Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

health

I Need More Morals

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Sometimes i am completely capable of doing something right even when i am sure that i’m not.

Our wireless network was all sorta of wonky. Elise’s laptop was connecting with a wire, her desktop’s connection was dotty, and my computer suddently disconnected from the network every time i checked my imap email. Taken singly the problems might have seemed surmountable, but not all at once. Feeling utterly helpless, i disconnected the wireless modem last night and made no attempt to fix it.

Fast forward a little over 24 hours, and i have a hankering to check my email. I could just plug into the wired connection… if i wanted to be a fucking wuss. But, no. This is simple consumer technology. The only thing standing in my way are three separate operating systems. Everything else is a matter of logic. In some instances logic and instructions written primarily in German. So, mostly logic.

To make a long story short, an hour later here i am posting wirelessly once again. I could be doing the same thing from either of Elise’s computers if i felt like it. Was it simple? No. Did i break and mistakenly delete things along the way? Of course. But i figured out the problem my damn self.

Between this, riding my bike to work, crashing my bike and not dying, subsequently exchanging my bike with no argument, throwing a successful wine & cheese party (wait, i’ll get to that one), and not going to the ER despite being convinced i had broken my hand (although i most certainly hadn’t) i have had a very capable seven days.

Moral which i already knew: you can’t succeed at what you don’t try. Time to employ moral: Seven days down, lifetime to go.

Bless Me

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As i sneezed my eleventh consecutive sneeze on the 57 bus this morning, i wondered why i am so intent on suffering this allergic martyrdom.

Yes, there are a scant nine pills left in the same little orange bottle i’ve been refilling with allergy medication since 2000. One is a renegade percocet still in hiding after my tonsillectomy, so in actuality there are only four days of relief to be found beneath the cap, inscribed “push down and turn.”

Why there are only eight pills is the question. I have medical insurance, as i work for a company which excels at selling medical insurance. I have a long, well-documented history at sneezing at just about anything than can be found in the outside world. So, why no refill this year?

No refill because i haven’t actually used the medical insurance, which is costing me plenty per year to have its plastic calling card simply fill space in my wallet. I brought myself to go to the dentist, but the doctor… something just doesn’t sit right about it. Nothing’s wrong with me, other than the sneezing. But every attempted appointment, whether canceled by me or the mysterious “them” of every general practice i’ve tried calling, always has my the specter of my mother’s control looming over it – how she would have me go to a doctor only after she had seen him for something herself, and how she would come right into the room with me – right into the damn paper-gown room, because she was a nurse and it was all clinical and she needed to know what was going on.

Well, in my intense desire to not let her know what’s going on i have developed an altogether aversion to the doctors, any doctors, even doctors she has never met. And so in my futile quarter-life attempt to take back the meager amount of privacy and control i’ve never had until now, i’ve just doomed myself to sneezy commutes and snuffly workgroup meetings.

Ah, the price of independence, perceived and actual.

Mom would never let me go a day without allergy medication.

Packed Like a Rat

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The only lingering symptom of my sickness is that my ears (well, in actuality, my eustachian tubes) are quite filled with the sort of head-cold detritus that helps to usher out something greater, the result being that when i speak it sounds as though my voice is coming from behind a closed door about ten feet behind me. I’m hoping this little issue will clear up on its own, as the only medical solution i’ve found so far involved putting small holes in my eardrum, which i am not in the slightest bit keen on.

Emerging from sickness makes me want to also, in parallel, emerge from mess – partially because i have a medieval belief that little fever imps tend to emerge from mess, but also because the listlessness of sickness tends to invite messiness. (Thus, if you believe in fever imps, sickness is self-perpetuating). I made a solid run at organizing my desk, which had become even more cluttered than usual with the addition of iPod implements. However, as per my usual failed routine, i have become stuck upon my computer.

The impediment is threefold. First, i never finished transferring Uprush.org to my new host at the end of November, because i was worried that I hadn’t quite backed up my hostees files perfectly. Well, now, $60 in redundant hosting later, i find that i don’t particularly care (and i did it twice, anyhow, they’re probably fine). At worst i stand to annoy two particularly good real friends and one particularly favorite net friend by bunging this up, but seeing as they have been staying for free since various points stretching back to 2000, i think they can withstand this one possible disappointment.

(Did i rationalize that well enough?)

The second impediment is that my once shiny-and-new harddrive has nearly reached a state of teeming density between my compulsive music-collecting habits and my impulsive mixing habits. I have been flirting with buying an external harddrive for several months, but after an extensive web-shopping initiative this week i have discovered that for every two good reviews you read about any of them there is at least one about permanent file loss. Seeing as i’m looking to entrust my precious music collection and my irreplaceable mixing to one of these potential-digital-life-wreckers i find i suddenly have the coldest feet possible. Advice appreciated, via email.

Finally, my bookmarks. Oh, my bookmarks. No matter how tidily i try to organize them the web is vastly greater than my organizational acumen. Not to mention the nearly hundreds of links i have flagged for blog inclusion which in fact saw no such limelight.

So yeah, the point of this post was, here comes a bunch of out-of-date linky posts. Have a nice Saturday.

Wee Wee Wee!

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I have this special way, which I’m sure is the special way of most people, of absorbing trivial information from credible sources, but then forgetting the source of the information by the time I want to use it, thus making it anecdotal at best.

I’m sure that I’ve read about the slow evolutionary recession of our pinky toe. The pinky finger is useful, to be sure, and not just for guitar playing or holding tea cups. But, the pink toe? It’s just a decorative flourish for the outside of the foot; it is a mere foot flourish. None of the staying power of the big toe, or the gripping ability of the middle three that allowed you to fetch things out of the bottom of the pool. No. And, if we were in the wild, running about with bare feet, somehow nature would favor those with increasingly smaller pinky toes until it became just a tiny side-of-foot nub, and eventually disappeared, leaving us with four useful toes in its wake.

Except, you know how you never appreciate the effect of something until you don’t have it? Like, mom annoyingly doing your laundry or an old jalopy that had really comfy seats? Well, my left pinky toe is in revolt today, folks, and I am feeling the impact.

This weekend I abused the toe, though not intentionally: I clipped the nail entirely too short and subsequently collided the poor useless thing with my bathroom door, as I am wont to do with one toe or another at least once a month. It’s not broken, as my co-worker with the broken pinky toe assures me I would barely have been able to put on my shoe in that event, but it hurts enough that it’s turning out to be nearly non-functional as my day proceeds.

The thing is, it’s not just the pain of walking around. I mean, yes, it is just the pain of walking around, but the pain itself isn’t what I’m finding to be so debilitating – it has had some unexpected side-effects. Walking down the broken sidewalk to the trolley my left foot couldn’t seem to find solid footing – it was like when you first step onto a beach wearing flip-flops, and you’re carrying something heavy, and the sand seems to melt away from your every step. Like that, but with sidewalk, because I could not get my whole foot to come down solidly to create balance without the cooperation of my pinky toe (which, in effect, is the spokes-toe for the entire side of my foot).

Tertiary effects included cramping in left-toe-number-four, which was using its grippiness to overcompensate for its out-of-commission pinky friend, and overextension of the capabilities of right-knee, as right foot and its respective pinky were doing quite a bit of work to keep me upright.

Walking back and forth to the printer a few times has finally beat the pain into pins-and-needles submission, but I still feel as though I’m hobbling because I cannot quite figure out how balance works anymore.

So, anyhow, part of me is like, “just cut the damn thing off, evolution was gonna get there eventually anyhow.” But, the other part says, “Oh my god, our descendants will be doomed, dOOOOOmed I say! How will they walk, or effectively battle the giant irradiated killer cockroaches, without effective pinky toes slash side of foot spokes-toes?”

I don’t know. I just don’t know.

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But, i miss it. I miss going to sleep with the huge book splayed open somewhere in the middle on the pillow next to me. I miss sneaking a peak forward to see how long i had to wait for another Pemulis appearance. Infinite Jest became a placeholder in my life for the dependency that it reviles … on entertainment, on liquor, on drugs, on other people … watching the characters in their endless dance of all of the above and even more left me free to do what i needed to do in my life without feeling the elastic pull of any of my various addictive tendencies in one direction or another.

As soon as i finished the last seven pages my grandmother was in the room, chirping like a bird. I had somehow managed to stave her off by showing her how close to finished i was, but i found myself without a defense and my first thought was “i need a drink.” I’ve never needed a drink before; in fact, i haven’t been drinking especially often lately. Suddenly, it became the focal point of my day: coming home to my empty apartment and getting blitzed enough so that everything was fuzzy around the edges like a peach and i could simmer quietly down into silence and sleep. Imagining the slippery slope to unconsciousness i might take later was enough to save me from the endless bickering of my septuagenarian family-members, and to get my on the plane.


When i left the hospital i wanted, more than anything else, to be somewhere other than in my own head. Yes, i wanted to go home. Yes, i was hungry. Most of all, though, i was craving an opportunity to poke at my perceptions and rattle my reasons. I wanted to feel disconnected in a wholly opposite way from how i felt in the hospital. And, i did. It was perhaps the most excruciatingly stupid single night of my life, but i woke up the next morning with that binge-stupidity as a tangible buffer between my sick and confined self and my well self — the two never saw an intersection because i made sure to remove myself from where they might’ve met.

This has become the function of substance to me, suddenly … separation. I’ve always thought that anything potentially addictive would be dangerous when it stopped just being fun and started being useful and i was entirely right, but i managed to forget about the entire situation while i had that thick book on my pillow filled with its own endless fucked up addicts to draw my escapism from. Now it’s gone, and i am set back to my continuing reality.


And, importantly: alone — no more characters to keep me up at night. So, maybe it wasn’t a reaction to the novel, but to the mental company it provided.

I’m not sure. I’m going to sleep on it.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/12/8138240/