Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

thoughts

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Lindsay, who just read the entirety of my archives and so is in the position to know these things, has informed me that i just have to write more often. If i write more often, she reasons, i will enjoy it more, and enjoying it will make it better.

This, historically, has meant that you (the reader) has to suffer through all kinds of crapola in the meantime. But, you didn’t have anything else to do, right?


“You’re on hiatus, huh?” It seemed like a funny question to ask me — of course i’m not on hiatus. When am i ever? I’ve only ever took one that i recall. One look at the date on my last post told me why i was being asked, though. Apparently just thinking about witty stuff doesn’t count for much in the blogging game .

As if it’s a consolation for missing out on daily updates from my decidedly droll life, i have somehow managed to notch my fourth consecutive quarter on the Dean’s List. To put that in more tangible terms for all of you literal thinkers out there, i am currently less than .03 away from graduating with honors. Not the dopey kind of honors you get from being in the “honors college.” Noooo. The kind of honors you get for being smart and doing well.

In an intriguing turn of events, i don’t remember a lot of being smart or doing well that happened over the course of this past quarter. Thinking about it is like trying to remember if i’ve blogged lately — i know that i got straight A’s, but i’m a little foggy on the when and the how of it. There was, of course, last week’s two days of hell as i built a Senior thesis paper from the relative nothingness of one interesting Scientific American article into a hulking five thousand word treatise on Globalization and Technology. I got an A in that class… despite not being a Senior and, oh, not even being enrolled in the major that i wrote a thesis for. Ha. And, people in the class talked about how the professor was the second coming of Vlad the Impaler, a veritable vampire of academia, sucking up lots and lots of work and leaving behind only the dried up dead husks of things he once regarded as students.


He seemed to like me, actually.

I could go on. Somehow i’ve gotten to this place, this place where i am successful and smart and yet i feel like some small part of me is living outside of it, wondering how someone could be so successful. And smart. And so goddamn charming.

Okay, so, maybe i made that part up….

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/03/200052935/

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I’m having trouble deciding what i feel about anything except for sitting holed up in my room protected by womb of thick walls and loud music. Yesterday on my way home from class i walked a block out my way – out of boredom, i guess. I had never been on it on foot before, just in a car passing by. The feeling was indescribable, as if i had stepped off of my front porch and onto the set of a television show (because i had never seen that block before except for through the glass of a window/screen).

I think that sometimes Elise feels bad that i don’t write so many songs anymore, as if it’s her fault. It guess it is a little bit, because i am happy and not creating stupid scenarios in my head to connect me to every person that i pass by on the street out of utter desperation to be a part of someone else’s day. It’s confusing to look at the entries in my little grey book from a year ago, while Elise was still new and confusing enough to evoke my typical lyrical ramblings. At a point not too far after that there is a disconnect, and suddenly i am not writing out of my gut anymore, from where my songs used to spring covered in bile and blood. Every time Elise gets used to me not having anything new to sing at all i surprise her, the other night with four new songs that she had never even heard a hint of before. They make me uneasy — i have trouble feeling them and so they are hard to sing.

I have thirty four weeks of college left after i complete my last co-operative learning experience this summer. I said a funny thing last night to Erika about that. I said that i wasn’t returning my mother’s phone calls because she would have to get used to not hearing from me and being worried once i left Philadelphia. I talk a lot about what i may or may not do after i graduate, everything from going abroad to going to grad school, and usually it has an air of fantasy and speculation about it. Last night, though, i said it without thinking. It felt like singing one of my old songs, half diaphragmatic support and half a punch in the gut. I don’t know where i’m going to go, or what i’m going to do, but apparently it’s not going to be here.


Or so i say. But, for as many streets there are in this city that can make me feel alien there are other cities on this planet that i’ll never see. I really ought to start working on that.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/03/90595788/

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I can’t imagine when it was, as i hardly ever watch television, but i definitely have a recollection of channel-surfing past a Richard Simmons Sweating to the Oldies advertisement and remarking to Elise that i ought to buy it. Why? Because i would be a lot more likely to dance around in my living room like an idiot then do, say, ten pushups a day.


She doubted me at the time, but had she seen the solid gold dancing i’ve got going to the Chicago soundtrack right now i think she might… erm… well, she’d say i was gay.


Right. But, what’s important is she loves me.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/02/90328381/

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Winter turns me into something of a lardass; it feels as though i have been steadily gaining several pounds a week. I personally like to think of it as a protective layer of flubber combined with an appreciation of fine dining, but flub is flub. However, after many weeks of intense practice i believe i could competetively run the two block Walnut street dash to board a moving SEPTA bus.

I would surely win.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/02/90282047/

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No, i will not do my reading on Modernity, or write five-hundred words about globalization in India without ultilizing the passive voice. I will do anything but. I will read every Metafilter post, complete with comments, from the last three days. I will floss my teeth, eat ramen, and then floss my teeth again — i like to think of it as an empirical study on ramen deposits in college students. Afterwards, I will aimlessly stare off into space while intermittently checking to see if i have any new email, because i would rather do anything but school between tomorrow and September, let alone now. And, let’s not even begin to mention the nine thirty communications class where, in the last session, my professor read out of the book FOR AN HOUR after making feeble attempts to evoke discussion from his dazed classroom of crusty-eyed twenty-somethings. Let’s face facts: I cannot communicate in a classroom setting before ten-thirty. It’s the gods’ honest truth; i’ve never received an A in a collegiate course that began before ten. And, well, now that i am a surly and jaded senior, may the gods be with you if you try to teach me how to communicate, study communication, or evaluate communication at any point earlier than that.

As for that “I’m so smart, i’m going to graduate with honors and go to a spiffy grad school” riff i was on last semester, it seems to be losing ground to the “Stuff my face with wild animal abandon whenever i get bored in an attempt to gain 20% of my body-weight before finals week” initiative and the “Who needs coursework when i have the Vagina Monologues? And who needs the Vagina Monologues when i can idly fuck with my website all day!” movement.

Last night i had a dream where i had graduated from college and all i could do was sob — because i had suddenly realized how much the worth of my life increased when accompanied by a silly little piece of paper. And five years of vaguely applicable torture, sometimes occurring at times when not even torture should be inflicted on a college student. Let alone theories of communications research.

Me? Frazzled?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2003/01/90253010/