Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

adulthood

Crisis = Danger & Opportunity

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Last year I approached my 25th birthday with trepidation – I’m on the younger side of my group of friends, and I’d watched each of them struggle with some variety of a quarter-life crisis. Who am I? What am I doing with myself? What am I spending all of my time and money on? The questions seemed as endless as they were answerless.

To boot, the end of my first quarter was off to an inauspicious start: I had recently quit the acappella group that was my only after-work activity. I wanted to perform my original music, but I had nowhere to play and no one to play with.

And, right on my birthday, Elise and I had a hideous fight, a rare thing for us.

I love a crisis, because it represents both danger and opportunity, so I made my quarter-life as a challenge. In a year where most twenty-somethings freaked out about lacking direction I would turn my meandering life into a pure vector, improving every aspect.

The whole endeavor sounded ridiculous last September when I conceived of it – how could I better every aspect of my life without some cataclysmic change, like winning the lottery or developing telekinesis?

As it turns out, if you want to truly alter your life you have to treat it like a weather pattern – starting with the proverbial flutter of butterfly wings and winding up on the other side of a hurricane of change.

It yielded some results I couldn’t have possibly anticipated, many of which I already touched on for CK’s birthday a month ago. I performed live in almost every month of the year. I rebooted my blog, creating something I adore more than ever. I’ve saved more money than I have in my entire life previous, but I still found a way to afford voice lessons. I’m eating healthier than I ever have before, but it’s not just a tacit attempt to jump start my anorexia. And, as evidenced by my yet-to-be-recounted Thursday night as a rock star, Gina and I are finally a band.

The list goes on and on, but it ends with the most important item: I’m happy right where I am.

Last night at dinner my mother asked me if I felt any older, and I think I surprised her by saying yes.

I feel older in the best possible way.

Happy Birthday To This

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I spent the majority of my day yesterday moving my best friend & bandmate Gina and her boyfriend Wes into their first house.

We were a small team of movers – just five, plus one in the truck – yet the move went as smoothly as it could possibly go… with the exception of one instance of Gina and I collapsing into giggles while trying to carry her futon around a bend in the stairs, and the fact that the laws of physics bar them from sleeping on a queen-sized box spring anywhere other than their living room.

Gina and I have now known each other for over half of our lives – through middle school, high school, college, post-college, and now whatever this is. It was amazing thing to be a part of her big move yesterday, just it continues to be amazing to be able to see so far into the past of someone, someone with whom silliness comes so easily, and with whom I am the epitome of comfortable, willing to speak my mind even when I know we disagree.

Crushing Krisis has now been alive seven years – since August 26th, 2000. That’s more than half as long as I’ve known Gina, and nearly as long as I’ve known the rest of my best friends.

To the best that I can discern, Crushing Krisis is the longest continuously running blog in Philadelphia, and has been since 2003. It’s an amazing thing to contemplate, especially considering that Philly was recently measured to be the second most bloggingest city in the United States. It also means that CK is increasingly one of the most established blogs on the face of the internet.

Just as significantly, since it’s inception Crushing Krisis has been a home to my original music, featuring the original (and, correspondingly, longest-running) singer-songwriter podcast, Trio.

Maybe more significantly than either of those distinguished roles, Crushing Krisis is a part of me – a persistent virtual reflection that helps me to see myself as I am, as I once was, and how I wish I would be.

This page is a lot of things, and a lot of me, and for each year that passes it gets a little more important, because I am getting older and starting to forget feelings from certain moments or stories from specific parties.

I long ago accepted that birthdays and new years days are not inherently transformative experiences – you don’t come out on the other side a new person more than you would emerge reborn from any other day of the year. Yet, they can mark your graduation into being a changed person.

As I wrote last year’s birthday post I felt as if I had finally reached a stable place in life, and if Year 6 of Crushing Krisis was about finding stability, then this past year has been converting stability into happiness.

Some of that conversion was literal. I went from writing and editing letters to managing publications and ad campaigns. I went from being a house-bound recluse of a songwriter to a semi-regular at area bars. and open mics. I transferred Crushing Krisis from Blogger to WordPress on November 12, in the midst of participating in the amazing National Blog Posting Month. I vowed to have a consumerless Christmas (and succeeded). And, Gina and I finally became the band we’ve always teased at being.

And now I am actually, unequivocally, at an equilibrium of happiness – which, if you read through as many hundreds of old posts as I have in the past few weeks, you will realize is a state I wasn’t sure I would reach. Not so soon, at least, and maybe never.

Year 7 of Crushing Krisis includes a slew of favorite posts. I cursed at the television. I had a headache so profound that I gave it a name. I reinvented myself for NaBloPoMo. I recounted my first heartbreak. During a single Trio I redefined one of my favorite songs, and debuted one that had been incubating for half a decade.

I almost burned down the house baking cookies in the microwave. I finally told the story of my life-altering nap at Bonnaroo. I recorded a perfect version of one of my favorite songs. I took my first trip to a casino. Septa carried out an act of terrorism against my favorite garment. And, I finally celebrated the 4th of July the way I’ve always meant to.

But, for every favorite post there’s another that’s just as essential. I offered the most succinct description of myself ever made. I retold the story of the Queen of Darkness, complete with soundtrack. I mercilessly deceived a toddler to get him to eat his vegetables. I contemplated six years of knowing (and reading) Rabi. I listened to the Beatles entire catalog while racing through my last letter of NaBloPoMo reading.

I examined my role as a narrator in my own songs, comparing it to that of an inanimate object. Elise and I found a new favorite restaurant, where we’ve since become regulars. I documented my seemingly endless struggle with organizing my home office. I started documenting my visual life. I reflected on how far my 2004 resolutions have got me.

I recorded my favorite Garbage song, as well as one of Madonna’s most obscure. I reflected on how feminism sometimes makes me cry. I drank a lot of limoncello. I helped present the fifth annual Lyndzapalooza with hardly a hitch. I recorded my catchiest song, ever. I nearly lost my mind in the middle of Broad Street.

After recapping my year in words or links I usually spend the penultimate paragraphs of these August 26th posts talking about what Crushing Krisis is to me and what I hope to make it in the future, but I don’t know if this iteration warrants the introspection.

After seven years of blogging Crushing Krisis is me or, more accurately, an integral, inextricable part of me that I hope will exist as long as I do and beyond. Ultimately it doesn’t matter how many posts I make in a year (105), or how many unique songs I feature (37), or how many times I tell you how I really feel (?). This is just what it is, and I wouldn’t want it to be anything else.

While the penultimate paragraph changes, the final sentiment never really does: thank you. Thank you, no matter how many posts you have read, or how many songs you have listened to.

Thank you, because each of our identities are half about our self-perception and half about others’ perception of us, and if this is a form of me it would only be half-alive without a you to complete it.

Thank you. And, happy birthday to this.

Of Undergarments

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For a significant portion of my adult-shoe-sized life I consented to own only a single sort of sock. Gray Hanes socks.

My time, I reasoned at the tender age of fifteen, was too precious to be spent sorting and matching socks.

(Of course, at the time my mother was sorting and washing socks; I only did laundry when I wanted to work out something on guitar without anyone being able to hear me.)

And, socks were a utilitarian piece of clothing – their selection hardly factored into my fashion sense. Between boot legged jeans and tight vinyl pants no one would ever know or care what color socks I wore

(Around the same time I had deemed that all of my underwear be black, which seems contrary to the whole “utilitarian piece of clothing” argument. Except, nothing spoiled a good semi-goth outfit than a tiny peek of the angelic elastic of a pair of tighty-whities. Trust me.)

My single-sock philosophy developed a chink at Drexel, where our job-interview coaches put our impending job interviews in a plain and dire light: if your interviewer caught you wearing gym socks under your dress pants they would turn you out on your ear, having already seen for themselves your greatest on-the-job weakness and deemed you unworthy. And, if Drexel caught wind of it you could be expelled.

Or something like that.

I carefully shopped around for a black sock I could stick with, eventually settling on Dockers. Generic, easily bought in packs of three or nine. The perfect complement to the gray Hanes. With only two colors, sorting was still not an issue, which I appreciated much more now that doing my laundry involved sitting in molded plastic chairs and sorting on card tables.

I’ll spare you a sock-tinged journey through the remainder of my collegiate and professional career and just cut to the chase.

Friday morning I spent ten minutes rustling through my laundry basket seeking black socks. In the literal sense my quest was fulfilled – I came away from my hunt with eight socks. Yet, practically it was unfulfilled – none of them matched. I have designer black socks, gold-toed black socks, black socks with subtle patterns, and two subtly-different sorts of black Dockers socks.

What’s the moral of this tale? I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps that all of those fussy teenaged whims usually have some sort of obstinately sound reasoning behind them, and if you don’t wind up as an entirely different person as an adult you might find yourself wishing you had never let down your guard.

Although, for the record, I still do not own any white underwear.

How To Stream Satisfaction

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I have not left the house since Friday night – since dragging my sorry self in from the humidity with guitar and amp and bookbag after what maybe would have seemed like one of the longer days of my life had I not just helped to put on a music festival last weekend.

I unapologetically turned on the central air, flopped on the couch, and that was that.

Waking up the next morning – and, in fact, all the way through the weekend until earlier this evening – I couldn’t quite tell if I was sick, or just “under the weather,” or if my body was simply mounting all possible protests at once: sore from lugging amp and guitar around the city, voice fading after a week of talking and singing, stuffy from allergies (also: I need to change the filter on the central air).


I’m being paid to help an acquaintance write and record two songs.

It’s a peculiar arrangement – even beyond the peculiarity of being paid to do something that I spend the majority of my non-working life doing for free. She has words, and melody, and even some chords, but she needs help translating them into a coherent, performable, recorded song.

On her first song we completely clicked, suggesting the same exact chords to each other, minus our personal flourishes. The exception is a single, recurring section where she hears the accompaniment as happy and major, whereas I just feel it as minor and unresolved. She sees where I am coming from, but she doesn’t hear the song that way.

She’s the (paying) client, so I’m doing it her way, but it hurts a little – the song is losing a layer of nuance that only I will ever know. It’s a peculiar direction to head in, given I’ve spent the last year or two mercilessly deconstructing my own writing, trying to eliminate all of the nonsense whims to drill down to the perfect song underneath.


I’ve been reflecting on how my threshold for wasting money seems to be pushing in two opposite directions, leaving a vast middle ground of amounts to waste.

On one hand, I won’t even spend $.99 on a song I like on iTunes, whereas in the past I used to buy albums just based on cover art. On the other, a $400 piece of furniture or recording equipment is a necessary evil, whereas three years ago it took months of prodding to get me to buy my first brand-new electric guitar for that amount.

Is that normal? As we grow up are we all at once more willing to nickle and dime and more willing to throw money at seemingly inevitable larger purchases? It seems like the sort of thing I couldn’t understand as a child, but I feel like I live an entire life that I wouldn’t be able to understand as a child, so the finer points are getting harder to discern.


Last night I watched Battlestar Galactica on the floor of my room/office, head propped up by cardboard box because i was too sore/sick to wander downstairs to find a pillow. It was thing infinity-n on my list of things to do, but I did it anyway.

What is more modern-day than being able to download exactly the thing you have a whim to watch at 3am on Monday morning?


Do you remember when blogging was about recording that instant gratification? Now we have Facebook status and MySpace walls to record the instant – the offhand comment, the spurious wish – while our blogs sit in silence, waiting to catch a thought that is more fully formed.


Lying on my floor somewhere around 4:37 a.m. I thought, fuck that. If my modern adult life says I can stay up all night watching television on my floor because I am too impatient for the DVD to arrive in September, then I’m allowed to blog about whatever damn errata I want to.

It’s not the errata that is alluring and readable, in the same way that watching that one episode doesn’t mean that I am modern and adult. It’s that watching that episode was any of a thousand possibilities of things I could be doing at 4:37 a.m. – a range expanding from sleep to flying to Kansas City just to get drunk.


It’s that enough amassed errata is defining – maybe even arresting – but the only way to find that out is to collect it all in one place, instead of squandering it on everyone else’s internet page.

The Belly of the Beast

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The closest I had ever been to a casino prior to Saturday was my twice-yearly reading of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, so when we stepped onto the floor of the Tropicana I half expected a neon carousel full of lizard-people to greet me.

It would have been better than the real thing; shabby carpets whose patterns snaked from side to side as they stretched across a hazy room filled with a fleet of leggy middle-aged waitresses in weird black corsets and hundreds of chain-smoking, hollow-looking gamblers, with a few cigar-smoking rotund gamblers thrown in for good measure.

I suppose I could have inferred the haze and the zombie-like patrons from Hunter, but i had been hoping for something more psychedelic.

In Vegas, maybe, but the nine of us were in Atlantic City. Wes and Karen sat down for winning streaks at black jack while I milled back and forth, nearly having my legs broken when i mistakenly wandered into the service-space between two active craps tables.

It occurred to me that there was really no instruction for the beginning gambler; I couldn’t have even sat down at a black jack table, let alone craps or some poker variant. While the hollow-cheeked undead of Atlantic City elbowed their way past me to get a closer look at the craps game I wondered if they all just expected me to buy some chips and lose until I understood … until I realized that anyone who spent any amount of time wondering about that wasn’t fit for gambling in the first place.

Eventually the more serious boys headed to poker while the rest of us made a pass at the slot machines, where I spent my first (and perhaps only) $3.25 on gambling before declaring that the fleet of corseted grandmothers were not going to keep me inebriated enough to make my gambling cost-effective.

We retreated towards the sports bar and, as the whir and hum of the shabby casino room faded behind us and as the ceiling gave way to rows of wicker fans and then impossibly-bright false-clouds, I thought that perhaps I liked casinos very much so long as I didn’t have to go into the casino part.

Either that, or calculate just how much I had to gamble in total to have my drinks and roomage completely comped and spend exactly that hour-by-hour over the slow course of a day. Because I’d rather spend my money on a steady and sure flow of Southern Comfort than whip it away on the whims of an eight-deck shuffler.

Eight hours later and we were all thoroughly drunk (some of us already hung-over) and mourning our poor Eagles while singing karaoke, me and Gina and our entire table screaming back the pitches of Bohemian Rhapsody at the pitch-deaf lump who had the (intentional) misfortune of selecting the song, and then carrying our scream-singing into the cool night air and back to Philadelphia as i sang the pitches i still could with my husk of a voice.

It took me the better part of Sunday to recover from the experience – just sleep and water, no speech or food, until finally this morning I felt as though the rest of me had returned from AC, where it had somehow become entangled in the hazy air on the casino floor.