Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

memories

I’ll Cry If I Want To

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I have assisted in the throwing of many parties, but I’ve only actually thrown three in my own living space that actually qualified as “parties” and not just gatherings or hangings out.

Of the first we dare not speak (not anymore, anyway). At the second, someone told me she loved me, and someone passed out in my stall shower (different someones; obviously a success). And, at the third I holed up in my room, jamming loudly with a rotating slate of collaborators, oblivious to the rest of the party (my ideal evening).

We are throwing my fourth party this Friday: a housewarming slash graduation slash after-party to The Last Ever (Really, This Time We Mean It) Live Performance by the 2004-05 TrebleMakers, at 7pm in Stein Auditorium.

Or, more accurately, Elise is throwing an after-party, and I am project managing the after-party.

Basically, this means I suck all the fun of party-planning out of party-planning by charting all food by meat and dairy content, calculating the low/mid/high number of total guests, using a spreadsheet to track all ingredient purchases, and creating a gantt chart to illustrate why we need to buy another slotted serving spoon.

My project management prowess seemed to be lost on the party-thrower.

Aside from the estimated twelve hours of cooking I have to do between now and Friday, in my capacity as project manager I am most concerned about how many people will show up. Though our house is spacious, it only is equipped with seating for six – seven if I bring in my lawn chair from outside.

In the depressing attendance basement of my low/mid/high equation (affirmed via PERT), only eight people are coming, which would make for a rousing game of musical chairs for the guests while Elise and I frantically proffered an alarming array of appetizers and 60+ servings of three possible main courses.

However, on the “our friends like us enough to park in South Philly just to eat food and be adults for three hours on a Friday night” side of the list (high), there are *fifty-four* people. Not exactly enough for the neighbors to call the cops, just enough to eat all of our food, and more-than-enough to pack our house like a sold out GA show.

As potentially alarming as the potential fifty-four guests are from a planning and entertainment standpoint, they are no where near as alarming as the potential eight. As a result, I have resorted to attempting to force my friends to confirm or deny their attendance (no maybes, damnit!) by sheer force of will. As that isn’t working out so well, I am in fact living minute to minute by the fickle whims of Evite. When two of our key couples declined the invite this morning due to prior plans I went into red alert.

“E,” my morning bulletin began, “M&S and G&W can no longer attend, and N&G converted to maybe. Lo/Med/Hi has taken an across the board hit due to variance from our presupposition of attendance.” The grim reality set forth in the stark light of Monday morning, I concluded with the real conundrum: “H’or Deurves situation may require re-eval; also, in danger of three-cheese chicken roll up overrun of half-dozen or more. Alter menu, or invite more guests? Pls advise, tx! – P”

And, I haven’t even started planning the music yet.

Space Invaders, and Other Causes of Insomnia

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There were a lot of reasons I hardly slept in high school. One was perhaps that I lived my entire life in my bedroom, so had trouble differentiating the living part from the sleeping part. The other were the dogs.

Back in SouthWest Philadelphia, the dogs would bark all night. I think all of the neighbors to the left of my bedroom had at least one chained in their yard (though to the right they had chickens, and rabbits, in that order).

Between my canine-based insomnia and my general feared of sharp-toothed animals, I was less than thrilled to find that our new neighbors (to the right, this time) kept a pair of frightening pit-bull/Cerberus blends who had just had a cute-but-still-threatening puppy.

The growls are inhuman. Actually, un-canine. They sound like nothing I’ve ever heard out of a dog before. They are low, vibrating my window fixtures. They are the kind of noise I’d expect a dog to make when cornered by a larger animal. They are, in fact, the sort of growls I would expect a dog to make when encountering something with an unfamiliar and threatening scent. They are a growl from science fiction, and every time I heard it I half expect the roof of my house to be ripped back like the top of a can to reveal giant whirring saucers in the sky, beaming harsh red lights down on houses and trees and people, and they would all spontaneously burst into flame.

Except, I have looked out into the yard, and there is nothing in the yard but the dogs. Merrily drinking from a bucket, running in circles, and growling growls that should be preceding an alien invasion.

let the spirit out

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They are all smoking in the kitchen.

Everything here smells like smoke; i smell like smoke after just a few hours of it. Aunt Rosie is in a house dress and high heels. She doesn’t wear underwear. Rosie is almost eighty, but i still picture her waking up in the morning and climbing out of her Barbie box. She girlishly flattens her dress, green with blue cornflowers, against her thighs with the flats of her palms as a breeze comes through the open door.

Aunt Mildred is in a dusky lime-colored sweatsuit. She forgot to pack her hearing aid, and leans in almost imperceptibly every time i speak.

I wonder to myself where they all learned to react to death. Rosie wants to rub her feet to keep them warm. My mother wanders in, shell-shocked and with so many more wrinkles than i remember from a month ago. She opens the window and smiles wanly at me.

“We does this at the hospital,” she says.” “To let the spirit out.”

Postal Service

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In grade school I found the concept of Pen Pals stultifying; try to find one kid to strike up a slow-motion exchange with via handwritten letter? Handwritten letters took too long to write, were too hard to read. Why not just trade phone calls? Or, at least, typed letters.

It was third grade, and my teacher absolutely refused to allow me to type my letters. I had a typewriter at home, my little blue manual on that folded into its own suitcase, on which I would peck away grade school murder mysteries and horror stories. Having recently received a note from my incredibly square Wisconsin friend, I anticipated a dreaded letter writing exercise in class the next day. In a pro-active academic turn (still rare, to this day) I got out my steely blue friend, and pecked away.

The next day in class, when the teacher told us that we would be writing out our replies, I raised my hand. I had brought mine, I pointed out, and it was already neatly typed.

My teacher was not amused. I couldn’t get out of the exercise just because I could type. I would still have to write out my letter.

Defiant, I struck back; I would love to write my letter in the horrible, awkward, cursive of third grade, but surely I would be allowed to place my wonderfully neat typewritten note into the massive envelope that would shuttle letters to our sister-school of hopelessly sheltered born agains in WI?

She was aghast. A typed note? No no no.

At this point the details become a bit muddled; to the best of my recollection, I may have refused to write out my letter so that she would be forced to use my typewritten one. She may have taken the typewritten one from me and insisted I write one from scratch. All I recall is that I was flustered, and made to turn my desk to the wall and write my note by hand, possibly in duplicate.

I can’t remember if my mother found out, but I suspect if she did she probably just had a hearty laugh. For all of my critique of her, one principal she has stood by is that no child should be restricted by a lowest common denominator (she knows the phrase, but god help you if you ask her to show you what it means with fractions), in the same way refused to let teachers force me to show my work on repetitive addition tables in first grade when I had already figured out how to multiply.

I hate when I figure out how to do things the fast way but am restricted by a classroom (or a world) of slow movers.

I’m No Al Gore, but…

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I have an obsession with connectivity.

If I have five free minutes at work, waiting for a phone call or finishing lunch, I immediately connect to my favorite people and topics on the internet.

I always say I had been waiting for this my whole life, and people think I’m trying to say that I am Al Gore and that I invented the internet. I’m usually at a loss to describe what I mean, but I have finally thought of a good example.

When I was five or six, He-Man toys were all the rage. However, being the equal opportunity battle coordinator I was, I also wanted to have She-Ra toys to fill out the gender ratio. I had nearly every He-Man toy, and I know for a fact that I had every single She-Ra. Except for one.

Spinnerella. She was one of the last of the series to be released, with the result being She-Ra didn’t take up all that much shelf-space in the action figures department anymore. My mother and I were intent on finding her – we had just found her net-tossing friend and, my personal favorite, Entraptra and Perfuma. Just one more She-Ra to make my fantasy world complete.

To this day I’ve never seen that damn toy in person. We went to every toy store in the Greater Philadelphia area to look. Were we supposed to cross state lines? Call stores around the country? In 1986, how were we to coordinate our search?

In my tiny, five-year-old mind, I remember thinking how silly it was that I couldn’t find that one toy. It obviously existed. Knowing what I know now about action figures, I’d wager to say that my spinning friend may have been short-shipped, or may have appeared with lower frequency in each case. However, at the time, I just knew they were out there somewhere, and couldn’t get over the mystery of why they had to be so damned hard to find. Surely there was a store that had too many of her that they couldn’t sell? Surely some girl had gotten two for her birthday, and had an extra?

I may not be Al Gore, but even then I knew there should… there had to be a way to connect to a larger group of people with the same interest. Some kind of a collective intelligence.

The internet came as no surprise.