Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
by krisis
Lest you think my life is all work, wedding, and rock music, for the next seven hours I’ll be bartending and providing other general assistance at a fundraiser with live hip-hop music and DJs for IX ii V Records.
Never let it be said that I am not living an eclectic life.
by krisis
As I first draft this post I am on my lunch break, alternating my typing with wolfing down a salad and chugging a glass of Airborne, because I didn’t have any time to write a post last night after my band’s rehearsal, and after this it’s back to copy editing and drafting project schedules, and then directly off to have dinner with one of my co-best-ladies and her wife, and from there another brief rehearsal before meeting up with my fiancée at our favorite open mic, and then some brief iteration of sleep before more work, followed by an upscale bar crawl I’ve organized for my friends, and then bon voyage to fiancée as she heads to a conference in Florida.
That sentence says almost everything you need to know about my life, in a nutshell. If it sounds too yuppy or droll for you then you have arrived at the wrong droll, yuppy blog, because those are the sorts of crises that are crushing me lately.
Thus the title of this, the longest-running blog in Philadelphia.
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Last year my adventures in National Blog Posting Month were bookended by a comic book analogy, which provided a frame for a complete reboot of Crushing Krisis.
First, I rebooted on a technical level, as I moved over six years of posts from Blogger to WordPress. More significantly, I rebooted from a content perspective, by reintroducing each character and plot strand from my life with no assumptions and no back-story required.
Also, since I am cultivating a second career as a singer-songwriter, I performed and uploaded nine Trio podcasts of original music ranging in topic from my identity to things left unsaid to my modern pop influences.
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My wonderfully telling introductory run-on sentence shows off an interesting facet of the intervening year – many aspects of my tongue-in-cheek reboot analogy were more apt than I intended, because the majority of my 30-day accelerated reinvention actually stuck.
And, not just the minutia, like my attention to detail being recast as a inner OCD Godzilla spewing indigestion-causing hellfire whenever I don’t perform a task in the most anal way possible. We’re talking about major life changes… I even blogged every day for another entire month this past September – that certainly never happened before!
As a result, rather than subject you to yet another reinvention for 2007 (I’m not Madonna, I just cover her songs), for the rest of this month I’ll be blogging about the changes in my life, especially the songs and stories connected to the two best, biggest, and most exciting parts of my new identity – that I am now an actively rehearsing and gigging musician, and that I’ve recently become engaged to my amazing partner of the majority of the seven-year run of this page, Elise.
I don’t expect you to be familiar with the highly obscure, highly complex history-of-me to follow along with my NaBloPoMo content; after all I’m just one of over 3,000 blogs for you to traipse through over the next 30 days, which is no easy feat. I know … last year I read every single blog, linking to a full 10th of them.
So, to spare you any extra research on my behalf, and in keeping with the original intent of last year’s reboot, all of my NaBloPoMo content will be presented free of backlinks to anything other than previous NaBloPoMo content from this year and last.
Tune in tomorrow for the first chapter of my engagement story. And, welcome to National Blog Posting Month at Crushing Krisis.
by krisis
It figures that I spend three days actually doing interesting stuff and by the time I drag myself home I’m too exhausted to try to explain any of it. That’s sort of the Blogger’s Paradox, isn’t it?
Apparently, being a bachelor involves a lot of drinking, staying out past last call, sleeping at other people’s houses, and being cheery and fully functional the next morning at eight.
In other news, riding around in a convertible does awesome things for my hair.
by krisis
I’ve been remastering seven-year-old audio and chipping away at installing WordPress 2.3 for twenty of the last twenty-four hours, and at this point I’ve lost track of which thing I’m doing for fun and which is the chore.
Oh, I’m sorry, they’re both supposed to be fun? I must have missed the memo, because at the moment I can’t wait to get to work in the morning to do some project management and be free of this insanity for eight or nine hours.
I’ve been in overdrive every since I spent all of a gorgeous yesterday sitting naked on the couch, eating an entire box of veggie chicken patties, watching inane commentary tracks on fucking Heroes just because that’s what I would watch if Elise was here, followed by wandering off to the bedroom for a three-hour nap while my audio project takes ten minutes to process.
Clearly some atonement had to occur for that seven-hour period of my life, which is what lead to the weeks-early install of WordPress 2.3, which at the moment fails to impress me in any way, shape, or form. So far it’s fucked up everything I liked about WordPress, resisted the installation of every theme that serves my esoteric organizational needs, and provided me with a useless little box to manually write tags in. They call that a feature? It helpfully suggests “cats, pet food, dogs.”
Don’t be surprised if you start seeing posts tagged as “you can shove those cats up your ass,” or similar.
On the plus side, now through almost three hours of archived audio I am getting uncannily good at making seven-year-old Real Audio sound reasonably listenable with 12-band parametric EQ and other assorted magic of GoldWave, which I’ve now been using for almost a decade and which is still hands-down the best audio editing tool you can purchase for under $100. If only it had a project history a la Photoshop it would be perfect…
(If I was really serious (re: masochistic) I would actually bring multiple tracks of each guitar vocal into my mixing software and tease out each one for a specific purpose, like guitar, vocals, room sound, et cetera, thus creating an artificial four- or eight-track version of something I’ve got on a dismally compressed single take. I’m pretty sure that’s what they do when they remaster old-school wall-of-sound stuff.)
I seem to have defeated the mid-mastering naps by heading into the hallway to sort laundry, and now that I’ve run out of laundry I just go do sit ups until I start to wheeze, which is usually a sign that my audio is done processing.
It’s a glamorous life, this pseudo-bachelorhood.
by krisis
There’s that point where you think you are drowning but suddenly realize you are swimming. It’s the same as that point on the rollercoaster where your stomach keeps traveling upwards while your body has already begun to settle.
That was today, to a tee – breathless and fumbling until around eleven, where I realized that my definition of fumbling is everyone else’s state of enthusiastic focus.
Somehow it carried through the end of the day and past my mad dash to the train (run past the liquor store at full tilt; realize I have overshot my goal by a block; run back to the liquor store at full tilt), floating me through our meeting until it was just us finishing our wine and Gina and I singing our harmony for Lindsay, and a room full of people saying they can all tell I sing better now.
It carried through the slightly damp walk to my threshold, within which I slipped off my headphones to discover Elise blasting WOGL in the room. “Love the One You’re With.” (it’s been following us this week)
Her head emerged from her office. “I just wanted to make sure you would dance with me.”
I’m sure I’ll eventually figure her out, too.