Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

rabi

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.

i am sounding out the silence

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A few weeks ago I visited Rabi in NYC. It was an relatively ad hoc trip – I owed her a visit, and she was free for a few days. Things just fell into place.

Rabi and I are not the bloggers we once were; both of us allow our domains to fall into silence for weeks or months at a time, when the span used to be days or mere hours. One might imagine, then, that we had more to talk about than usual, having missed so much errata, minutia, and other blog-worthy details of life.

Not quite. In fact, upon my departure I had the distinct impression that we had spoken markedly less than in any previous encounter. The quantity changed, though the quality of the conversations wasn’t any more or less.

It made me think: do I speak less now, in general?

I’m quite sure that I do. At work I am almost entirely autonomous, and spend long stretches of my day quietly creating project plans or proofreading. Elise and I operate on slightly less words than we used to, if only because it takes less to communicate our meaning these days. And, I despise the phone, as ever. Yet, even in public situations – in meetings or dinners or parties – I have the perception that I’m saying a lot less than I used to.

The next question in sequence is: why? The easy answer is “circumstance,” but all of the circumstances that surround me are ones that I manufactured for myself, which leads us to a second “why.”

Do I just have less to say? Am I becoming less self-involved as I (presumably) mature? Am I growing more comfortable with myself, and in turn with the silences that surround me?

Does it mean that I’m listening more? Or, am I more introverted – less likely to expose myself to others?

Looking back into the microcosm of Rabi and I, walking in circles in the East Village and around the Seaport, I can see a little of each reason. I’m sure there are days where one dominates, and others where they are equal.

It just makes me wonder: where did all those other words go?

Trio: Season Five, Suite #8!

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Trio: Season Five, Suite #8:
Songs on the Topic of Friendship
Standing, Martyr, Until You Awake



Trio – the original singer-songwriter web session – returns for its fifth season featuring my own DIY music. This season each trio of songs will have a loose topic to connect them, which I will discuss between songs.

A sample of what I had to say in this Trio…

Standing
It’s about both a negative and a positive aspect of friendship … leaning. This mutual leaning society that you have with your friends. Which is a good thing – that’s what friends are for. But it’s about the event where one person stands more freely than the other. You have one leaner – one Tower of Pisa in the relationship, and one Eiffel Tower – and the back and forth that creates.

Martyr
Sometimes when you are a third party really looking at a problem that your friend is having and you’re not involved in that problem it’s hard to gauge how much of a problem it really is. You have no way of knowing. They’re your filter. You don’t have any other reality other than their reality. … We all climb on a cross every so often, and this song is about telling one of your friends to get the fuck down. … It’s not that I don’t like you, it’s that I don’t believe in your problems.

Until You Awake
I had become friends with somebody through Rabi, and that person had an unfortunate incident with her health, and they actually were into a coma. … Things were not looking good for her. … I have really been blessed in my life by not only my own good health, but the good health of everyone around me, and I didn’t know how to react to this young, vibrant person who maybe would never get to hear one of my songs. So I sat down one night and wrote “Until You Awake”

I remember that I sent it to her boyfriend and he played it for her in the hospital and shortly thereafter she woke up. … I still play it because it represents the power that ever-tenuous-connection across the internet can have over you, and over your songs.

You can download this Trio, or listen to a previous Trio:

Rabbit-Totems and Purple Dragons

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Even before I had the internet I was always interested in connecting to people who I could understand on some intrinsic level.

In my pre-internet age, one of my favorite comics was Sam Kieth’s The Maxx. Many issues of The Maxx had a pen pals page tucked into the back. The idea of it thrilled me – some equal yet opposite alterna-comic fan flung far across the country could trade significant thoughts with a distant speck of me.

I whined and begged my mother for permission to write to some pen pals or, even better, to send in my information to be listed (because, surely each pen pal was reaping hundreds if not thousands of letters from eager writers such as myself).

I was flatly rejected. Repeatedly. Because, as far as my mother was concerned, it was the goal of the entire population of America to seduce me into acquiescing to a quiet, tidy kidnapping. Who knew what kind of lunatic was lying in wait for impressionable young comic fans such as myself to engage them in witty adolescent banter, only to suss out the likeliest kidnappees and stealthily infiltrate their homes in the night.

I shortly and unsuccessfully agitated for a P.O. Box, and that was that.

(Why didn’t I just send in the damn letter with telling her? Who knows. That is how good of a kid i was.)


When I first started Crushing Krisis one of my favorite things was to not only find and link to a new blog, but to get into a longterm habit of reciprocal linking – carrying on a sort of turn-based dialog in a series of blog posts meant not just for each other, but for our entire audience(s). In a way it was like a comic-book crossover.

Sadly, in most cases only my side of the chat still exists – six years of blogging yields quite an attrition rate. Of my virtual pen pals even the most venerable and permanent-seeming blogs I exchanged links with are gone. All but one.

Wockerjabby was a strange creature – six years ago just a clean layout emblazoned with a purple dragon, talking about college and exercise and veganism and astrophysics. Rabi, pronounced just like “Robby” (cotton on?) was… a girl? A girl named Rabi living just a few miles from my apartment? An awesome, intelligent, health-conscious, blogging girl name Rabi going to college around the corner from my favorite malll?

I was hooked from minute-one. And, just a few hours later, Rabi noticed my link and wrote me a nice email. And (nearly causing me to have a heart-attack in excitement) linked back.

Afterwards i started a (somewhat embarrassing, in retrospect) linking campaign professing my blog-love, and Rabi continued to reciprocate, carrying on merry conversations via email all the while.

If the story plateaued there – two bloggers trading links for six years – it wouldn’t be too remarkable.

It didn’t.

We decided to meet – Rabi was the first internet person i ever met. In the middle of a field, actually. Well, at a train station, and briefly in a grocery store, but predominantly in the middle of a field, where I sang songs and she read poetry.

We continued through Blogathonning and late night IM conversations discussing “Peter’s-Head Romantic Gravitational Units,” and a lengthy walk through night-time Philly, and somehow wound up flying together and then road-tripping together to Boston for concerts, followed by multiple iterations of walking the breadth of NYC and Philadelphia, eventually coming-of-age and enjoying martinis in both locations.

All of that from one link, six years ago yesterday. Not only a best internet friend, but a best friend.

Ever since Rabi’s link has always appeared on my link list. And, six years later, CK is still on hers.

It’s hard – still hard, even with blogs and MySpace – to thwart the natural tendency of our social circles towards homogeneity. Your friends will always have something in common with you, because if you have nothing in common the spark of friendship never catches, and a year later you’re left wondering why someone is still on your friends list. Because of the limits of the physical world, usually many of our friends wind up having the same things in common with us.

The allure of The Maxx pen pals and, later, the internet, is the offer of hundreds of different tangential contacts – small intersections of interest. The long tail of meeting people, the joy of which is following that connection to find even more connections.

In Rabi I have found the unique overlap of blogging, of loving music, of eating strange vegetarian foods, of remaining dedicated – even obsessed – with staying vibrant and real.

Probably way cooler than anyone i could have met from The Maxx.


(ps: Rabi, your Trio got usurped because i don’t know how to play two of the songs yet. Consider this your Trio IOU to be redeemed when i have more than a day to learn three songs.)

NaBloPoMo Round-Up #6: Just Gs & Hs

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It occurs to me that these massive link posts might seem like interruptions in content to you, the faithful reader.

However, really this is all about you – introducing you to the witty and interesting lives of dozens of other quality bloggers. Because, while i am currently at the pinnacle of my witty-posting trio-recording A-game, all of us faithful CK followers know that might not continue to be the case in December and beyond.

I’m giving you options, faithful reader, for days when not even a martini with a dash of grand marnier can loosen me up enough to post a post or sing a song. So, listen up. [Read more…] about NaBloPoMo Round-Up #6: Just Gs & Hs