.)

It was a glorious day when I turned in my assignment. It branched perfectly from the existing novel, written in the same style. It ended with the idnelible image of the marines disembarking onto the beach to discover nothing but an idyllic island beach, barren but for a wooden pike bearing Ralph’s head – set against the backdrop of the raging inferno of the forest, from which the screams of Jack’s tribe could be heard all too clearly.

To emphasize this bleak ending, I carefully collaged said image out of a series of clip art as an illustration for my final page.

A relief map of the Ozarks, in case you were wondering...

I got an A, but they might have decided to keep an eye on me for a little while.

.

I know I’ve mentioned this before in more memorable fashion, but for me the hardest thing about writing a novel continues to be writing what I don’t understand.

I understand talking, so there is plenty of dialog. Once I got my learning permit last winter the driving scenes became much more plentiful.

I managed to keep the characters out of the car for three thousand words this weekend, but when your characters are crashing around the Ozarks in a pitched battle for life and death, every page is a new research project.

As a plus, I am now ready to book a  zip-line adventure through America’s deciduous forests!