Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

ocd

Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure, Pt. 4

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The fourth post in this series finds your author all of three days before Gina’s Bachelorette Party AKA All-Day Adventure and I am, let’s say, FREAKING OUT.

Gina modeling a vast collection of our stenciled icons in action on Gina's back late in the day in her bachelorette adventure (while Mikki and I spray more stencils int he background). As you can imagine, we had to spray these quickly and in highly public spaces.

Allow me to set the scene for you. It is eight or nine at night. I am on my side patio, which I like to pretend is private but really is quite in full view of anyone passing directly in front of our house.

I am wearing only my underwear. My blindingly white naked torso vibrates against the dusk like a bike reflector. I am dual-wielding two cans of spray paint against a defenseless bag of planting soil, which is wearing a plain white t-shirt. The shirt bears several iterations of the Starfleet symbol, some in black spray paint, others apparently colored in with a marker.

I swear, if photographs of this scene existed, I would totally share one.

Why this utter madness? Let’s travel back in time two days. As the guy on the ground in Philly, I was on the receiving end of the various bachelorette party supplies selected by Kelly (in Belgium) and Mikki (in Seattle). Both women are so ridiculously kitschy and crafty that it defies explanation. I received many things. A box of 30 pink t-shirts. A set of Erlenmeyer flasks and graduated cylinders. A package of vaguely phallic sidewalk chalk.

What I did not receive was spray paint for branding our t-shirts.

The t-shirt iconography had become central to our gamification concept for the party, with Gina choosing a team for every challenge. If the team defeated the challenge, they would be branded with a special stenciled badge. Think of it as “Foursquare: LIVE!”

Despite working all day in the midst of a team full of craft maniacs, I am not in the least bit crafty. I’m not even good at speculating about methods of craft. I am good at desktop publishing and subsequently printing things on high end paper. That’s about the extent of my crafting abilities. I am not great at creating things with my hands. I still have problems changing guitar strings.

Thus, the spray paint issue was very … concerning. Three days to the party seemed like the time we should be testing the spray paint, to make sure it would work. Kelly and Mikki had mentioned a few potential brands in their emails, but I couldn’t find any online that I could get shipped in three days, because spray paint can only be shipped via ground.  I started researching other spray paint, discovering that most of it needed to be sealed with heat before it set. Every time I found something that sounded like it might work (including, hilariously, “Hunters [sic] Specialties Permanent Camo”) I ordered it for the fastest shipping possible, all the while getting increasingly frustrated that I was researching spray paint at all instead of writing Gina’s instruction book.

The very highly recommended spray paint choice of Kelly and Mikki was "Montana Gold Acrylic Spray Paint," which comes in every possible color, including metallics.

Remember how I recently shared a leadership assessment that said that I have a strong future vision while focusing on data and clearing obstacles? Well, it also told me that under stress I become myopic and focus only on information overload and slaying things.

It’s not a big leap to the scene that opened this post. I had five cans of assorted spray paint and two markers lined up and had dressed a 40lb sack of dirt in one of my old t-shirts. At a loss for an icon I could quickly stencil out of a sheet of cardboard, I went back to basics: the starfleet insignia. Not wanting to get spray paint on my clothes (even clothes I’ve set aside specifically in a bin entitled, “for painting”), I elected to strip down to a pair of blue bikini briefs to conduct this exercise.

Welcome to my brain. It is a scary place.

The next morning Kelly and Mikki talked me down from my panic after I sent them not the sanest or nicest email I have ever written. They helped me figure out which local stores carried the paint they both recommended, and Kelly assured me we could visit one together when she arrived stateside. Mel coaxed me away from my desk at lunch and convinced me I would not have a panic attack from entering a craft store. I bought the recommended spray paint.

Problem: solved!

Now we had all of the necessary elements for Gina’s party, save for three: Kelly, Mikki, and the instruction book that would lay out the rules of the game and all of the various challenges.

Oh. Just that.

Tune in next time for Kelly and my madcap adventures the day before the party, how an off-hand mention of a “side-quest” turned into the most hilarious part of the event, and samples from the now legendary instruction book.

the tyranny of the click

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I have never been good at playing to a click track.

[For non-musicians, a click track is a simple rhythm track that plays in your ear while you record to help you keep time. It can be as simple as a beats-per-minute setting that plays a little “beep” for every passing beat.]

For a long time that was a function of other, more major issues in my guitar playing. I was dropping beats left and right and my strums were like the thrashes of a dying man. Not lining up with clicks was the least of my problems.

I still cannot quite play to a click track, even with half a lifetime to refine my playing. Now my problem is syncopation – I so very rarely strum on all the downbeats the click usually slides away from me as I play.

Why is the click so important?

First, it satisfies the musical leanings of my internal OCD Godzilla, who needs things to be both perfect and perfectly aligned. He does not truck with deviations in speed or rhythm, and has put the nix on many fine solo recordings of mine because they ever-so-slightly sped up.

Second, for flexibility. Overdubbing, stealing riffs for other verses, patching biffed guitar solos, and dance remixes. They’re all easier when a song is recorded to a consistent click track.

Though I still can’t play to basic clicks, after a year of drumming with Zina I have no problems playing to a basic rhythm that sketches in a bit more than just the main beats in a measure. A simple rhythm on my Casio keyboard can now keep my songs in time.

That’s fine for me solo, but what about the entire band?

We’ll find out on Saturday: we have a drum engineering session scheduled with Zina. She’ll record her parts to two Filmstar songs with a metronome playing in-ear, and then we’ll all dub our parts on top of her.

In effect, we’re recording like a real band would record, which makes our house a real recording studio, and me a real recording engineer. Plus, the tracks will be a consistent speed.

OCD Godzilla is incredibly pleased.

bondage is progress

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Oh, the things I'll do for my art.

Last night E tied me to a chair in the middle of our freshly painted dining room so I could research my novel.

You see, last night I was blasting out words at an amazing pace on the El when it came time for my protagonist to be cuffed to a chair.

Despite many contortions on the El, I couldn’t figure out how far he could stretch, or if he could stand up and walk. The lack of detail was killing me. My nonstop flow of words dried to a trickle.

I hurried down our street, rereading what I had written on my laptop, only twice stumbling off of the sidewalk and into hedges. I unlocked our front door, flung it open, and announced to E:

Honey, I need to you to tie me to a folding chair and take pictures of it!

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I’ve always been afraid that I don’t know enough to be an author.

I’m obsessive about details. I always have been. As a kid I would compare stacks GI Joe file cards to make sure their stories were consistent.

Oh the irony: Gina the chemist is writing a book and a blog, and Peter the communicator is learning chemistry.

I love getting lost in the fictional histories other authors have created, but I never thought I could create one of my own. I mean, have you watched the special features on the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition DVD? Tolkien wrote entire history books about his fictional world. He wrote a frickin’ language!

Me? I’m not well-traveled. I don’t know much about history. I haven’t taken science class since the 90s. I don’t know how anything works or how to take it apart or how to turn it into a bomb. I don’t even know the right way to describe a lot of things, like architecture or clothes.

That’s why I like writing songs. Songs have their own internal logic. Sure, they might reference something in the real world, but only for a word or two.

We learned that I would have to make an excuse for the character's feet not to be secured, because I was a deadly weapon with the folding chair tied to me.

Late in September Gina challenged me to do National Novel Writing Month. I didn’t say yes right away.  I spent all of October outlining my story and sketching the details of my characters. If I was going to join I wanted a mythology of my own.

While I outlined I hit a lot of gaps in my knowledge, but I didn’t let them stop me.  I’m smart. I can acquire knowledge. Better to start out with ideas.

A few of my characters  do things that involve some pretty intense knowledge of chemistry and physics. In my outline I glossed over the details, but now it’s time to write about them. I can’t always be asking Gina about every little detail, so to get started I bought Chemistry for Dummies.

And, last night I needed to find out how hard a character could swing a folding chair he was flexicuffed to in order to knock out another character, so I had E tie me up and take photographs of it.

Why? Because that’s what an author does.

The Mopping Fool

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I am not what you would call an active “cleaner.”

I’m a tidier. I’m an organizer. But, it takes a lot to move me into cleaning mode.

In my head I always look this adorable while I am cleaning. I may or may not also always wear that hat.

I have a certain fear of activating that particular urge, possibly because I come from a line of hard-core OCD scrubbers.  Much as Bruce Banner turns from nerd to Hulk, when my inner-cleaner is invoked I go from laid back dude to my grandmother. I become intent on vacuuming the floor every time someone leaves the room to get a drink – vacuuming it until it is safe to eat mashed potatoes right off that rug.

E has learned to let that particular sleeping OCD monster lie on most occasions, because getting me involved in day-to-day cleaning is the nuclear option. The one time I have been entrusted with cleaning a bathroom the result resembled a demolition project.

The one area where E is willing to deploy the nuclear strike that is my genetic heritage of clean-freak-ness is mopping. I like a floor to be so well-mopped, so gleaming with elbow-greased shine, that you dare not mar the surface with your shadow after the mopping is done. I don’t trust other people to mop for me, because they don’t employ the five key phases of mopping required for a truly gleaming floor.

To say that I was invested in our mop purchase for the new house would be an understatement. “Invested” implies a degree of detached evaluation. No, our mop purchase was a matter of life or death – life with gleaming floors, or the relative half-life of dull ones.

At one point I was reduced to near tears in the middle of an aisle in Home Depot, wracked with indecision and guilt. Couldn’t we buy a sampling of four or five mops to do our own comparative test across multiple surfaces?

The Rubbermaid Wavebrake® Dual-Water Combo with Sideward Pressure Wringer. Wavebreak? For real? It's a fucking mop cart, not a jet ski.

A test should not have been required. What I wanted was a rag mop with a solid wooden handle, and a bucket to wring it with and in. Rubbermaid G780-04 Pva Roller Mop was the ultimate mop because of its heavy metal handle, thick sponge, and heavy-duty wringer. Then I discovered that tiny screws hold said sponge onto the mop, and they get pretty rusty – to the tune of an hour or two to change the head. That was the end of that particular love affair.) –>

Home Depot has a wide, pleasing selection of wooden handled mops. What they had zero of were wringing buckets. They had one massive $100+ dollar custodian cart that came with its own “Caution: Wet Floors” sign in dual languages. I am a serious mopper, so the concept intrigued me, but I didn’t think the cart cornered well enough to get around the island in our kitchen.

Is it just me, or could this easily double as some sort of implement of torture?

Apparently wringing buckets are a rare item, which puzzles me seeing as non-wringing mops are pretty damned common. How do they get dry? Some Amazon shopping yielded the Behrens 412W Galvanized Mop Wringer Pail, but with shipping it totaled almost $40. Seriously? For a mop bucket?

As a result, I committed the cardinal sin of a committed mopper – I bought a plastic handled mop with a built-in wringer. I figured it could last me through three or four moppings – long enough to find a permanent solution.

This is the Quickie Home-Pro Twist Mop with Spot Scrubber. It is the devil.

I was wrong. Super wrong. I popped the wringer out of its plastic threading on my first wring. I began to wring six or seven times to get it dry during phases two and four, which caused the mop head to age six or seven times as fast, which resulted in a busted mop head on its second outing.

$20 dollars for two moppings. I know MY mopping skills are worth $10 a go (hello – I have FIVE PHASES), but I don’t know if the mop quality was equally as worthy.

This all came to a head on Sunday night. I had avoided mopping our kitchen since the mop gave up the ghost, but I caused a bottle of ginger salad dressing to explode across our entire kitchen. Spot-cleaning was not an option – this required mopping.

I dealt with the frustration of my devil mop for all of five minutes. So do you know what I did? Scrubbed the damn floor on my hands and knees. And dried it that way too.

I know I’m my grandmother’s child when I comes to clean floors, but is scrubbing by hand seriously my best recourse with all of the cleaning products in a Home Depot and across the internet at my disposal?

Should I really be having in-store panic attacks and 1000-word blog posts both on the topic of mops?

Am I missing some incredibly simple explanation about how mops get wrung? Do people wring with their bare hands (eewwwww)?

More importantly, what simple home cleaning or repair task drives you similarly up a wall? Please tell me I’m not alone in my insanity.

I just want to understand

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At the bottom of my basement stairs, I realized I was defeated. Or, at least, foiled in this particular instance.

The floor of our basement was covered with water two inches thick, and our water heater was hissing and spewing a fountain of water from its top.

I had an idea how to turn off the water. I had a plan to pump out the water. But I had no idea what was wrong with the water heater, or how to fix it.

Defeated.

.

If we wrote out a list of my fundamental character traits, one is that I have to understand how things work.

I don’t have to fix every problem myself. I can delegate and rely on help from other people. But, bottom line, I have to understand what the problem is, why it’s happening, and what’s being done so that it doesn’t happen again.

I’m discovering that this is going to be one of my major challenges as a homeowner. When something breaks or explodes or just mysteriously stops functioning, people expect you to step back, call a contractor, and repeat the serenity prayer under your breath.

Yeah, I just don’t roll like that.

If the primary three letters in my life are frequently OCD, the next trio are DIY. Do It Yourself. DIY is why I know how to do almost everything I know how to do.

When Blogger wouldn’t republish archive pages in 2000 I taught myself how to code PHP. When i wanted to record a studio album I minored in music. Last night I completed disassembled a backup drive with a blown power supply down to the last screw and installed it into another computer, rather than contemplate sending it away for repair.

All that said, I’m still a little intimidated by DIYing the house. It’s one thing to take apart a hundred dollar hard drive, and another to conduct demolition on a multi-hundred thousand dollar house.

So, when we bought the house it was a special challenge to find the right sorts of inspectors and contractors and insurers that could satisfy my need to understand.

We took our best shot. The Great Water Heater Explosion of 2010 tested both our vendor-selection and the limits of my understanding and my serenity.

Our Home Warranty company suddenly had clauses that were nowhere in our contract, and when I called to understand where they explain their coverage, their answer was basically “we don’t; no one has ever cared.”

They were dismissed.

Then we had a plumber quote twice as much as we thought it would be to replace the water heater, without really breaking down how he arrived at that number.

He never got a call back.

Basically, until I’m comfortable with in-home DIY, “understanding” has becoming my homeowner’s litmus test. If someone is afraid to make me understand – because they don’t want to be questioned, or they don’t want to empower me, or they want to charge me too much money – then they aren’t going to touch our house.

In the end we replaced the water heater for HALF of that initial quote in a single day.

Next challenge? The electrician whose lack of attention fried the aforementioned hard drive, to which his solution was to bill us another $1,200 for a dubiously defined solution he couldn’t help me to understand.

I understand that I can’t fix everything and I can’t know everything. But, at the very least, I can understand everything.

That’s all I ask.