Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

SGapt

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I’m scattered right now, and i’ll edit this all (somehow) later, but i just wanted to post some moving stuff while it’s fresh.

Yesterday the universe conspired to have a different cosmic actor stand in on my part, and i saw all of the potential i have as a physical being burning through the blinds i usually keep drawn on any amount of tangible power i have.

I have never really been in a physical fight; i often wonder how i’ve managed to avoid it. I was certainly a prime target for picking on all through grade-school and beyond, but i’ve never had to defend myself from anyone before. So, to me, a split knuckle is pretty strange… a wide bloody red grin out at me from my right thumb.

Sometimes i get a violent urge, and it makes me wonder if we’ve all had guerilla warfare hard-coded into our genes. In the same way i went into “Hulk Smash” mode on Wednesday while packing, yesterday i again and again found myself lifting things twice as heavy as anything i’d ever be caught carrying otherwise, and in one instance virtually tossing my stereo down a flight of stairs.

Something else i’ve never really done is a stamina-intensive activity. I’m not exactly lazy: i’ve been known to walk all the way from my apartment to my house carrying bookbags and guitars and things (which is pretty much the span of metro philly – a nice walk), i enjoy pickup games of ultimate frisbee, and riding my bike might be my favourite thing to do outdoors other than sit on a swing. However, i am not someone who’s especially motivated by sporting competition or someone who’s self-motivated to do personally rewarding things like jogging and daily exercising.

What motivates me is a result. This is blatantly obvious at work, where i quickly attend to tasks with a numerical ending point or a specific goal, while ongoing projects like entering folders and proof-reading reports are left to be buried under the mess of my desk. So, asking me to clean or pack when i know i can move whenever i want to is futile, but if you put me up against a deadline and with five other people i turn into captain motivation. That is, i’m at least captain motivation until my legs turn to jelly from shuttling box after box up to the third floor of our new apartment. But, now the job is halfway finished, and i just have to leap a few more hurdles before i am home free.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5404253/

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So, i won round one of the apartment war, but just barely. Basically, it got to the point where i needed to walk the larger object to the door and all of the smaller objects were in front of the door. I don’t have an exact recollection of what happened, but it was something like “Hulk not like clutter! Hulk smash!,” and the next thing i knew i had lifted my bureau clear over my head and was wading through a pile of sheet music (which is omnipresent wherever i live) & neck ties (not all packed, as it turns out) out towards the living room. Don’t ask me how i lifted it over my head (i took the drawers out, but it was still plenty heavy, not to mention unweildly), or how i fit it through my tiny hallway (which also was inhabited by a coffee table and a floor lamp at the time), or how it wound up in line for escape right between my battered black desk and my couch. All it know is, there is a line of furniture as deep as my apartment all queued up and ready to roll.

(Meanwhile, i don’t even want to contemplate the couch… all i remember is that it took grown two men (who weighed nearly four times as much as i did at the time) half an hour to get it up three flights of stairs. I have the vague recollection that it involved a lot of spacial geometry and machismo, neither of which i seem to be in possession of today (“Hulk Smash” interlude excluded, of course). And, it’s a damned ugly couch, too.)

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5385280/

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For two hours i waged a focused assault against my possessions, sorting, boxing, and tossing aside. As a result, all of the things i need to get onto the truck have been freed up (even if there’s no clear path from any of them to the door) save for one: my desk.


Historically my computer is the last thing to be unplugged and the first thing to be set up (enabling me to narrate my way through any ordeal), but this is the first time the desk will have gone out significantly ahead of the stuff that it holds and i can’t possibly wait until tomorrow to disassemble this mess of wires because i suspect my new roommates might kill me if i keep them waiting so i can fire off one last blog (just wait until i start asking them about DSL).

So, here we’ve got a showdown … messy apartment with no place for a computer to live comfortably for another 36hours versus my intense internet addiction and the fact that i won’t have a connection from 1:15pm on Friday until 8am on Tuesday. Yes, that’s as long as i was offline while in Florida. No, i’m not quite sure what i’m going to do with myself either. Yes, i could go outside to do something other than shop for cds. Maybe i’ll… um, … climb a tree? Jesus, i have no idea…

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5377000/

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Time has scrunched up and distorted itself again, and just like a rearview mirror some objects are much closer than they appear. One object that is much closer than it appears is the moving truck into which i will be loading three couches, two tables, a desk, and a bureau around this time tomorrow. In my brain the truck is still so far away that i have room to maneuver, or to brake quickly, when i reality it is on top of me so much that i hardly have space to breathe.

So, time has everything that’s tailgating me held off for the time being (at least to my perception), and i am left suspended in cruise control. Work, Friends, Sleep, Work, Rehearse, Sleep,… capitol lettered events leading me from one day to the next without a question. My bed has had a giant green Rubbermaid bin at the bottom of it for an entire week, and now fully half of its width is taken up with clothes and books i am sorting through, which leaves me a significantly less-than-human-size space in which to curl up at night. But, i don’t protest, because moving the bin or finishing my sort are things i haven’t scheduled any time for. And, so, i will arrive home tonight at 8pm (after another rotation of Work / Rehearsal) and i will leave for work half a day later and in the between bits my apartment will transform itself from scattered to neatly piled, and hopefully my thoughts will follow suit.


Half a day to scrunch the remaining half of my worldly possessions into truck-sized bundles while managing to leave out the things i need to live: already packed are all of my belts, brushes, kitchen utensils, and ties vs. inexplicably unpacked snowboots, economics textbooks, and condoms, none of which i’ll be using in the next day. Or in the next semester, for that matter, unless some highly unpredictable/improbable things occur (like snow in October, me inexplicably switching back into the BS program i scratched and clawed to escape, or me having a romantic life that *gasp* includes sex)(see, i told you they were improbable).

Somewhere at the bottom of a sorting pile of snowboots and textbooks (the condoms are segregated) lies an entire box of caffeine pills that i never opened. You do the math.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5367845/

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Back in the real world, my lease ends a week from today, and i think it just fully hit me today that all of my things have to be mobile by the middle of next week. The result was a two hour cleaning and packing binge that has so far gotten half of my cds, half of my clothing, and half of my books put away. The only problem seems to be that i have run out of places to put things, and so hopefully i’ll be going to walmart later to rectify the situation. Anyhow, today i am putting down the deposit on the new apartment (finally), and seeing my mother for nearly the first time all summer, and apparently i have decided to blog about lots of uninteresting things in an attempt to drive you away before the anniversary celebration on Sunday. Run!

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5277090/