Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

q.o.d.

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I’m still on SurvivorBlog2, as improbable as that might seem. All of my net-friends loudly proclaimed that i’d get booted fast when they first found out that i was a contestant, though i don’t recall any of them qualifying their statement with any reasoning. It’s an odd thing,… all the fun dynamics of a group log but with the subtle undercurrent of competition for attention and favour. I actually quite like it. I managed to win immunity from voting all this past week, first with a lovely speech i made in ra/mp3, and then by being the least popular logger still on our virtual slice of the outback. That least popular bit surprised me at first, but it didn’t burn at all; i open up as much as any of the other posters, but i’m not around as much and i’m just not as quirky.

I’ve yet to have a vote against me, but since i was protected for a whole week for all i know i could be voted off by everyone tomorrow. In a way i want to stay around, but i see how much this page is suffering. Yes, i run to them with the hottest sparkling shards of my life, and this is just the bits that fall through the proverbial cracks. For a while the many hits i was drawing from Sblog2 related links subsidized the slow decline of you all (my actual readers), but now it’s getting a bit out of hand. It’s true that i needed some kind of break from this (as was evident from my mean-spirited and belaboured posts in early January), but i never intended to let it shrivel up and die.

When Blogger adds this week’s archive to the page, it’ll be the 26th one; i’ve been doing this for half a year now. Time fools me the same way that physical scale does. This school year seems to be dragging on forever, but it’s a whole month shy of how long i’ve been blogging and that seems like just a tiny dent in the whole of my life. I’ve been rehearsing Good Woman of Setzuan for a month now, and there’s just under a month left. The month that’s passed seems like it stretches back infinitely far, and the one to come feels as if it’s going to evaporate before me, leaving my grasping for my lines tomorrow night under the spotlight.

Coincidentally, today marks the month anniversary of something else too. If you read closely i think you might know what. I’m sorry that i haven’t been as omnipresent on here as i’ve been in the past, but it’s just the way things go. Maybe, finally, my life has gotten up enough momentum of its own that this can’t be just a continuously updated daily log of boredom. Maybe now i’m bringing back the tiny shiny gems of experience i find during the course of each day. Or maybe i find myself a bit too important for my own good. Who knows. Love ya, and i’m off to work on lines so that the spotlight doesn’t catch me by surprise.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2333919/

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I read too fast for my own damned good. Yesterday i decided to go on a smallish shopping spree with my credit card to see how close i could get to maxing it out without being rejected from purchasing something. In the madness, i hit Borders and picked up Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon and a sweet oversized edition of Silence of the Lambs. I’m not sure what suddenly spurred this in me, but recently my girlfriend’s roommate has been powering through Lambs, and i always meant to read it, and i sorta want to go see Hannible. So, i suppose the plan was to get through the two of them soon enough to buy a non-movie edition of Hannibal to read before i go see the flick in a weekend or two. Or, as it turns out, maybe this weekend.

First of all, you have to understand my unholy hatred of movie-edition paperbacks. I hate them. Hate them. While having the image of a main character to aid me in visualization is always helpful, i’ve endured too many ugly movie-photos like the ones on the covers of The Beach or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, both of which previously featured superb cover work. Even worse, the new edition of Hannibal doesn’t even use the creepy zombie-like picture of Anthony Hopkins from the movie posters – instead it substitutes some awful and nearly amusing picture of him preening with a large straw hat on. It isn’t too threatening.

Borders had two copies of the non-movie edition, but i didn’t want to get ahead of myself. Paperbacks cost quite a lot now ($8 for a paperback? Does anyone else miss the 90’s yet?), and i didn’t want to sink nearly $30 into three books that i might not even like. So, i bought Red Dragon so i could finally read it & Silence of the Lambs, which looks nice if nothing else. I finished the dense 450 page Dragon in under 20 hours of intermittent reading; started around 4pm yesterday and completed noon today with rehearsal, sleep, and class coming inbetween. I was proud of myself. I’ve been known to finish 500 page books in well under eight hours in the past, but i tend to lose my momentum when i don’t read a large book all in a single sitting.

So far my impression is that Thomas Harris is a tremendous writer but a nearly equally inconsistent author who relies on too many plot devices and explicit histories in the place of actual suspense and horror. Much as in the movie of Silence of the Lambs, where you become excited by the chase rather than the whodunnit, this novel reveals the killer early on and becomes a book as much about him as about the protagonist (who’s a much better character). The protagonist is vivid, logical, and entangles himself and the reader frighteningly deep into each murder. On the other hand, the killer’s history is boring, contrived, evokes little pity, and surprisingly does nearly nothing to set the reader up for his near schizophrenic behaviour near the end of the novel. In fact, the book took a downturn as soon as it dropped the pretense and mainly focused on the murderer. And, i’ll never look at dentures the same way again.

Lambs is 350 pages in super-oversized soft-cover format, and it looks to be a bit more firmly put-together than Dragon. And, of course, it has a lot more of Hannibal Lecter in it. One thing i’ll hand to Harris as an author is that he crafted the ultimate chiller of a villain in Hannibal; in his new forward to the first novel he portrays the writing of Lecter’s first scene as though he viewed it from a corner where he was huddled in fear the entire time, fending off the urge to bolt out the door as well as the cackling of other inmates in the asylum. His description of writing Hannibal seems apropos, because i would hardly expect someone to deliberately conjure this sort of killer from the depths of their own imagination. A monster is hard to create, and much easier to develop in small strides as he crawls into the cracks of your psyche and makes you scared to even write him. Lecter definitely had that effect on his author, and now i can hardly wait to get Silence of the Lambs out of the way so i can run back to Borders tomorrow to buy a lovely copy of Hannibal.


Who knows, i might even wind up seeing it this weekend…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2296596/

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Eek…. i’m so used to hating Valentine’s Day and not buying anything for anyone that i sorta forget that i can actually take part in the greeting card industry’s favourite holiday after Christmas. I mean… i recognize its pointlessness in the same way i blow off Mother’s Day every year; either i’m appreciating my mother year ’round or the one day isn’t going to make much of a difference. However, i’ve always had a mother, but having a Valentine is an entirely new phenomenon. I’ll have to hit a Hallmark today when i go shopping…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2281300/

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I’ve always wanted to date someone with their own life, and their own problems and issues. Thinking about some of the people i’ve really crushed upon in the last few years, i don’t know if any of them had enough issues for me. It’s not as though i want to find someone with problems so i can solve them, or feel better about myself, but i think i tend to reduce myself to a much more boring person when i’m faced with someone who is extremely “normal.” And boring isn’t attractive.


Of course, liking someone with issues is a challenge unto itself. You immediately volunteer yourself, either as an answer or a crutch or a balm. Remove yourself from the situation and its like ripping the scab off of a fresh wound – everything looks even bloodier and worse than it did before you arrived on the scene.

I’m an optimist, and i like to think that there’s a middle ground. Isn’t knowing someone really cares about you enough of a crutch when you’re depressed? I always thought it would be, but maybe it was just an illusion. If that’s the case, maybe i should go back to liking boring girls, because i don’t know if i’m ready to play the daily role of a fix to someone’s addictions.

Wow, i really mixed some metaphors in there, didn’t i?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2225202/

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I never blog from my girlfriend’s place, so she has no idea where my page is (though it’s rather easy to find via search engines). While this means less updates for the page, it also means i can bitch about her without fear of retribution :p … not that i fear retribution or anything, but god knows i’ve had issues with not being able to talk about my friends before because they snoop around, so i like the separation i’ve managed to establish.


Okay, so, as you might have gathered, i go over to her place a lot. A lot. There has only been a single day in the last 3 weeks where we saw absolutely nothing of each other. I’m fine with this, because i really don’t mind being intense or clingy or any of that stuff, but sometimes i just want to sit here. I like to sit here. My computer is here. my music is here. My bass is here.


This is apparently a problem, because she has fixed it in her head that i’m coming over when i’m obviously sitting here with a horrible head cold just wanting to ache all by my lonesome. I am a highly rational person, and as such i expect to not want to be near other people when i’m sick – because i don’t want to infect them and because i feel slimy. So, i am staying here.


In case you were wondering, my declaration of staying here caught me a lot of shit because she’s sicker and wants me to keep her company, but she needs to learn how to deal with that. While i would love to be with her 24/7 every day, i would also like to live my own life 24/7 every day, and i can’t totally sacrifice one for the other so they’ll have to find a middle ground. Maybe i’m supposed to give up the comfort of my own apartment so i can be trapped in her tiny dorm room every night, and maybe the fact that i don’t want to do that makes me less mature than she thought i was. Or, maybe she’s supposed to compromise and come here every so often. What i do know is that I am not a child’s toy that can be possessed, and sometimes i like to sleep in my own damned bed.


And that’s as much as you’re gonna hear about my girlfriend for a while.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/02/2225034/