Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

august 26th

Happy Birthday To This

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With less than a month until my twenty-fifth birthday I am left pondering – am I ready to be an adult yet?

The conclusion would seem to be foregone. I’ve certainly been paying my own way for years now; I have a steady job (actually, a new one, as of Monday). I live in a beautiful house. I’m in a long-term relationship. I own plenty of adultish toys I could never before afford.

In short, I would seem to have attained some sort of stablity. A steady state. Does that make me an adult? How do I measure my adultness? How can i quantify it.

The answer to that quarter-life birthday riddle lies in this day, also a birthday – the birthday of this blog. At this moment I have been blogging continuously under a single title for six years, now entering my seventh.

That has nothing to do with being an adult. But, my blog tells me all sorts of things about the person i used to be, in contrast to who i am now. It tells me about slogging away at a coffee shop for CD money. It tells me about living in dorms rooms and ghetto apartments. It tells me about uncertain crushes and the blossoming of a more permanent romance.

It reminds me of when I only owned one ugly, thick-necked, out-of-tune guitar.

Obviously i’ve seen some progress. And, if you’ve stuck around long enough, you’ve seen it too. You’ve also seen the evolution of my writing – both in what I finding inspiring, and how I get my message across.

This year you’ve seen some new things – two out-of-state, out-of-comfort-zone adventures that I documented via my camera phone. You’ve also been left out of a few details, like my joy in seeing friends and co-workers experience the thrills of marriage and childbirth, my re-emergence at local open mics, and my excitement over my new position at work. I just don’t have the will – or the time – to report it all.

And, the nature of the internet has fundamentally changed. No one wants to wander out a domain blog when they can stay in the safety of LiveJournal or MySpace to read about their friends. And, with that centralization comes the dawning realization that all of this is in fact permanently archived (duh), leaving everyone frantic to carefully cover their electronic trails so future dates or bosses can’t find out every dirty little secret.

Has that changed me? I can’t really say. I’ve always tried to blog what’s important to me, even if only to remember something that might otherwise drift out of my memory. So, while other blogs are created and deleted, while other bloggers become LJ-checkers and MySpace addicts, me and this digital mirror still remain.

I wish I had time every day to devote to this. I wish i had tricked out special features and new songs for you every day. But, i wish that every year. No matter what i wish for, what i already have is what this means to me, and what you mean to me for still caring about it. And, if you need to go away for a while – to your MySpace or your real life – that’s okay. I’ll still be here, still growing. If it weren’t for this, i might not realize just how adult i’ve become; if i don’t keep it up, how will i ever know how far i have left to go?

Thank you for watching (and sometimes listening) as i’ve inevitably and inexorably grown up. And, happy birthday to this.

Happy Birthday To This

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I have been blogging for over a fifth of my life.

Purely as a statement, it’s meaningless. Abstract. People will tell you that you’ll be asleep for a third of your life, or waiting in line for a seventh of it, but you won’t suddenly re-evaluate the way you’ve been living your life. People don’t find god in an attempt to save themselves from a seventh-of-a-life of waiting in line.

I have been writing this personal web log for five years. I turn twenty-four in less than a month. I have been blogging for over a fifth of my life.

That’s a little more succinct. It works in numbers that you may be able to grasp – you know what “five years” feels like, and you either remember what it was like to be twenty-four or you can imagine what you want to be doing when you will be.

Or maybe you can’t do either. Perhaps you’ve never done anything for five whole years – not live in one place, or date one person Perhaps twenty-four is just another meaningless milestone in the blithe fiction that is your imagined future – so you can’t relate to that either.

Also, there are the concepts of “personal web log” and “blogging.” What do they even mean?

I have been writing this personal web log (an internet-based, sometimes diary-like, irregularly updated collection of thoughts, feelings, links, pictures, music, and other online errata) for five years (one year longer than a US president’s single term in office, half of a decade, less than a third of the the time The Simpsons has been on the air). I turn twenty-four (twice as old as a twelve-year-old, one year shy of a quarter century, three years younger than Joplin, Hendrix, and Cobain were when they died) in less than a month. I have been blogging (“blog” n., short for “web log,” thus “blogging,” v., the act of creating and maintaining a blog) for over a fifth of my life.

Is that explanation thourough enough? How else can I more succinctly quantify this peculiar obsession to you? It is at once less and more than keeping a diary, more and less than a simple concatenation of thoughts I have and pages I view. It started out as a place to say something without editing, but soon evolved into a more oblique window into my life complete with its own voyeristic audience of hundreds. Sometime after that it became about documenting moments in time, snapshot stories of misadventures freed from the banality that surrounded them.

All of this attempted definition begs the question: what is it now? And: how can I hope to quantify something that I can’t even define? This is no longer my occupation, or my pre-occupation. Sometimes I only write once in a month, and other times I have a week’s worth of sentiments tied together with a common string. In the past this was the central repository for all internet statements, the me-archive. Now I sometimes want to publish a thought or a piece of writing that has no place here.

Ulimately, I have run out of pithy, charming, defining things to say on August 26th. August 26th now looms less as a day of celebration, and more of a mandatory mark on my calendar to remind me to remember, and to try to remind you, what this means to me. The date has become less like the birthday of a child over whom I dote and obsess and more akin to the wedding anniversary of a second-cousin – to whom I periodically send a card.

In either case, I thank you so much for being an inexorable, impossible-to-define part of this half-decade-passed … for being the eyes and ears receiving these words and sounds … for being a friend, even if you are a silent one. I may not be able to articulate my definition of what you’ve been consuming, but it couldn’t be whatever it is without you to observe it.

So, thank you. And, Happy Birthday To This.

Happy Birthday To This

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I am not a huge birthday fan.

Yes, birthdays make a good day to sit back and say “wow, was that a year that just happened?,” but they’ve otherwise been turned into the same materialistic nonsense Hallmark holiday as all of those other holidays that I habitually ignore. By this point, my friends and limited members of my family have discerned my general distaste for typical birthday fare, and have compensated accordingly with a recent avalanche of off-kilter gifts, unusual cakes, and the now-annual beer-tasting festival.

Today marks the fourth birthday of my blog. You’d think I’d remember it, or have it marked down on my calendar, or buy myself a gift, but year after year it blindsides me just like the birthdays of my friends and aunts, all of which I typically remember just as they are upon me. I didn’t remember this one at all. Instead, I happened to be at Rabi’s, reading about this year’s Howl festival, and I was thinking about how it’s been exactly a year since I last saw Rabi, and then I looked at my posts from the New York trip and realized that it almost coincided with CrushingKrisis’s birthday, and then I realized that meant that CK’s b-day was once again upon us.

Four years is not the longest time to do something. High school only took four years, thank god. For most people, college only takes four. There are marriages that don’t last as long, and beloved children who are younger. It has been enough time, though, for over 2,500 posts, and for over four hundred thousand words.

CK’s birthday is a good point to look back across that lifetime of posts and words, but it’s also useful for gauging what can actually happen in a year. In a way, this past year’s posts represent even less of my life than they ever did before; they depict fewer moments, impulses, and sudden fixations. At the same time, these few posts reveal more – in my increasing impulse to let thoughts percolate through multiple passes of writing and editing I find a more robust view of my life as I look back over a sparser number of posts. Not as many thousands of words to depict the pictures; less polariods, more portraits.

I sometimes miss “the old” version of this page, but I know that’s it’s unrealistic to expect anything to stay the same. Television shows grow stale. Musicians evolve. Life goes on. For me to decry the state of this page, lamenting that it no longer portrays my minute-to-minute fascination with the minutia of my existence, would be ignoring the growth not of my writing, but of myself. I might still look (mostly) the same and think (mostly) the same, but each post I write has an effect on the outcome of the next one.

I have given myself the gift of four years of identity, thoughts realized and jotted down for me to re-live, re-think, and re-assess. You have given me the privilege of airing that identity, forcing me to repeat, repent, and resolve again and again in an attempt to find something truer, funnier, and realer the next time.

I want to promise you that this year will bring hundreds of interesting links, scores of engaging reads, dozens of awesome new recordings of my song. I can’t. I want to promise that I will be on the cutting edge of blogging, finding new resources and fresh writing to day daily. I won’t.

For all that I cannot promise you, I will promise you this: you will always be privy to a unique view of my life. Sometimes that is represented by a sprawling journal-like entry, sometimes by a new song, sometimes by a brief by-line to a link, and often by lengthy self-assessment, but every time it’s a topic I bring to this page, to you, because it is a key part of this identity. It’s something I’m crushing on, or that’s crushing me.

Thank You, and Happy Birthday to This.

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I like to think of myself as the ultimate indicator of whether any particular cultural trend has reached zeitgeist levels of proliferation, but in what we collectively refer to as reality i can think of at least two more trust-worthy sources to defer to. One are daily newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer and the second is the Oxford English Dictionary.

Not coincidentally, within the last few weeks both have indicated that BLOG is a word that has been inexorably wedged into our collective language, through the above linked article and the (somewhat shocking) inclusion of the term in the next version of the OED.

My response is, of course, “I told you so.” After all, i have been doing it for three years now, to the day.

While the OE inclusion is surprising, the Inquirer article left a bigger impact on me — if only because it neglected to mention this site.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Crushing Krisis could be the longest running Philadelphia blog (now that Rabi is conveniently out of the way in new york); I have to slog through all of the links here and here to make absolutely sure.

The concept is staggering; it doesn’t mean that i set a trend, but at least that i tapped into it first and have (so far) held onto it the longest. Through this passive act of ignorance i suddenly realized both how important this has become to me, what it really is, and how often i do not come through for it.

Long gone are those days, though, when i represented all that is common and exciting about blogging. I am not an active linker, and i do not engage in many of the trends and memes that are so often definitive of the blogging community. I am more interesting in reporting, either on my daily life, or on the people and communications i observe, and in singing and playing both my own songs and others’ through Trio and Blogathon.

Whether or not i’m putting in my best effort on a daily basis, new people continue to happen onto this page for the first time, some of them familiar and some entirely strange. All of my roommates (current and former) read it regularly, as do most of my close friends. Some of my professors have been known to stop by. This weekend, Rabi and I had just sat down to a refreshing Bubble Tea when my cell phone was rung by my god-brother, who i haven’t seen or spoken to in almost four years, but who had found this through Google. He told me that “Hide Your Love Away” was his favorite song so far, and said we should hang out sometime soon.

That’s what i love — how this has been woven together with my “real life;” not so much that you cannot see the seams, but well enough that it never quite unravels. I love that people i haven’t talked to, people i have forgotten, people i have never met can see a sketch or snapshot of my life at any given moment. Sometimes writing for it can seem boring, or tedious, or invasive, but if i were to stop, to actually give up for a single minute in the days or weeks that separate my posts, then suddenly this mirror of my identity would just turn into a photograph, taken from far away.

There have been times i have loved this more than i do now, and times that i have disliked it less, but i don’t think i have ever felt so comfortable about it. Thank you for reading. Thank you for listening. Thank you for caring. And, starting today, thank you for talking back in the comments section

Happy Birthday to this.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2003/08/happy-birthday-to-this-3/

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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/