Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Archives for June 2002

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Tiny blonde girl, six or seven maybe. The mic stand was as low as it would go and she kept twisting it back and forth trying to get it even lower, her eyes crossing every time it centered in her field of vision. On every chorus her father would glance at her and nod, and she would grab the microphone and softly sigh into it – recoiling after each phrase with her hand over her mouth, giggling. Half babbling child’s nonsense but half assured harmony, after three songs she was done and she crossed her eyes at us a final time.


Every open mic i’ve ever played has been a little different from the one before it, and this was no exception. Northeast Philadelphia has an eerie quality that it lends to its residents, world worn and weary as they are, so that you can read their lives off of their faces without even needed to hear the songs they had chosen for that purpose exactly. One man, in a faded blue shirt with strong biceps and a cracked and weathered guitar channeled Tom Waits with his slow gravelly delivery, not a surprise at all. A woman, her long blonde hair trailing her and a half apologetic smile on her face, playing self-consciously narrative songs on her full size piano. A thirteen year old girl dressed like a gypsy, holding herself as though she was twice her age until she took the stage behind another piano, this time to play swirling piano compositions she meekly announced that she had “written when she was eleven.” Not so long ago for her, the MC reminded us.

Gina and I must have presented them a conundrum, not betraying our world in our faces. First Gina, shocking them as she revealed her range note by note, first tickling the very highest and then descending to a nearly bass hum as she slowly circled the most basic chords in Bb. And me, i suppose, energetically bounding up and back from the microphone with each line, sticking out my tongue when i missed my riff, and making steady eye contact with anyone who was bobbing their head along. I can’t imagine that we telegraphed our moves, our voices, our emotions as well as the regulars, because our faces just don’t have that quality. Even the tiny blonde girl in her staring cross-eyed at the microphone in front of her face told me all i needed to know before she ever opened her mouth.

I don’t know if i can go back.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/06/85206127/

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How much do you need people?



This time last year i would have said that i didn’t need them at all. Just healed from the immediate wounds of a messy breakup, totally alienated from all of my theatre friends, and actively looking to sublet over the summer rather than stay in my cramped one room apartment. In those moments, i would have told you that i hardly needed anyone except for myself.


I would have been right … at the time. At the time i was so wrapped up in my own personal mythology that i didn’t have time to relate it back to more than one or two other people. I was fine – not at my happiest, but fine. But, in the year between then and now, everything changed. People who i didn’t see more than a handful of times a month are now my most reliable friends. I hadn’t even seen the three people i am most inclined to tell my secrets to once last June. I am in love with someone who i hadn’t even contemplated at the time. And, equally inexplicably, i am happy. Really fucking happy.

The only problem is that with these people there comes responsibilities. I have to find the time to see them, I have to keep their secrets, i have be there for them. And, i cannot burn the bridges i’ve built to them as carelessly as i blazed similar paths this time last year. I’ve gained stability but at the price of disposablity, and now that i’m standing up so strongly i’m loathe to sacrifice any of the balance they’ve provided.

Bleh, some people get cigarette breaks, i get blog breaks. Back to work.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/06/85197727/

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What do you think an eBusiness’s worst nightmare would be? Actually, i’ve been involved in two over the course of the last 24 hours so, by all means, let me share. First, you should know your worst nightmares by type. There’s the illusionary worst nightmares, which paralyze you in fear but have no bearing on your business. Then, there’s the Sisyphean nightmares that totally cripple a single aspect of your operation by rendering it useless. And, finally, a global nightmare – which is basically like living in some sort of eTwilight-Zone.

Yesterday was my first post-tonsil day back at work, and when i arrived i was greeted by a daunting task: someone had ordered over $2,000 of rock records, and it was my job to swiftly pull them and prepare them for shipping. Of course, swiftly is a relative concept when you have to individually track down over two hundred records, but i attacked the task with as much enthusiasm as i could muster. Meanwhile, my supervisors were at once ecstatic and suspicious of the fortuitous turn of events. But, everything checked out: the billing address matched the credit card, the shipping address matched the billing address, the credit card company enthusiastically approved the charge, and we even spoke to a real live person at the contact number provided with the order. How could it possibly be bogus?

Well, it was, and i can’t even explain it because no one’s taken the time to explain it to me, but after spending almost a solid eight-hour day getting this order together i’ll be spending another day tomorrow integrating it back into our inventory. And, while everyone’s pretty pissed about someone trying to scam us, no one actually spent more than a few minutes working on the actual order other than me, so i’m really pissed. Thus, the Sisyphean nightmare.


The specific nightmare was more dramatic, and even more annoying. Lindsay and i got to work this morning a whole twenty minutes before 9AM, hoping to spend a short day in the office. However, when i flicked the light switch in our room nothing happened. I found this to be especially strange because our lighting is florescent and copious … not the sort of thing that burns out. We chalked it up to random strangeness and headed into the warehouse, only to find it similarly cloaked in darkness. Just then, one of the owners grumped down the hallway and muttered to us “power’s out, working on it.”

Yes, the power. Out. Not in the whole building, mind you. Not in the hallways, or the kitchen, or in the office of our webdesign unit. Oh no. Just in our offices. Which meant no light for shelving, no orders being printed, no fans to blow cool air on the network servers, and no servers to be blown at. Our webpage is served externally, so we weren’t totally out of commission, but the eight of us that eventually turned up for work could only drink coffee and alphabetize in the hallway for four hours before our electrician glibly informed us that he fixed the problem (before being reamed out by the IT person in charge of our in-house servers).

So, if you thought internet outages and being out of ink were the worst of eBusiness’s worries, think again. And don’t think that anything that happens is easily fixed by specialized problem solvers like the ones in that never-ending IBM ad campaign, either. No multinational fortune 500 company can protect you from your electrician randomly flipping breakers, and no amount of fraud protection can protect you from bogus orders that aren’t really fraud.


And now, back to enjoying the ceiling lights.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/06/85180314/

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Three links that you’ve seen before.

  • 1. Registry Error is the continuation of Illegal Op, an absolutely fantastic e/n page circa 2000 that helped get me into the art of blogging. Headed up by Tony (formerly of Ahx), i am utterly thrilled to be hosting this page.
  • 2. To-cool-for-me indy music blog Buzzgrinder actually linked me back after i mentioned them on Saturday, calling me “a nearly twenty rock star aspiring Drexel student” and “a good blog.” Rock on.
  • 3. Amy attempts to be kidnapped and dismembered, but gets cool free prizes instead. Yo, next time bring me with you!

    https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/06/85177124/