Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

Year 02

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I did not prepare a speech.

Today we overslept for work. Every time one of us stirred enough to wake the other she would ask “It’s not too late to go in yet, is it?” Not waiting for an answer, she would hit snooze again.


I couldn’t tell you the last Monday that i actually made it in to work. Hours later we drove to the mall, ostensibly to shop for gifts but really just to buy a quart of Ben & Jerry’s. It almost melted on the way home, balanced on my knee in front of the air conditioning vent. As she was putting it in the freezer i think she was talking to me, but i wandered upstairs and into bed. When she found me i looked right at her, and then closed my eyes and said, “Just for a minute, i’m so tired.”

Now it’s almost midnight, and i’m trying to think of what to say.


I originally intended this page to be a scratch-pad, with no edits and no regrets. Quickly it turned into an almost constant running commentary, with no room for reflection. Later it became a catchall… recording all of my feelings for when i might need to remember them again. This year it has been a diary, the place where i run to when i can’t tell anyone else what i am thinking.

I’m not sure what it is now, but somehow it helped to get me to where i am. It has helped me to get happy.

This seems like such a lackluster way to mark the second birthday of this page, but somehow it’s totally apropos; I don’t think a speech is really necessary. Thank you for reading, and happy birthday to this.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/08/happy-birthday-to-this-2/

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The primary reason that malls bother me is that i don’t think so much pop culture and watered down fashion should exist and commingle in one place. I cannot bare to look at another Lord of the Rings cross-promotion. I cannot watch my girlfriend try on jeans every fifty feet for three hours anywhere but a mall. I almost cannot stand the ability to comparison shop for video games, Magic cards, stretch jeans, and Pat Benatar cds all at once.anywhere but a mall.


New Jersey, for those of you not in the know, has almost reached mall saturation-point. Really. And, when Elise asked me if i wanted to go shopping today, i had no idea that it would be a multiple store, multiple mall, multiple highway endeavor. NJ needs its malls, because they represent a commercially and spatially sound means of starting up a highly visited business venture in a state that all but refrains from imitating the metro Philadelphia and New York settings that it exists as a suburb to. However, i don’t think that i need them.

There is something distasteful about obviously thirteen year old girls in tube tops and capri pants with little wicker purses trying to catch peoples eye. There is something gut-wrenching about the Disney characters pressed onto black cotton shirts in startling standard alternative store Hot Topic, whose should-be motto was on sale as a witty Tee. Express is hedging their bets heavily on pin stripes and retro-hemmed skirts, while Wet Seal is leading the pack of outlets selling peasant-style blouses in ridiculously busy prints. Aeropostale seems to be convinced that terrycloth, baby animals, and sparkles are the undeniable keys to fashion success – and are willing to offer you an obscenely cheap PDA with your $50 purchase to prove it. And don’t even get me started on how hard i laughed when i looked inside the store that was (nearly fictionally) titled Rave Girl, or about the swimsuit at the Macy’s entrance that appeared to be depicting a 9/11 memorial somewhere just above the crotch.

It’s not that the existence of malls bothers me so much as the ways in which people rely and depend on them. At a time when everything from the songs you hear on the radio to the fashions you see on campus are dictated just as much by brute force marketing as by public opinion, how can a mall be anything other than a virtual cesspool of what corporate America thinks you should buy? Of course they only have a handful of independent albums, of course their size six jeans wouldn’t have ever fit me in my anorexic heyday, and of course the price of Neverwinter Nights is nearly the same at every store we visit. It is not a coincidence, it is a calculation, and every striped polo shirt that you buy means that everything added up just as planned.


If my Communications degree means anything to me, it is the ability to see through corporate curtains to the strings being pulled, even if it also means Elise might never take me shopping again.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/08/385361875/

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The way things were headed i seemed due for either a complete mental breakdown or halfway shaved head. And, having just had a complete mental breakdown two weeks ago, i decided that looking like half-hearted punk rocker was better than lying in the middle of my curled up floor sobbing and speaking gibberish.

Subtract half an hour. I was sitting on the stairs averting my eyes from the television because Nicodemus has always scared me. As her hair fluttered down to a white trash bag spread out on the linoleum one razor-sized strip at a time Kate said that none of us had ever seen her natural hair color before. Grinning, she stood up and and walked out of the too fluorescent bathroom as Ross turned to me and asked if we were just trimming up the back.

Add twenty minutes, and i was attacking it with scissors while he shaved off the back with a half-inch blade, pulling at my thick hair so hard that i was crying. Tears carried shards of hair down my face like tiny rivers as we all laughed out loud. I wish that i could blame our hysterical laughter on being drunk or stoned, but we had all stopped drinking hours beforehand. They were laughing heartily, rolling around on the floor outside the bathroom, and i was laughing at myself.

Subtract fifteen minutes. They voted five to one for my haircut, but add twenty-five to that and they all drifted away. Bored with me, though i played the comedian as i tried to get Ross to pay attention to how short my hair should be. Elise won’t like this, i said, and they all laughed at my antics as i complained about the hair that was in my eyes and how much it all hurt. She won’t like, i thought, because i’ll hate it. I will never be able to convince her.

Plus thirty minutes. Standing in front of the mirror with the clippers wielded like a dagger, and it was almost perfect. Ross had left, Kate was in the shower. The top was excellent, the back was a little shaggy, but the sides were all wrong. They needed to blend from the top, and loop around my ears. The left side slowly conformed to my wishes, but on the right i came too close in front of my ear and was left with a tiny bald spot when i pulled away. It just won’t do, i thought.

They had joked earlier about giving me a mohawk.

Six months ago today was the third night Elise and i slept beside each other in the same bed. Six months before that i was packing up what there was of my life and wondering if it meant anything at all. Six months before that i was already saying what i refused to let myself figure out. And i don’t remember what happened six months before that, other than that it was a week before i started using blogger.

After Ross left, Kate wanted a shower, Lindsay wanted me to sweep up the hair in the bathroom, and Erika wanted to go to sleep. I just wanted my curls back, to save them for winter when i can be pretty again, and now i am just teary and wide awake waiting for the train to take me away from here in the morning.


I will not forget this feeling.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/08/85355930/

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Everybody has something that makes them feel real. Or, realer, if you already believe in yourself. Attention and applause generally fit the bill in the circles i move in, but sometimes the thing you really need is a little more tangible. Money. A nice place to live. Gourmet food.

Despite my obvious predilection for both applause and attention, there are some other things that i require to feel as though i am an actual and worthwhile corporeal entity that is actually meant to take up space and breath. Or something like that. Things that make me feel as though things are going well and i really ought not to go frolic in traffic anytime soon.

One of those things, for those of you who don’t pay much attention, is music. Whether i’m listening to it, making it, or just hearing it in my head, my life feels like nebulous between station static without a soundtrack to tune in on. I also need something to do … doing nothing or participating in something passively tends to make me stir crazy in a very short amount of time. Thus my general distaste for television, past the obvious Friends fixation and American Idol addiction. The list goes on and on, with varying assignations of importance, down to the little things: Jeans that make my ass look good, for example.


There was one thing that was missing from the assemblage that makes up the difference between my current glib happiness and the droll existence i lived late last year; one especially tangible item that my life seemed to beg, nay, yearn for. I was certain that having it would make me happier and increase my quality of life.


Elise bought me the blender about two weeks ago.


For two weeks it just sat on my kitchen shelf, looming like a Northern Star over my blended-drink-less life. It was an invitation to smoothies and daiquiris, health shakes and margaritas … in effect, an invitation to increase my happiness and well-being in the area of semi-liquids. And it was still snuggly nestled in its cradle of Styrofoam and cardboard … until Tuesday night. That night i gathered girlfriends, roommates, and our general partner-in-crime SL and her beau. All of us were ostensibly assembled to watch the aforementioned American Idol program, but we had the secondary purpose of breaking in my blender with a jumbo-sized TGI Friday‘s premixed Mudslide. And break we did.

Three days later, and i am noticeable a more chipper person than i was before i slit the tape on the top of the blender-box open. It isn’t that having a blender is about getting really sloshed, though – as we found out yesterday – getting a few drinks into me makes mopping the kitchen a lot more fun. It’s just one of those appliances i’ve always felt as though a real person might own. I mean, how can you be real without the capability to make milkshakes? Eventually i’ll need an entire kitchen full of widgets and whatsits to make me happy, but for now i’m happy to have a ten-speed jumbo-pitchered blender to brighten my days.

Anyway, point being, i have moved on step closer to my materialistic and self-centered version of Nirvana. Now all i need is a gold record and abs of steel.

What about you?

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/08/85330678/

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The quiet close of my eyes and suddenly the words are erased and i am back inside my own head, lids drawn comfortably closed like thick shades to thwart the sun – my ears playing along as if they could do the same. The drift back and forth from wake to the inside of my eye lids rarely finds me becoming any more awake. Awake is the moment of decision, of day starts here, of opening eyes and smiling at the pillow next to mine.


Those mornings do not make me more tired. No one understands, but there is something about those brief flashes of open eyes and ears that makes the rest between them so much more valuable. It is hard to know what you have got until you do not have it for a second and then dash back to it, arms open, claiming that you never meant to leave.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/08/85308942/