Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

high school

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There were two incredibly cool things about being a peer counselor in high school. The first thing was that i was involved in the school Health Fair every year, and i got to co-direct and produce the fair assembly for three years running. The second thing was that we were responsible for teaching initial contraceptive lessons to eighth grade students who by law couldn’t be taught about contraceptives in a specific manner in previous years. I don’t know which i enjoyed more: getting to do a monologue about why using the word “gay” under the wrong pretense (“that’s so gay”) demeaned the entire men’s soccer team or teaching 30 stunning thirteen year olds about the birth control pill while still wearing a condom over my entire arm from the condom demonstration. My point? “So, if any of you boys still think a condom will be restrictive during sex you’ve obviously got us all beat on size.”

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2000/12/1527216/

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I have this very irrational (yet, highly rational) fear of contracting Oral Herpes. This started out as a sort of joke at parties – an excuse not to share pieces of pizza and drinking glasses with other people. As the years progressed my little rule evolved into my golden rule: The only people i’ll share anything with are people i would lock lips with anyhow. My friends all think i’m insane, of course. What most people don’t realize is that Herpes is the most prevalent sexually transmitted infection, only it isn’t just transmitted sexually. Anytime someone has a cold sore and they kiss you or share a drinking container with you, you run the risk of transmitting their infection. There is no cure for herpes. It is unsightly and easy to spot. It can weaken your immune system enough to allow other diseases to take advantage of you; by virtue of this trait is is known as a co-factor to AIDS/HIV. So, i might be overly paranoid, but my fear is not irrational. Anyhow, i hate sharing.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2000/12/1527158/

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Today is “A Day (with)Out Weblogs,” in observance of World AIDS day. The silence is deafening, defeating, and absurd. While some of the originators of this movement certainly have their hearts in the correct place (a place that seeks to emulate the popular “A Day (with)Out Art”), i think limiting the blogging world to silence is completely the opposite of what this day requires from us as intelligent human beings. Our art is the art of gabbing and linking and wasting time; today perhaps we should donate a little of our time to gabbing about AIDS/HIV, linking to information about it, and spending our time educating ourselves.

I am a thrice certified AIDS/HIV Peer Educator (Red Cross twice, Planned ParentHood once) and have served four years as a Peer Educator as well as conducted coursework in AIDS related topics. Silence on my part would be a waste. If you can claim any actual knowledge of AIDS/HIV, your wasting a day of your life on the behalf of other lives that are wasting away. If you can’t claim to be properly educated in AIDS/HIV your silence is a waste as well unless you’re spending the time learning something about this disease that has cast a pall over the entire world.

If today needs to be a day of your silence, please don’t let that silence go wasted. Please.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2000/12/1526981/

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Elliott Smith is one of those people that craft songs that sound immediately familiar. Of course, i’m not just realizing that now, since i’m already achingly familiar with his last disc, XO. I first came across it while in Anastasia’s bedroom. We’d just sit on her floor every sunday for hours, talking and watching movies and listening to tori and other music. Our big difference in taste was that i liked women, and she liked men. … Musically, that is. But, slowly we infringed upon each other’s taste. Suddenly Anastasia was listening to Dilate, and i was borrowing her copy of XO and listening to it in a stunned silence as i wondered how Elliott found noises for those empty places inside my own heart. Two years later i just bought two of her favourite discs from my senior year, and she’s in college somewhere in New York. And Elliott still invokes those familiar aches.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2000/11/1462941/

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I miss anastasia… or maybe i just miss the thought of her being here. i hadn’t really done anything with her since christmas break of freshman year, but i’ll always think of her as one of the best friends i’ve ever had. just hearing one sentence from her over the expanse of the internet makes my day worthy. The last time we spent time together we sat on her floor and she showed me her art portfolio from the program she had been in summer ’99. they all were spread out on her rug, and her pictures were amazing. i’m not a fan of photography, but her pictures made me just want to stare and stare at them without taking a breath. there was one that was from a series of self portraits, of the top half of her face with a bang of hair sweeping across her forehead. i told her that i wanted to use it for the cover of my demo. i didn’t have a demo at that point, or a strong intention to make one, but afterwards i went home and recorded the majority of what became other plans over the course of vacation. i never saw that picture again. my demo was dedicated to anastasia. i miss her.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2000/10/1144362/