Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

mom

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I’ve never found very much of my music collection to be too implicitly sexy; sure, certain songs have their own sex appeal and others somehow took on one over the years, but what it comes down to is that i frankly don’t have a lot of albums that i would leave on while making out. Of course, for the longest time my rules of album buying went something like “there has to be a girl or an acoustic guitar, and both if i’m really going to enjoy it.” And, while this still is the most ultimate truth in my hunt for new music, it is no longer my sole critera for purchase, and it’s because of this that i feel like i own some music that’s a wee bit sexy now.

The crux of it is that the female voice doesn’t have a scandalous effect on me. Tori Amos sings some sexy songs, Elastica has one about feeling one’s back on the hood of a car, and Garbage has a web of darkly electric songs that are simply churning with sexual energy. That’s all well and good, but i’m compelled to listen to them rather than have it on the score of my lovelife. These songs are soundtrack music rather than scores… they talk about the movie but they don’t always click with the emotional content of the scenes themselves. However, today i realized that i do have the elements of the score lurking in my music collection (although theoretically half of it would come from hers), and it’s all because of the effects of a single girl.

We never kissed. Not once. Not even goodbye. Such was my relationship with Anastasia. However, what we did do a lot of was going to the movies and lying on her floor on Sunday afternoons arguing about music; she had the same sort of exception to women singers that i did to men, only really harbouring a great love for Tori Amos, Bjork, and Heather Nova. Her soft-spot was for men… and not aggressively loud alternative men, but squeaky or thoughtful or nerdy men: Soul Coughing, Ben Folds Five, Elliott Smith, Evan Dando, Get Up Kids, and a whole raft of even more indy rock guys whose albums i know on sight but not by name. And, so, we’d sit on her floor and we’d argue about why i didn’t like any of those bands and why she should really buy an Ani DiFranco album (which she eventually did, with Dilate).

Anastasia and i had a falling out near the end of Senior Year when the mess of applying to college was over and i felt as though i could actually talk to my old friends again. It was too late for my record collection, though, as a tiny kernel of the future had already taken root; on a total whim i had bought the just-released Keep it Like a Secret by one of her favourite bands, Built to Spill. I knew that i liked them a little, but i saw it and it was $13 and suddenly i needed it. But, when i got home it laid untouched on my desk in it’s perfect cellophane wrapped sitting on top of a brown bag containing its receipt. I wasn’t going to open it … it was simply symbolic of my lost relationship (and lack thereof) with Anastasia and there was no reason for me to open it let alone to buy it to begin with.

And, while i was at school the next day, my mother walked into my room for the first time in weeks, ostensibly to take out the trash, and she threw out the empty brown bag i had sitting on my desk. Afterwards it was inevitable – i could scream at my mother all i wanted to, but that album was a part of my collection as much as it was a part of hers, and i couldn’t not listen to it. So, in into the cd-changer it went.

It seemed so harmless at the time, just one happy springtime record in my collection of disappointed and jilted women, but the damage was done. I listened to it with my windows open, i put it on during showers, and i played it while working on my webgame. Built to Spill was like a pot slowly boiling all through my Freshman year; an album i would return to at the drop of a dime. And, suddenly, with this school year came restlessness and disposable income, and suddenly i was coming home with Ben Folds Five and Elliott Smith and even striking out on my own to find things she would like, like Deathcab for Cutie.

Today i was trolling through the used section at AKA Music and i bought, among other things, the Matador Records 10th Anniversary 3 disc set. The first song on the first record is “Stereo” by Pavement, which is a sort of innocently thumping bass groove with a nearly-spoken almost unattentive vocal that trips its way through the song unselfconsciously as it accents and squeaks and turns. And, somehow, to me the geek sound of an indy rock voice paired with at once carefully crafted and lo-fi instrumentation is a seductive sound to me.


There is a Built to Spill album called “There’s Nothing Wrong With Love,” and the cliche of the title mocks the a-typical and affecting songs therein. I remember that once we were lying on her floor talking and she told me how Ben Folds loves Built to Spill and how they both do “Twin Falls Idaho” and how the song after that on the Spill disc mentions David Bowie and at some point while i was sitting there nodding along and listening attentively my brain decided that the upward curl of an untrained mail falsetto or the persistent movement of a band with just a lead or bass guitar rather than a rhythm guitar was an attractive sound to me. Men have a way of writing about girls and sex that women obviously don’t, and while it’s not always the most artful thing in the world when compared to one of my Tori Amos cds, i understand when Ben Gibbard says things like “i hung my favorite shirt on the floorboard, wrinkled up from pulling pushing and tasting tasting” because even though the lyric is obvious, the effect the girl had on him is inherent to the lyric more than the lyric is demonstrative of it. Or,… i don’t know, maybe my brain is just forever trained to create sexual tension around Anastasia’s sort of music the same way i can get whiplash if someone walks past me smelling of Happy


The funny thing is that she’s in New York or Boston now because she got into college a year early and is this amazing artist and has all sorts of direction and i’m still sitting here in Philly listening to her sort of records as if she’s ever going to make it onto my top-five breakups list just because she’s influenced at least one song on every relationship mix tape i’ll ever make while in college. In a way she transcends my hardly populated list of heart-breaks because we never happened, so that in my memory i can keep us lying on her floor together perfect and separate forever without any tangles to comb out. So, here i am listening to Pavement and wondering if it could really underscore a perfect kiss. I wonder if, hundreds of miles away from here, the thought ever crosses her mind while she’s listening to Dilate.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5056420/

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My mother breezes through the office on the way to the seashore and she is famous. Administrative assistants fawn over her. Tour guides smile politely. I understand people being ungodly nice to my family as if they actually liked me when i’m there to witness it, but the fact that they did it while i was safely hidden away in the bookstore makes me think people here actually like me. She was gone in a flash-bang of blonde-streaked hair and bandages on her arm before i could really talk to her much, and i came back to my office to find this sitting on my chair.
Naturally i assumed that it was provided by my mother… with phrases like “Others find it difficult to accept your domineering and, at times, argumentative manner” that fit well with our generally contentious yet friendly relationship (“there is little demonstration of sentiment, appreciation, sympathy, or encouragement”). However, the piece of paper in question was placed not by mommy-dearest but by Izabelle, fellow admissions employee and all-around partner in crime.

Now, i’m typically the most critically skeptic person i know about these personality indicators, but i think there’s something to this one only because of the combination of my first and middle names. Peter apparently predisposes me to be “not inclined to merge [my] opinions and viewpoints with others” and to be “invariably quite direct and candid, and lacks the moderating tone of tact” (in highschool i was known as the boy who wholly was lacking tact). I find it “difficult to find the right words.”

Right. Which is why i talk so fucking much.

Meanwhile, the more interesting determination is the flavouring given by my middle name: “Your pleasant manner attracts people to you with their problems and you are capable of offering practical advice, though you would probably not follow such advice yourself.” Right. The thing is, the majority of the names i look up have summaries that obviously aren’t applicable to the people they represent in my life, and a quick browse through the site reveals the same sentences used in combinations again and again in different opposite seeming names. So, it just happened to get the combo right in a way that it really struck me. That’s how scam-artists work (they want you to pay them for a more exact description).

Oh, yeah, and “weaknesses in the health caused by [your] name center in the head.” Heh.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/07/4346382/

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There’s a whole story that goes along with this post but this post is a story in and of itself, so maybe i’ll tell the other part some other time. Anyhow, here is the crux of it: We have 20 high school guidance counselors from up and and down the East Coast staying with us here at Drexel while they receive training from the National Institute of Technology. Seeing as how i work in the admissions office and that i’m (apparently) some sort of secret weapon with my disarming naivité and big city customs, i’ve been deployed repeatedly to help out these counselors (with the hope, i would suppose, that they’ll want their students to apply to Drexel in the future so that they can be as jittery and disarming as i am).

My position as designated schmoozer has left me with ample time to sit back and observe the N.I.T. instructors at work and in their own conversations, and i have to say that their technical merit is nearly as uninspiring as their name. The two most intense technical conversations i’ve personally eavesdropped were one about using Mailing Lists effectively and another about setting up an FTP server hub, both of which i understood very simply (hell, i eat that shit for lunch. After all, i am a regular reader of Linkstew and Fury). As for their work, they’re training the counselors in basic internet applications using IE, Netscape, and Powerpoint, and therein lies my problem with this whole charade of technological advancement.


At a reception for the counselors last night more than one of them remarked to me that they had spent time at similar trainings in the mid-90’s, but that technology had obviously advanced so much since then that they needed to train again. While this is true, i began using the internet in the mid-90’s at the most basic entry-level without a hint of instruction and now i’m certainly able to do anything they’re being taught this week at Drexel. So, where’s the difference? Don’t say that it’s because i’m young and because this is a hobby, because we all know urban professionals who’ve picked up the same ‘net fluency on the job over the last half decade. The problem, and the difference, lies in the fact that they’re being trained on application use instead of technology use.

The best example i can give is that in learning how to design a simple webpage for their counseling department to have a mailinglist signup on, they were all instructed to do so with Netscape Composer. When it came time to inform the counselors that they could change the colors of their background and their links, the counselors were shown the wonders of the ‘Fonts and Colors’ menu – which they ooh-ed and ahh-ed at enough to make me slightly naseous.

Now, i’ll be the last person to propose that we teach all of the counselors raw HTML coding from their first day on the job, but the flaw here is inherent in the design. They’re learning page construction on Netscape4.x, which is already obsolete, and they’re barely even learning how to change link colors. They have no concept of what’s going on behind the words and colors and italics of their page, and they are being trained not to care. This training will be out of date by the end of this year; had the instructors instead taken an extra thirty minutes to explain the tag and hexidecimal color values, the training would last them for nearly another half decade (not to mention the fact that really everyone uses style-sheets for color now, and that style sheets are dead-simple to learn from scratch when you don’t have a misunderstanding of HTML to get in your way and that they control a hell of a lot more than just color). So, these counselors are essentially paying money for airline tickets and “continuing education credits” to get barely fluent in software that is barely considered competetive, with the instructors knowing full well that they’ll have to run a new training session in another year or two when Netscape4 is finally put out to pasture as it should have been earlier this year.

Right. Stuff like this annoys me. When i taught my mother the rudiments of how to use her computer, i made sure not to root them in a single program suite. I taught her how to save files and copy and paste in something as simple as NotePad, and she scaled those skills to Microsoft Works and Netscape without batting her eyes. Similarly, in Netscape i taught her what to do rather than how to do it so she could figure it out on her own in IE if she ever switched over, and while she certainly doesn’t have her own subdomain of Uprush i’d like to think that she is savvy enough and well-prepared enough that she could learn PowerPoint or Composer in a fourth of the time these counselors are taking (neverminding how long it would take them if they were being taught the right way).

By far the worst part of this is that i keep schmoozing the instructors and they smile patronizingly at me when really their company’s website isn’t even coded as tightly as this shoddy little adventure held together in CSS, PHP, duct tape, and arcane prayers to the gods of blog. But, they all carry cell phones and wear business-casual shorts and have funny little conversations with each other about “downloading-to-floppy” and “maximizing user potential” and it’s all i can do not to bust up laughing.

sigh. No wonder i’m not an IST major; i couldn’t put up with all the bullshit.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/4287276/

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(i’ll spell check it tomorrow, i promise. for now just wince along and enjoy the only mistakes i made were proper nouns, so spell check was usless. feel free to keep wincing)

where to begin, where to begin

i think, perhaps, my mother could be turning into some sort of closeted pill popping addict. Nothing serious though… nothing a psychiatrist would provide (aside #4: could, should, whichever…). She’s down the shore right now, and i’m feeding our cat. Except for, “down the shore” definitely means something like “meeting my dealer to score some really good shit.”

Good shit being strong antibiotics, and maybe some cough syrup laced with codeine.

However, “feeding the cat” definitely only means feeding the cat.

Our household has always been known to hoard prescription medication, and my mother getting a nursing degree only made things worse. What can i say, we enjoy being well prepared. However, when i just hit the medicine cabinet for some Benadryl because i can’t even see straight enough to work the teevee remote (aside #6: yet, i can still type) i found myself wading in the midst of what has to be fifty bottles of medication. Fifty! Tiny blue pills, shiny green pills, pills that rat-a-tat-tat in their brown glass bottles, purple pills that look for the life of me a lot like Starburst. And that isn’t even counting herbal supplements. The entire counter below the cabinet is all charcoal and cell salts and et cetera.

(Aside #1: i forgot my bestest truth on my list of truths and lies. when i was five i overdosed on cell salts because i thought they tasted like vanilla. i was at my dad’s place which in my memory seems as though it was desperately hanging onto the seventies, and i opened the lid because nothing was childproofed back then and they all just slid out onto the glass table in an avalanche of melt-in-your-mouth goodness and i wondered how many i could fit under my tongue all at once.)

I haven’t fed the cat yet. Any minute now.

We really do live in a culture of the quick fix subscription to things: medication, magazines, cable teevee. I’m currently reading Survivor by Chuck Pal-something-Fight-Club-niuk, and it seems to be all about putting patches on things that aren’t really fixable. So far. Chuck loves to write about criminally fucked up men and the strange alluring women who motivate their plots – and he definitely could do worse. (Aside #2: Where is my strange & alluring plot motivator? All of his seem like they’re written for Helena Bonham Carter, or a very strung-out Angelina Jolie after all this Tomb Raider hype blows over. But, what am i saying, i had my plot motivator and this is my novel. Silly boy.). Survivor doesn’t beat my last solid read-through Plan B, but it has Club beat hands down. The guy is gunning to be the next Vonnegut, and how many other authors do you read that sit in puddles of their own blood and urine for fun and leisure?

Yeah, certainly not this one. Or, at least, i tend not to immortalize my tales of blood and urine by posting them to the internet. My face feels like it’s melting but that’s just my allergies, but this is so incredibly bad that i can’t even seem to focus on anything for very long and i really need that benadryl and at least my mom could hoard something fun like opium or something, but no, it’s all bladder supplements and pain relievers. Damn you, St. John’s Wort… damn you to hell.

(Aside #3: This whole aside thing is rather clumsy, but all my html purist friends complain if i make a link with a title-tag that shows my aside but then the link leads nowhere. I might have to start using the infamous footnote, because my parenthetical comments are really turning into blogs of their own. but, i digress for now…)

This house is a funny empty thing. Me and the cat, and he doesn’t seem to like me so much right now despite me being the keeper of the can opener. We have mirrors on either side of my living room and i often just have the urge to stand in the middle of the two totally naked just to see my infinite naked images stretching into eternity as the mirrors echo and echo themselves. This again goes back to the fact that i love to exhibit, but i also love to perfect, so in the end i’ll wind up just like radiohead, crafting until the product becomes obscured. Perfectionist exhibitionists all turn out narcissists ’cause they have to listen to themselves so much to get it right.

So, anyhow, the point is that i could never do an all-nude review, but i definitely should have a webcam. But, in the absence of that, i could honestly just pound my fist into the wall until it shattered (aside #5: my fist, that is) into a thousand shards and no one would ever hear or know or anything. I started to do it because it seemed like a way to pass the time, but after a while my hand started to vaguely ache and the wall seemed somewhat unfazed and the whole ordeal reminded me of when Selina would do the same thing so i stopped and want back to staring into our unassuming little medicine cabinet.

This is so different from my apartment, where all sorts of little noises creep in from room to room and from floor to ceiling. My apartment bleeds living human noises from corner to floorboard. Here i don’t have any noise with me. It’s just these clackity keys clacking away, and the cat shuffling up and down the stairs trying not to let me notice him, and silence upon silence upon silence. Where to begin?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/06/3990465/

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The sky is so very grey that i feel like it’s drowning out all the reds and oranges in my personality and just leaving me calm with layers of blue and purple with maybe just a peak of yellow underneath. Or, maybe i just didn’t get quite enough sleep last night and am looking for an excuse to be low-key. Life is moving by very quickly as of late and i’m just trying to put in an appearance in every day and hour so i can at least say i was in on it even though it will be a blur in my memory.

I seem to be performing in a bar on campus tonight for an hour but i couldn’t explain to you how that happened if you were to ask me so you probably shouldn’t. I’ll get a weekly invite if i do well with the patrons this week and next, so if you have id (that’s identification, not the thing that hides underneath the ego and the superego and makes you all primal and stuff) you should come (Buffalo Bill’s, 35th and Lancaster, $5 cover, i’m on near 11pm). Also, my beloved Treble Makers are singing at the Drexel a capella show Saturday @ 4pm in Mandell Theatre, and they’re much cooler than i am even after you allow for the fact that there’s 10 of them and just the 1 of me. But, enough advertisement.

If one thinks ahead (i know, it’s frightening) to me actually being asked to show up with my guitar on a weekly basis, one would realize i’ll eventually have to get up off my ass and learn some new cover songs to play. In the last 24 hours i happen to have learned three, but that’s mostly because i just got an Ani DiFranco guitar book in my teeny metal mailbox and so now i am in study to eventually have an entire set just of Ani DiFranco songs (as if anyone can really tell the difference). I’ll definitely be Trioing my new covers this weekend, so keep an ear out for them. Should be interesting.

In a tangent tangentially related to my slow but sure musical growth and exploration, Gina seems to be moving into the apartment directly above mine for the summer (after which point i’m probably moving out). The ramifications of having Gina and I stacked one on top of the other with all of our various guitars and cds and things are rather exciting (probably more like terrifying to our neighbors), and life should definitely get more interesting. Or maybe just louder. We shall see. But, speaking of vertical neighbors, my downstairs neighbor randomly showed up at my door last night while my mother was fussing over my newly installed air conditioner, and a strange and uneasy conversation ensued. I have never been one to have guests over, especially on zero notice, so my entire third of the conversation seemed to be geared at getting one or more of us to exit the apartment. It’s not that i’m unfriendly, i’m just not really used to people being in my space. But, downstairs neighbor is very sweet and she likes to listen to me through the ceiling, so i won’t begrudge her some time standing on my threshold talking about where to get good 2for1 deals on whole frozen chickens with my mother.

Wow, that post got much more literal as it went along.

Even the music i brought with me to work today is sorta greyish sounding, and it’s all new so it’s just flying past my ears as i try to absorb some little pieces of it. But, i think i come here to actually work, as odd as that might sound, so i’m off for now, into the grey. Wish me luck.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/05/3673273/