Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

high school

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Waking up early reminds me of my old homes and of high school. How i used to be so sleepy that i couldn’t imagine moving, let alone showering or eating or walking to the car, but i knew that i didn’t have a choice. Being the first student into my high school at 6:59 just as they turned off our industrial strength alarm, and wandering the empty halls up to my homeroom where i would lay my head against the cool black surface of my lab table and drift off until other people began to drift in a half hour later.

Being adult about something is so jarring, so unusual. I make a decision that i know doesn’t make me happy, but it makes sense, and i wonder how i ever learned to do that. This morning at twenty to seven i could’ve just turned the lock on my door and went back to bed – ignoring the imminent calls of Lindsay and Kate for me to join the early edition of our car pool. I wanted to sleep another hour. I want to sleep another hour right now. But i didn’t, and i’m still not; i am here at work marveling that i am getting anything done despite the cobwebbed haze of sleep that is still shrouding my consciousness hours later.

There’s something about responsibility. There is something about appreciating it more, and also something about knowing what’s important. But, i sometimes still forget to differentiate between things that are important to do and things that are important to me.

In other news, i defragmented my hard drive, devirginized my new blender, and bought two really sexy shirts for $20 at the newly (and inexplicably) renamed Express For Men. How Have You Been?

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/08/85322298/

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Listening to 25/24 on loop for the last two days whenever i’ve been in my apartment, and real music at work today seems positively surreal. You mean, there are cds that exist that i wasn’t on CntrlRm-Out headphones for? Totally a shock.

My life is totally a shock sometimes. I raised just shy of $300 for Planned Parenthood, and i’ll probably write a check for the difference; i figure this probably breaks me even for all of the training i got from them for free when i was a Peer Counselor in High School. Leaving the ‘thon page up seems halfways like bronzing a baby’s shoe and half stuffing a dead pet. Did that just make any sense at all? In a way i feel as though it’s memorializing the first step in what will (hopefully) be years of high quality recordings from me, but in another way i feel like i should be getting back to normal.


It doesn’t feel normal right now, i don’t feel normal. To go from a week of all anticipation to a week all of denouement is jarring, and i just feel like i’m standing in a shadow. I had an honest to goodness panic attack last night, which isn’t exactly a common occurrence around these parts, and to this point i’m not sure why. Lindsay has become fairly convinced by this point that i really was locked in my room in a gibbering mess rather than fooling around with my girlfriend, but i feel like everyone else is looking at me strangely sideways. Not that i went around advertising it, you know, billboard: “Total headcase here, please pull around.” But, i like to be able to talk about things once i’ve got them on my chest, lest i suffocate.

I’m not sure how long this layout will remain or what will follow it. I think it’s simple and pretty and white, and i don’t mind that being my virtual impression right now. But, until i figure out what will be happening after it’s gone i definitely feel like a guest on my own blog.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/07/85296632/

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Where to begin.


This feels disturbingly like ninth grade. I remember my ninth grade dance… there was quite a fiasco about who i would bring, and i wound up bringing the most harmless nonromantic person i could bring and i wound up having an excellent time. I don’t know what possessed me to attempt to use an invitation to a dance as a tool of romantic acquisition, but it probably for the best that i didn’t get a chance to ask. Of course, not having a chance to ask made me possibly more miserable than hearing a no, but thank god other people have more sense than me. Thank God.

So, we danced for hours and had excellent fun, and it didn’t occur to me once that i wished i was with anyone else. Sometimes life has its serendipitous ways with us and we don’t even realize it until the dancing is done.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2002/01/9085822/

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That’s (read the last post first, silly) the encapsulated story of my life… find out about something, fall in love with it, remove it from any sort of social context, and then watch it wither and die on its lonesome. That’s how all of my crushes work too… find someone i adore, remove them from their life to insert them into mine via the insides of my head, and then watch the actuality of us wither and die because i’ve separated it out from the social soil it was once rooted in.

I never had sleep overs. I never had to share my toys or play with a second person. I never permanently traded or anted up anything to anyone in my entire life. I never learned that the whole point of having a life of my own was to share it with anyone else, and so in highschool i marched home every day to dutifully ignore my homework and read my email while other people hung out and messed around and dated and did drugs for the first time; i was my own intensive after-school program. Eventually the internet grew into its own social structure so much that i was discarding friends who i couldn’t keep up with via IM and starting to have online-only acquaintances who i looked forward to talking to. And, eventually, this happened.

I can’t really decide which is the magic card: this page, or this life. On one hand, i pour my heart and soul and free time for no kind of compensation into something that not more than a couple of hundred people see on any given day. On the other hand, i have this wonderful spark of existence that i am mostly busy keeping to myself… emotions and voice and song that i’m bored with from all the times i’ve sat through them, but that amaze other people.

Either way, i figure i am still living the life of an only child… i create my own personal fantasy where the sharing is always one-sided and shun any interruptions of it. In that respect, this page mirrors my life. The things i say are the toys that i have earmarked so carefully to be touched by other children in the sandbox while i keep Jinx and my Nightmare card secreted deep in the pockets of my memory. I am spoilt and selfish, but i do not learn. You’d think i’d know better by now than to be selfish, and i might have figured out that i like going to parties better than i like sitting and staring at the blank white box of blogger, but i apparently haven’t caught on that i have to be a real person-shaped-person here if i expect to be treated as such by an audience…. blah. sleep needs to happen now. i’ll continue this tomorrow… ! in fact…:

to be continued…

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/6906529/

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Yesterday was walking walking walking, starting out in my apartment skittering from floor to floor and then off to the office and around the campus and then with Gina delving far into center city where i somehow managed to spend under $20 on a shopping trip for once in my life and then back to university city to walk in circles upon circles that eventually left me sweating and smiling heading back up the stairs of my apartment.

It seems like Gina and i can have one endlessly strung out conversation that will last us from the beginning of whenever we see each other all the way until when she finally has to get back to her apartment to continue with her own life rather than with our all-too-briefly shared one, and yesterday was no exception. I don’t know how we wind up talking about sushi and the existence of an afterlife and cool brands of wah-pedals and bars on South Street that got busted for selling coke all at once with hardly a pause for breath, but we definitely do.

Two intrinsically linked things came out of our infinite conversation that keep echoing in my head, and those things are coping and karma. Gina and i have known each other for eight years now, and in the history of our friendship we can find many examples of events that in retrospect look totally different to us than they felt at the time. Both of us were entirely emotionally unhealthy heading into our last year of high school, though neither one of us would have admitted it to the other (or anyone else) (or ourselves) at the time. Gina had a great new boyfriend and was sure to be a lead in the play, my guitar playing skills had picked up and i was accepted into all of the AP classes i wanted … things all seemed good. Of course, looks deceive, and i was depressed about life and college and even though i was past being obsessed with my weight on a day to day basis i was entirely too thin and Gina was my best friend at the time but she had to deal with her own set of problems that i won’t even begin to enumerate here. And now we get to reflect on the situation and reveal what was going on inside at the time.

Mentioning such meager problems in my life makes me feel like a lightweight, especially considering that i came through it all not significantly worse for the wear. What keeps me wondering about the way the world operates is that at the time i would have told you that i was happy and doing well but looking back i can see through that to my life being relatively empty and hollow at the time. I don’t know how i kept from being miserable and sick and exhausted and defeated. Maybe i was all of that and i didn’t even realize it at the time (and still don’t).

This is where karma comes in. Bad things happen to good people all of the time, and visa versa. Whether or not karma exists as an actual repayment for your actions in life it is present in that your choices will alter you and your psyche for the rest of your life. Comparatively, my choices were easy and my hurdles were not high and i didn’t even think about balking at them at the time, and i think the fact that i didn’t flinch has left me as the relatively healthy person i am now – three years after the fact. What makes me really wonder about life, though, really wonder, is the people who were not ever allowed to make an easy choice and who have always been presented with hurdle after hurdle to leap. I know too many people in my life who have had to face too many challenges, and almost too many of them to believe have somehow walked through all of their fire and brimstone and still manage to smile every day; that isn’t to say that they don’t have problems and issues, but that they aren’t consumed by them all the time.

I am not an especially strong person, and my amassed karma must be equally tiny in relation to the world on the whole. I have never been extremely sick, i have two healthy parents who i have relatively open lines of communication with, i have never been financially in danger of losing my home or my possessions, and i have never been physically or emotionally threatened so much that i was unable to defend myself. But, i know people who have battled health problems for years, who have lost parents to feuds and time, who have lived on incomes stretched to the breaking point, and who have endured assaults on their physical and emotional well being on more than one occasion. What really scares me about life is that sometimes all of this is inflicted on one family… even one person, and that they are left to come through it or to fail somewhere in the middle. I know people who failed and are stuck endlessly in a feedback loop of emotional and physical trauma that they will inflict upon themselves if no one else will do it for them, but what amazes me about life is that for every one of those people i know more than one person who still believes fully in everything life has to offer them rather than inflict upon them after battling a similar set of circumstances. Everyone who has faced against a difficult set of circumstances has problems and regrets, but not every one of those people can wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night, and that power alone is something that stuns me.

What’s my point? Who knows… is there ever one, really? The point, i suppose, is that my tiny mound of shiny karma is but a pebble in the face of what some people have amassed, and that i just hope that they all get to redeem what life owes to them… and that i will get to see them enjoy every second of it; i’d gladly trade in my karma just for that.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/09/5573008/