Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

My Life Is a Joke

by

Lindsay and I have an ongoing joke about my life.

Lindsay, being my primary secret squirrel, always finds a little nook of day to tuck a conversation into. Frequently we talk about all of the things that I do – work, blog, play music solo and with Arcati Crisis, Lyndzapalooza, freelance writing – &c, &c.

She, one of the more overachieving and time-conscious people I know, marvels at how I actually advance my goals in each of those areas all of the time.

The joke is that, in order to fit in all of those things, I must not do anything a normal person does. I don’t watch television, sit down for meals, or talk to people on the phone. I don’t sleep. I’m like some sort of T-1000 or Cylon. Or Madonna. I’m purely focused on achievements and achieving them, and nothing else.

That’s a slight misrepresentation. I am not a robot, and only aspire to be Madonna. I still do all of the things that human beings do.

Occasionally. And quickly.

.

When I graduated from college and started my career I resolved not to do any theatre or music for an entire year. No art, essentially. I would focus solely on being a good employee and a good boyfriend, because I wasn’t sure I’d be good at either. If I had free time I would sit and play video games until another opportunity to be a good employee or boyfriend presented itself.

After a year I allowed myself to get involved in a theatre project with Gina, and from there my natural inclinations for art and recklessly large personal projects took over.

I made a very elaborate chart. It included every possible thing that I could do in a given day. All of the regular human things, all of my time at work, all of my special goals, and everything else. Washing dishes. Walking from one place to another. Making out with Elise.

I tracked what I did for three months, every minute of every day.

At the end I had a beautiful graph of my life. A rainbow of lines interwove with each other to show me the relationship between work and sleep, guitar-playing and housework, or blogging and masturbation.

The area under some of the lines was the shape of my success; the area under others a dimension of dead space.

My priorities snapped me into focus. Before the chart I would have told you I was already busy enough with life. After I realized that I wasn’t writing songs because I was reading TMZ for 20 minutes a day.

.

The chart was almost three years ago.

Today Lindsay initiated the latest iteration of our joke, querying if I planned to sleep at all in the next few months while chipping away at my list of measurable goals for the year.

The chart was about sleep too. I tried to live on just five or six hours a night, and suddenly all the useless things expanded. The chart showed me that I need sleep to stay focused.

It was a disappointment, sure. I work and commute for almost ten hours a day, and if I have to sleep for seven that leaves just another seven hours in which I can live my life.

The punchline to our joke is that every minute counts, awake or asleep. 60 seconds to flip channels is a quick email reminder. Three minutes to set the table is rehearsing a song. A half an hour on the phone is this post.

Which would I rather look back on in December, or when I turn thirty, or when I die?

I always eat with the wrong fork, anyway.

weekend braindump

by

My biggest weakness – bigger than any weakness in character, or for spending money, or really even for wasting time – is that I’ll always stop to read something.

It’s such a subtle flaw. We’ve been over how as a child I felt compelled to read cereal boxes as I ate breakfast, but it’s a lot more than that. It’s my voracious reading – how on vacation as a child my mother would pack an entire suitcase of books, because you never wanted to encounter a me with nothing to read.

In adulthood it manifests a little differently. I’ve lost patience for fictional universes, so slow to unwind before me. Now the communications major has taken over. I’ll read Rolling Stone while tying my shoes, and even carry my laptop into the bathroom if I haven’t quite finished reading an article.

Okay, maybe that was over sharing.

Where once I was limited by my physical ability to store words, now I’m only limited by bandwidth and time.

The awful side of my habit is getting caught up in junk words. Trolling through FaceBook status updates. Reading comments from the misanthrope TalkBackers on Ain’t It Cool News. Are these altering my life in a positive way? Am I better person for consuming them?

All that said, here are the more substantial words that have kept me occupied over the weekend.

First, there is Battlestar Galactica. There are a scant six episodes left of this genre-shattering drama, and the press has belatedly gone into overdrive to promote the show (you know, just in case people have time to watch four seasons worth of backstory so they can catch the last six episodes live).

If you are amongst that demographic you probably shouldn’t even be reading these articles, as they are spoilers-galore if you aren’t all caught up through this past Friday’s doozy of an ep. I’ll try not to put spoils into the links, but if you aren’t up to Season 4.5 please don’t click through anything.

Jenna Busch has a fantastic interview with the alluring and well-spoken Kate Vernon, who has always been spectacular on BSG. Battlestar.tv goes on at great length with Grace Park, who reveals lots of interesting production details – including what its like to act as Sharon and Boomer within minutes of each other.

A thoughtful in-canon letter to the editor about Why Tom Zarek Was Right during the course of recent events on the show (I happen to agree). a brief one with Katee Sackoff, who reveals that she was battling thyroid cancer at the end of the series, adding to the emotional weight of her performance.

OS news has a lengthy chat with Nikki Clyne, who played Cally. I love how all of the BSG actors are more than just actors – Nikki is working on some kind of social networking site? They’re all such renaissance people. For example, scroll towards the bottom of composer Bear McCreary’s interview with some of the actors to read a hilarious tale of how Michael Trucco (Anders) helps launch a historical ship with Michael Hogan (Tigh). Also in that interview, the stunning (in beauty and as an actor) Rekha Sharma dishes that she spent weeks hanging out together in L.A. with Kate Vernon – I can’t decide if that’s better as an intellectual fantasy or an erotic one. ?

Okay, I also read some interesting things not about a fictional universe.

Lincoln’s Laws of War challenges you to recall your AP History as it outlines how the rights that Team Bush so ably dissected were first put in place by Obama’s presidential idol.

A compelling (if a little too detached) piece of longform from VF writer Vicky Ward on the serpentine tale of Esther Reed, a girl who ran away from one troubled life into another in a quest to find some suitable outlet for her secret genius.

A surprisingly personal (at least, to me) take on Michelle Obama, from Vogue, of all places. I love this woman so much. It is surely my goal to meet her at some point in my life.

Nate Silver – of my preferred election website, 538 – uses similar predictive modeling to guess the outcomes of Oscar.

The Academy’s PR team is making a lot of noise about how intimate and different their ceremony will be this year, but I don’t know if they can capitalize on the success of the Grammys because movies are experiential in a completely different way than music is. On the Grammys people tune in to hear songs. On the Oscars people tune in to see stars. Unless Titanic is nominated they could take or leave the movies. Their only hope might be holding the Supporting Actor trophy until later in the program than usual, since it’s the only major award their voters deigned to offer to Dark Knight.

I won’t be watching because – lack of live teevee aside – I only watch award shows with Erika. That said, I do love Hugh Jackman.

a shark for places

by

I have now been back from Europe and installed in my house for close to three days.

I’m slightly afraid to go outside. Half because I know I’m going to compare everything here to Paris and London, and here will lose out in every instance. But also because as I surround myself with my city the impressions of those other places will begin to fade.

Prior to (and during) the honeymoon I was eager to grump that I don’t understand the worth of spending money to go places. Even afterward that’s still true – when I tallied our total expenses last night I almost cried, even though they came out almost exactly as what I estimated.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the places. I loved Paris, and I liked what little of London I saw well enough. I just don’t enjoy vacations – being idle. On our slowest days in Paris I hated it, but when we turned Paris into work – multiple museums and neighborhoods to visit in one day – then I enjoyed being in Paris. When we turned London into a scavenger hunt – snapping photos and visiting shops – then I enjoyed London.

I would love to live in Paris – to be able to enjoy Paris while I am at rest. Paris was the one place I’ve ever been where I felt totally in-place, even as I stumbled through their language in every interaction.

Philadelphia can’t be Paris, no matter how many French books and newspapers I stowed in my garment bag. But I can bring that swim or sink vacation mentality back to Philadelphia – move or drown, create or die.

If I move fast enough, the scenery stops being significant.

too good to be true

by

A terrifically well-reviewed and relatively rare-to-see Sondheim is playing (and is completely and utterly sold out for the entirety of its run).

At the end of our block there are two high-end camera shops, facing each other, both of which carry Panasonic cameras (neither carry the one I’m trying to find).

Around that corner there is an entire street of guitar stores, in the middle of which sits a sheet music store that carries every domestic and imported sheet music book I have ordered from Amazon in the last three years (there is literally no sheet music I have left to buy).

Across from Hairspray is a terrific Mediterranean restaurant that serves breakfast until 15:00 (service was paralyzingly slow, even when we were the only people there).

Our hotel is so high-end that if you switch on the Do Not Disturb light they call your room to see if you actually don’t want to be disturbed, and if you don’t answer after three tries they break into your room to replace the heated towels in your NYC-apartment-sized bathroom (I had some sharp words with the duty manager, who informed me curtly that you have to call to tell her if you don’t want them to enter your room while you are away, and let them know when they can next enter your room. Is this a four-star thing I was previously unaware of since I only stay at crappy hotels? Nowhere in their extensive bedside literature does it mention this, and we had left all of our clothes, gifts, electronics, and money in plain sight when we left, since we took explicit care to light the Do Not Disturb. Now we have to go through everything to make sure it’s accounted for and not damaged).