Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

rabi

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So, i am going somewhere. Did you gather that much?


A few months ago (which seems like a much much longer time) Tori Amos released her North American tour schedule, and there was a Philadelphia date on it scheduled for today. I promptly emailed Rabi and Amy to inform them to leave the date open on their calendars. And then, as suddenly as the date was released it was suddenly struck from all of the tour schedules, leaving me with no way to see Tori. Rabi still had a chance, though, because Tori was playing in Boston at the beginning of her fall break. Surely Tori was reason enough for Rabi to get home in a timely fashion, and she’d have been responsible for enjoying her enough for herself plus Amy and I.


I lamented just that to Rabi via IM one evening only to be informed that it was actually Rabi’s mother on IM and that i’d be put into contact with Rabi shortly. And, shortly, Rabi appeared and asked if i’d like to come up to Boston to see Tori.

The next day we had plane tickets.


As for Tori tickets… through incredible circumstance and a tiny helping of my own concert-snobbery and incompetence, we are flying to Boston to see Tori without Tori tickets. I will add here that i have once before arrived at a Tori concert without tickets and promptly obtained fifth row seats, but i have no such illusion about this event. So, in nine hours (wow, still nine left…) i will be boarding a plane with a girl i’ve only ever met twice and flying to her city so that i can stay at her house so that we can (not) see Tori.


Nine hours and counting, no Tori tickets, no bags packed, and no pants. I’m definitely on pace for a relaxing weekend.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/10/6308788/

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Hi. Apparently my lap-dance was written off as random drunkeness (though i’ve heard it was quite good despite a lack of quality nudity), and i wound up sleeping all night last night while two of my favourite people to talk to were hanging out with Erika downstairs so that i could get up at 8am this morning and do laundry for three hours. Oh yeah, baby.


In other news, much graciousness to ShadowClear and Andy Dehnart for linking to me for no apparent reason other than that they find me interesting, and to Jean’s blog for continuously linking me even though i need Izabelle to translate for me half of the time.. And, also, i appreciate Rabi‘s adding my link to her new layout; rest assured that when i figure out who exactly i’m reading Rabi will still be very much on the list. I mean, you know my surfing habits are running on tilt when i couldn’t tell you what’s happening on in the lives of Benjy, Tom, Mollie, KevRock, Martha, Brendan, Eve, Lizzie, ErnDawg, Nancy, and all the rest.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/6015860/

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MapQuest claims that i walked less than ten miles in yesterday’s travels from my house to the corner of 5th and South and back, but i’m not prone to believe it; even if the distance is really that relatively tiny when being roved over by four wheels, it certainly feels like twice that if you walk every step of it and take in the sights and sounds along the way.

Yesterday saw me starting off at home and slowly slipping farther and farther into the city until i was past it and had to work my way back through… first to admissions and then retreating back to the theatre, next quickly into 30th street station and then down to and around and around the same block of Chinatown looking for a good vegetarian restaurant, unintentionally down to South Street, and finally back up to Rittenhouse Square – where everything stalled out for almost two hours as my world reduced down to two people and one tiny park bench that was put there for a woman who refused to sit still.

At some point in eighth grade we were filling out some redundant “getting to know you” survey, and one of the questions prompted us to fill in our favourite physical place to be. My partner in the exercise listed locations in Paris and in London, and others in the class named other cities and states. The only place i could think to write down was Rittenhouse, which is just a city-block sized square of green dotted with an indefinitely multiplying quantity of benches. The me of six years ago couldn’t even begin to fathom something better than a tiny piece of quiet in the middle of the knotted urban mess of my city, and i’m almost a little sad to say that today it still ranks implausibly high of my favourites places in the world. The fact of the matter is that i’ve hardly ever been to another place that would compete not only for character but for context, and in my limited experience the square still has impressive rank.


I was a little surprised that Rabi had never been there before, so i aimed our trip back towards the train station so that we would pass Rittenhouse Square. As the amount of Walnut street between us and the square quickly shrank i had this mental zero-g moment where i caught myself wondering why i was even bothering: i’ve spent less than three hours of my entire life there, i manage to not think about it for months or years at a time, and typically i just walk through it on my way to a bookstore. I suppose i just wanted to show her something that was inherently plugged into my concept of Philadelphia… moreso than any certain skyscraper or piece of history.

When Rabi failed to gasp at the tiny block of neat grass and wooden benches i was hardly surprised, but somewhere along the way i think she got the point. Of course, mileage obviously varies.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5724030/

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My mother can be very amusing when not taken in large amounts, but if you introduce any sort of negative energy in between us it just bounces back and forth and eventually we’re just like an amplifier overloading with feedback and blowing out. But, the inbetween bits are more side-splitting than ear-spitting.

Specifically, there was the two of us sitting on the floor in front of our stereo singing the harmony to “Band on the Run” (even though she’s been a snob about Wings for as long as i can remember) (and, also, us doing the flip-out vocals to “Oh, Darling” later in the car because, yes, we are Paul McCartney addicts), my showing her how to operate the self-checkout lane in Superfresh (and saying “Okay, rolls, *dramatic pause* this is where it gets a little complicated”), watching her trying to coax my cat out from under my bed because he forgets who i am (“It’s Peter, the one who used to squeeze you and chase you and torment you a lot. You remember him, don’t you?” “We’re trying to get him to come out, mom.”), her shocked (and amusing) exclamation of “And exactly how am i supposed to make breaded eggplant parmigiana without eggs?” when i asked if we could have Rabi over to eat something credibly Italian, and especially this introductory exchange:

Peter – [incredulously] When did you get so… blonde?

Mom – [blithely] And your hair is so dark! And curly! Did you dye it?

Peter – [sweetly] Nice to see that you’ve managed to forget what i look like while you were down the shore for two months. Did you at least bring me back some salt water taffy?

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5287048/

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Rabi just posted back-to back entries about her identity as it relates to the internet. I haven’t linked Rabi once within the last week (as is generally my habit), and i don’t want to clutter up her comments as badly as i did for some of her other identity posts, so i thought that i’d comment right here, in my own fashion.

When i first got my account on America Online it was just after Christmas; i was fourteen years old and i didn’t really understand what the internet represented past a slew of AOL chatrooms and WebCrawler, and my screen name was PeterPCM. Everything was fun and rosey, but as i slowly began to learn a little more about how things worked and about the places one’s email address could wind up i wasn’t entirely comfortable with my name being so up front. When i got off of AOL that summer my email address went through a brief transition, and by my fifteenth birthday that September i had signed on with Erols with the login Krisis.

By that time i was already deep into the continual construction of my first Geocities webpage, which started over five years ago – sometime during the summer after my Freshman year of highschool. That webpage and that identity stayed wholly separate from myself for years; because my email address has stayed so consistent over the years i wound up establishing an actual identity to go with it. There have people who i’ve met and lost touch with who never knew me as anything other than a nebulous androgynous entity named Krisis, and i loved it. After the first incarnation of my webpage finally ended i created a new webpage that was more contingent upon my identity due to my songs and voice appearing all over it, but people still wound up asking me if i was a girl or a boy after i sent them there to answer their own question. For all of my pre-college summer i posed as a female character in an online roleplaying game and never once had my identity questioned or revealled. I was content and secure.

However, in college my treasured anonymity began to accumulate chinks in its armour despite my solid facade. All during Freshmen year my web identity became more and more entwined with my presence on Shafted, where Krisis was my posting handle. I couldn’t very well be anonymous and androgynous while talking about my own life and friends, and so i let down my guard and finally owned up to things like my sex, age and location. I still admantly refused to use my first name while ‘in character’, which was evidenced by most Shafted posters not knowing what to call me when they actually met me in real life. And, otherwise, things stayed aproximately the same.

Everything changed three hundred and sixty days ago, when i plugged my ftp information into blogger and began to deluge the internet with an amplified version of my interior monologue. Immediately i ran into conflicts… i didn’t mention my name anywhere in the blog and my ‘about’ page was deliberately vague about my identity, but to have a ‘blog’ i needed to have an identity and a voice of my own. Slowy but surely i crept into my online presence and edged some of the pieces that had been there as placeholders for facets of my own personality that i had been protecting, and at the same time i held on to facets of my internet voice that were routed deeper in my own self than anyone would’ve ever suspected. Despite these changes, i was still resistant, only mentioning my name sparingly in the context of songwriting and in conversations about me until it was nearly 2001; a search of the archives mostly turns up unending praise of Peter Mulvey. Even as my name finally spread through the internet through things like SurvivorBlog2 and Amy‘s mentions of me i persisted in signed comments and emails with ‘Krisis’ rather than ‘peter’.

As of now i’m just confused. Comments at LYD, Wockerjabby, UnNarrator, and Crezappy all alternate my monkier with my actual name depending on what information the cookies on my computer decided to remember. Emails to the notify list get my name, but emails to Tori lists still get Krisis despite the fact that Outlook on my work computer lists “Peter” as my reply name. And, because i send so much email at work, my student address has been the one most ‘internet people’ i talk to are seeing rather than my alias name.

Where have i wound up? Full circle from the start, i suppose, seeing as an email from me typically reads as From: “Peter [pcm22]” (which isn’t a far cry from “PeterPCM”). My “identity” is another matter entirely… more than four years playing the role of someone who wasn’t quite myself has left a lasting impression on my narrative voice on the internet whether i like it or not. Since i stopped writing fiction around when my first webpage saw its prime i literally have a gap in my personally recorded narratives where the only ones i wrote were for the internet – meaning that my internet voice literally usurped my typical one on the whole in my writing. In fact, now it even reaches far into term papers, official letters, and reports at the office.

Admittedly, it still feels weird sometimes to talk about my hair or my weight or to appear on my webcam, but i think at this point i have irrevocably entangled myself with whoever i had become in the same way what that i had become hijacked my own written communications. So, now my split personalities have been reigned back in to one manageable boy, and i’m left wondering what this newly merged boy’s real voice is on this log … the frantically paced, parenthetically snarking, self-derisive narrator of a year ago – or this newfound one complete with at-length reflections, somewhat credible grammar and syntax, and through-composed essays.

I suppose part of the fun of reading me must be watching me try to decide. Or, at least, part of the fun of writing me certainly is.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5182482/