Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

day in the life

How To Stream Satisfaction

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I have not left the house since Friday night – since dragging my sorry self in from the humidity with guitar and amp and bookbag after what maybe would have seemed like one of the longer days of my life had I not just helped to put on a music festival last weekend.

I unapologetically turned on the central air, flopped on the couch, and that was that.

Waking up the next morning – and, in fact, all the way through the weekend until earlier this evening – I couldn’t quite tell if I was sick, or just “under the weather,” or if my body was simply mounting all possible protests at once: sore from lugging amp and guitar around the city, voice fading after a week of talking and singing, stuffy from allergies (also: I need to change the filter on the central air).


I’m being paid to help an acquaintance write and record two songs.

It’s a peculiar arrangement – even beyond the peculiarity of being paid to do something that I spend the majority of my non-working life doing for free. She has words, and melody, and even some chords, but she needs help translating them into a coherent, performable, recorded song.

On her first song we completely clicked, suggesting the same exact chords to each other, minus our personal flourishes. The exception is a single, recurring section where she hears the accompaniment as happy and major, whereas I just feel it as minor and unresolved. She sees where I am coming from, but she doesn’t hear the song that way.

She’s the (paying) client, so I’m doing it her way, but it hurts a little – the song is losing a layer of nuance that only I will ever know. It’s a peculiar direction to head in, given I’ve spent the last year or two mercilessly deconstructing my own writing, trying to eliminate all of the nonsense whims to drill down to the perfect song underneath.


I’ve been reflecting on how my threshold for wasting money seems to be pushing in two opposite directions, leaving a vast middle ground of amounts to waste.

On one hand, I won’t even spend $.99 on a song I like on iTunes, whereas in the past I used to buy albums just based on cover art. On the other, a $400 piece of furniture or recording equipment is a necessary evil, whereas three years ago it took months of prodding to get me to buy my first brand-new electric guitar for that amount.

Is that normal? As we grow up are we all at once more willing to nickle and dime and more willing to throw money at seemingly inevitable larger purchases? It seems like the sort of thing I couldn’t understand as a child, but I feel like I live an entire life that I wouldn’t be able to understand as a child, so the finer points are getting harder to discern.


Last night I watched Battlestar Galactica on the floor of my room/office, head propped up by cardboard box because i was too sore/sick to wander downstairs to find a pillow. It was thing infinity-n on my list of things to do, but I did it anyway.

What is more modern-day than being able to download exactly the thing you have a whim to watch at 3am on Monday morning?


Do you remember when blogging was about recording that instant gratification? Now we have Facebook status and MySpace walls to record the instant – the offhand comment, the spurious wish – while our blogs sit in silence, waiting to catch a thought that is more fully formed.


Lying on my floor somewhere around 4:37 a.m. I thought, fuck that. If my modern adult life says I can stay up all night watching television on my floor because I am too impatient for the DVD to arrive in September, then I’m allowed to blog about whatever damn errata I want to.

It’s not the errata that is alluring and readable, in the same way that watching that one episode doesn’t mean that I am modern and adult. It’s that watching that episode was any of a thousand possibilities of things I could be doing at 4:37 a.m. – a range expanding from sleep to flying to Kansas City just to get drunk.


It’s that enough amassed errata is defining – maybe even arresting – but the only way to find that out is to collect it all in one place, instead of squandering it on everyone else’s internet page.

So Much To Say

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I need to re-hook-up phone posting, because at the pace of my life right now the only chance I have to sneak in a comment here is via phone. There’s been gardening, weddings, new furniture, American Idol, walking home every day, run-ins with old directors, people asking me to compose music, work photo-shoots across the damn city, and all manner of other things to distract me from blogging.

All of which would be a lot more interesting if I would write about it at length, but that would take up a commensurate amount of time.

Blahg.

Until I get my act together to make a decent post, you can hold yourselves over with my interview with Andrea Nardello, conducted for Lyndzapalooza!

Over and out.

Acts of Terrorism Against My Fashion Regime

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Like most tragedies in life, today’s caught me completely unaware and unprepared.

For many years I have eschewed a heavy winter coat in favor of a layered winter ensemble consisting of perhaps a suit jacket, then a light warm-up jacket, then my trusty mod-squad brown leather jacket, topped with a scarf. It’s enough layers to keep me feeling insulated without the claustrophobic implications of a dowdy jacket.

This morning was cold enough to warrant the full layered ensemble, which I carefully arranged even as the clock crept towards making me late for work. The layers kept me from overheating as I nearly jogged from my house to the Orange Line, haplessly flinginging myself onto the second car as my lateness extended from seconds to minutes.

Fast forward past my triumphant entry to work sans five inches of curly hair and a highly efficient morning meeting. I sit down at my desk with a sigh and notice a smear of something on my right pant leg.

How in the world did I get this reddish paste – it looked like orange marmalade – on my dress pants? I carefully sloughed it away with a napkin, using a damp edge to pick up the remaining crumbs.

Must’ve bumped into someone’s bagel on the elevator, I thought.

I continued thinking that until I noticed more of the strange orange substance on the tail of my suit jacket, and all over the seat of my pants, and also strewn across the lower back panel of my treasured mod-squad jacket.

I wasn’t so worried about the jacket, which has suffered many indignities over the years, so much as I was concerned about the suit – my favorite one. Luckily, I had another suit waiting for me at the cleaners. I could walk to the cleaners, turn over my suit and leather jacket for cleaning, and come back wearing a clean suit.

Down the elevator I went, and across the street to the cleaners. When I arrived I helplessly flung my leather jacket onto the counter and breathlessly explained the problem.

“… and I know this jacket is a little beat up, but it’s my favorite, and I just want you to get this stuff off without it leaving a stain, and the same for my suit.”

The man behind the counter tilted his head and spoke to me in a slow, patronizing tone.

“Sir, I really can’t do anything for the coat now that you’ve let it wear through to the lining.”

Now, many of you have seen me digitally or physically wearing the mod-squad jacket, and though I might have let bits of it get slightly tatty, I’ve never literally worn it through. So, imagine my surprise when I looked down past his patronizing gesturing hand to discover that the strange orange marmalade was now encrusted around a quarter-sized hole in my jacket that – yes – showed through to the lining.

After a moment of consideration I decided that said hole definitely was not present when I examined my jacket in the office. The orange marmalade had eaten through my jacket.

How had my life gone from a typically busy morning of corporate communications to some oddball Jack Bauer subplot? What could I have possibly rubbed up against between my front door and my desk that would eat a hole through otherwise impervious 30-year-old leather?

Why was I still wearing a suit covered in the stuff?

I swiftly stripped down behind the cleaner’s changing curtain as they retrieved my on-hold suit, passing it into the booth in exchange for my soiled clothes. I came out of the store sans-coat, clutching my suit jacket closed with one arm and holding my mod-squad jacket (rejected by the cleaners) far away from my body with the other.

And that was all before lunch.

To the best that anyone has conjectured, at some point I leaned against some element of Septa that had recently been liberated-from or treated-for rust, and the mixture of the solvent involved and the leftover grit wound up pasted across my backside. Curiously, it didn’t seem to be harming my suit (nor my briefcase, which I noticed was slathered in the stuff hours later).

The upshot is that my beloved mod-squad jacket is now wrapped in airtight dry-cleaner’s plastic, probably on the way to an ignoble end in an industrial strength trash bag, and my best-fitting suit is at the cleaners being de-marmaladed (if such a thing is even possible) and I won’t know the outcome until the morning.

Frazzled, distraught, and facing a walk home in the cold without a jacket, at 5pm I decided that I could not let Septa’s passive act of terrorism against my fashionable layering cow me into inaction and dowdiness. I would fight back the only way I know how – with an ample credit limit and a trip to Kenneth Cole.

Now, if only I could figure out a way for this story to end with Septa picking up my K.C. credit card bill I could say I lived happily ever after with my new perfectly-fitted not-too-warm winter jacket (and accompanying splurge-shoes).

The Belly of the Beast

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The closest I had ever been to a casino prior to Saturday was my twice-yearly reading of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, so when we stepped onto the floor of the Tropicana I half expected a neon carousel full of lizard-people to greet me.

It would have been better than the real thing; shabby carpets whose patterns snaked from side to side as they stretched across a hazy room filled with a fleet of leggy middle-aged waitresses in weird black corsets and hundreds of chain-smoking, hollow-looking gamblers, with a few cigar-smoking rotund gamblers thrown in for good measure.

I suppose I could have inferred the haze and the zombie-like patrons from Hunter, but i had been hoping for something more psychedelic.

In Vegas, maybe, but the nine of us were in Atlantic City. Wes and Karen sat down for winning streaks at black jack while I milled back and forth, nearly having my legs broken when i mistakenly wandered into the service-space between two active craps tables.

It occurred to me that there was really no instruction for the beginning gambler; I couldn’t have even sat down at a black jack table, let alone craps or some poker variant. While the hollow-cheeked undead of Atlantic City elbowed their way past me to get a closer look at the craps game I wondered if they all just expected me to buy some chips and lose until I understood … until I realized that anyone who spent any amount of time wondering about that wasn’t fit for gambling in the first place.

Eventually the more serious boys headed to poker while the rest of us made a pass at the slot machines, where I spent my first (and perhaps only) $3.25 on gambling before declaring that the fleet of corseted grandmothers were not going to keep me inebriated enough to make my gambling cost-effective.

We retreated towards the sports bar and, as the whir and hum of the shabby casino room faded behind us and as the ceiling gave way to rows of wicker fans and then impossibly-bright false-clouds, I thought that perhaps I liked casinos very much so long as I didn’t have to go into the casino part.

Either that, or calculate just how much I had to gamble in total to have my drinks and roomage completely comped and spend exactly that hour-by-hour over the slow course of a day. Because I’d rather spend my money on a steady and sure flow of Southern Comfort than whip it away on the whims of an eight-deck shuffler.

Eight hours later and we were all thoroughly drunk (some of us already hung-over) and mourning our poor Eagles while singing karaoke, me and Gina and our entire table screaming back the pitches of Bohemian Rhapsody at the pitch-deaf lump who had the (intentional) misfortune of selecting the song, and then carrying our scream-singing into the cool night air and back to Philadelphia as i sang the pitches i still could with my husk of a voice.

It took me the better part of Sunday to recover from the experience – just sleep and water, no speech or food, until finally this morning I felt as though the rest of me had returned from AC, where it had somehow become entangled in the hazy air on the casino floor.

Complementary Compliments

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If I’m having even the most decentest of days I tend to be very complimentary – especially to co-workers. For a little while in college I was sure I was meant to go into PR, because I love to spin people in a positive way.

(That was nixed, at least for the time being, because I don’t usually find products to be quite so spinnable.)

If a designer whips up a cool brochure in record time, or if one of my friends sings a song really well, or if someone just makes me happy, i don’t hesitate to let it be known – not only to the person, but to anyone else in earshot or who I see later that day.

What’s funny is that I don’t really think about the impact of my compliments – whether they brighten someone’s day or seem routine and vacuous – I just make them because people seem to deserve them. I am an indiscriminate complimenter.

Work today was as frenetic as ever, peaking in the seemingly impossible task of providing final sign-off on multiple 100+ page books that are due to mail in a week.

As I was leaving I bumped into a particularly beleaguered co-worker in the hall who had been proofreading the books all day, and said, “Last call for Peter. Speak now or hold your proofreading until the morning.” She laughed and said she was fine for the night.

“Are you sure,” i queried, “because I can stay if you need help.”

From the other side of the hall someone from another team chimed in. “Isn’t Peter great that way? He always offers to help, and he really means it, even if he’s on his way out. That’s pretty awesome.”

In the wake of that five seconds of honest, unsolicited compliment I felt as if someone just told me I got a promotion to CEO. I truly love my job, and I don’t offer to help people to get complimented or so I’ll be well-reviewed, but it was really nice to know that someone else appreciated it.

My dear reader, have you been offering praise where praise is due? If not, try it for a day or two. And, if you wind up making someone’s day as much as my co-worker made mine, leave a comment to tell me about it.