Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
by krisis
And, of course, as soon as i get back to my apartment i immediately feel sick. I know it’s because of all the negative energy i’ve been producing… because i always drop my guard mentally and immunologically whenever i’m feeling mean. So, now i have to suffer through the rest of my vacation sick. Isn’t this nice? First i was marooned in florida, then i was locked at home with my awful old computer, and now i’m sick (and still working every day this week). Oh boy.
by krisis
Being stuck at home now isn’t really as bad as it was at any point last year, because now i have my apartment to retreat to. I mean… if i truly had some huge panic attack and needed to get out of the house, i could just catch a cab to my apartment. That’s my safe thought… knowing that i have the keys and that i can run away at any time.
by krisis
The sky is a sort of pinkish blue. It’s funny how the fade from one to the other occurs; once i was trying to paint a tiny inch or two of horizon onto an acrylic piece i was working on for art class and it just wound up as this sloppy red-white-and-blue mess. But the sky right now … defies the color spectrum to define it. It isn’t so much violet in the middle as much as the last strands of pink are reaching upwards to entangle themselves with the trailing fingers of the blue.
Obscuring my open sky view is the chunky concrete side of a row home. I can see the evening sky through a break in the the row of houses where one house had been years ago. The empty space is defined by the utterly flat wall of the neighboring home on which you can see the faint outlines of rooms and stairs. Construction amazes me; sure, its not especially hard to build up a single house from the ground up, but to then go back into its empty frame to install electricity and water and heat and everything of the sort amazes me. They built a new dormitory on 32nd street over the summer, and i watched it grow from the ground up until my friends moved into it the day before classes began. Even after having watching it wind its way up i still don’t really understand how it was possible… there’s a building there where once there wasn’t one.
Scale really amazes me. The same way the building of a dormitory seems staggering in comparison to a single row-home that no long exists, distance awes me. I can walk the width of the entire city in a day, and in a car i could drive nearly across the entire state of Pennsylvania. There’s a girl who came to Drexel this fall from Los Angeles, and the space between here and her home is hard for me to grasp. Sure, it’s all tucked safely within the boundaries of the United States, but coming from L.A to Philadelphia to go to school is nearly the same as coming from England. That space … i can’t measure it realistically in footsteps or city blocks or even miles. The idea of a mile loses its coherence when presented in such quantity. Is it just 2000 times farther away than the coffee shop is from me? Maybe, but does that help me to understand it any better? Distance is measured more easily in what comes inbetween: Pennsylvania Dutchland, and Chicago, and endless fields of grain, and mountainous states with less population than Philadelphia, and the San Andreas Fault. Or, maybe i’ve got my geography mixed up.
In about 24 hours i’m boarding a plane to Florida. The distance isn’t as great, but it’s still a bit stunning … i’ll be passing over friends in at least three different states that i’ve never even been to on my way there. It’s a three hour flight, yet it takes six hours to drive from my destination to DisneyWorld in Orlando. I used to have to use mnemonic device to remember if it was Disney Land and World. It’s funny what will stick out in your memory after years of relative obscurity.
I haven’t been in the air since i was in 8th grade. Since then… well, i’m obviously pretty different. I don’t know how airplanes make me feel anymore; before they were a joy and the turbulence was better than any rollercoaster i’d find in Florida. Now rollercoasters make me a little bit nervous, and i’ve known the detached fascination and horror of watching the news report the crash of a plane – knowing all along that i just lost the possibility of having hundreds of conversations i had been planning on having after the summer was over.
All of that is just the distance between me then and me now. It’s hard to really comprehend the difference six years can make in a person, whether it be in days or weeks or seconds. But, you can measure it by the landmarks left on my life. At least that way it isn’t such a daunting task. To be sure, it’s been a long while since i last took to the sky, but i’m still the same person – and i’ll be boarding a plane that’ll tear into that not-so-violet evening sky in 24 hours.
by krisis
Matt and I just cleaned. The whole process is really an exercise in futility because i know for a definite fact that i have more stuff than we have room to put it. Despite having thrown out two trash bags worth of discarded handouts and totally reorganizing my bookshelf the overwhelming lack of space remains an inescapable fact of my life. It’s likely that i could live in an apartment where all the walls were lined with shelves and i still would have a pile of something on the floor. However, it would be a smallish pile of something unimportant, which is why shelves turn me on so much.
Semi-pornographic obsessions with furniture aside, the apartment is clean right now. Clean. Saving me from celebrating in any fashion (perhaps through sleep?) there’s also easily my weight’s worth of miscellany covering the whole of my bed, which i’ll obviously have to displace in order to sleep tonght. I have repeatedly bemoaned my unescapable bulk of possessions, but i haven’t ever addressed why i own what i own. Frankly, i’m obsessed with material things; I wish i could just have some massively easy catchall mechanism to organize every little scrap of paper and ball of fluff that i want to keep. Sadly there is no mechanism available to me that would do just that, and i’m not nearly organized enough to be able to make good use of it.
My material possessions fall into three categories: things i use or might use, thinks i need or might need, and things i can’t throw out. The first category includes things like my entire cd, book, and comic book collections, which i could easily condense down so that they would fit onto my shelf space (but what would be the fun of that?). The second category includes clothing, half of which just endlessly sits in my drawers hopelessly relegated to being the bottom layer (and with no rhyme or reason, so that some of my favourite clothes fall out of rotation for months at a time because they were the first ones i folded after doing the wash). The third category features the aforementioned balls of fluff and also includes paperclips, half used pencils, and playbills from every play i’ve been a part of or seen. I generally wouldn’t mind throwing out everything that fits into this category, but generally i’m afraid to because all of it is is marginally useful or important in that way where it’s never actually useful or important.
Today fit into that last category, by the way. And i can’t even end it by going to sleep on my own damned bed.
by krisis
Things that make me happy right now: Mac&Cheese (that doesn’t require milk or butter); my crappy stereo (and its five disc changer); my (unexpected) $50 bonus (for multiple record sales days at the shop); not living in a dormitory (and not worrying about getting kicked out for break); my plane tickets to florida (and all of the food that will be bought for me by my relatives there).