OCD Godzilla

about that name

September 1, 2013 by krisis

You may have noticed that I made it through both my entire baby-naming post as well as my anniversary blog without actually typing out our daughter’s name.

There are some bloggers who reveal every little detail of their children’s lives. Dooce, who I’ve been reading since before she had kids (or even lost her job), famously discusses not only the names but also photos, conversations, personal details, and medical challenges of her two daughters. I feel as though I know everything but their shoe sizes, and could probably find that out with some digging.

I have zero judgement to pass on Dooce or thousands of other bloggers who share the details of their kids’ lives, but I’m not sure it’s for me.

Or, more accurately, I’m not sure it’s for me to plaster her ridiculous exploits all over my blog. Do you need to know all about her pooping? What about the face she makes that bears an uncanny resemblance to Grumpy Cat – should I post a picture? What if my daughter turns into a meme?

At the same time, I don’t want to miss out on all these fun stories! People mommy- and daddy-blog for a reason – because children are insane and unfiltered and hilarious and unreasonable. They’re instant entertainment. I’ve spent the entirety of today mostly just laughing at our baby.

What happens when those two things intersect? When in grade two I read her a post, and she says, “I’d rather you not mention that, father,” and then I say, “Oh, shit, hopefully that’s not retroactive, because otherwise I’ve got about six years worth of posts about you eating things you found on the floor to redact now.” What happens when her classmates begin GOOGLING? Aren’t my own exploits embarrassing enough for the both of us?

Parents have to make a lot of decisions for their children, so usually the consent is theirs. But there are some decisions that it’s not really fair for a parent to make. I wouldn’t permanently alter my daughter’s body, or decide who she’ll eventually marry – those things are for her to determine herself, much later. And, I don’t want to tell her story to the entire internet before she even knows it’s her story to tell.

After much deliberation, OCD Godzilla and I have reached a compromise. I will blog about some of her exploits, but nothing medical or blackmail-worthy, and not by name – especially because it is so unique. Since my wife’s moniker has become the brief E, and since my daughter is the sixth E-lady in a row in her family, she will be known as E Version 6.0, or EV6 for short.

In addition to differentiating her from wife E, this is also a terrible pun about her being a sociopathic X-Files villain and/or one of my least-favorite bands of all time. Also, it neatly resolves the possibility of a horrible nothingness being released across the internet because my baby doesn’t have a name.

Finally, in lieu of her actual name, please accept this comprehensive list of her nicknames to date:

Profussor Wiggles, Dean of Fidgets.

Grumpy Cat. Duckie. Smelly Cat. Little Bug. Frogger.

The Terrorist.

The Fusser. Fussbudget. Fussy Fusser.

Flopsy. T-Rex. Hamster Cage. Grumplepuss. Baby Hiccups. Baby the Hutt. Sidecar.

Captain Poops. Tiny Crazy Person.

Definitely Probably Pregnant

November 19, 2012 by krisis

As I fall asleep, I think about cells rapidly dividing.

Nothing is ever a sure thing, but I am pretty sure we are pregnant.

Zygote We have been trying for a few months now, where “trying” means (close your eyes, future offspring) having sex with a little more consternation and chart-making than usual. I mean, depending on your usual sex, I guess.

This time around I don’t think it would be projection to say we both felt a little different as the week wore on. When we woke up yesterday, after much devil’s advocacy from both sides we wanted to take the test. I inquired if I needed to hold any sort of papers while E peed on them and was rapidly dismissed.

“Wait,” I said. “What should I do?”

“Not follow me into the bathroom?”

“No, I mean, what should I be doing in case you come downstairs and tell me we’re pregnant? I don’t want to be surfing the internet. This is a big moment.”

“It is,” she acceded, maybe fidgeting impatiently.

“How long does it take?”

“Five minutes.”

“I’m going to play a song. Something I wrote. A song about you.”

“Okay,” she said. And, maybe, “Can I go take the test now?”

“Yes. Okay.”

I played a song called “What Do You Want From Me?” which in retrospect was a peculiar choice. It’s a song about being an imperfect partner and lover, and being afraid you aren’t enough how you are. I don’t think I chose it with any intent, but it was a decent enough selection for five minutes of being Schrodinger’s Expectant Father.

She returned during the last verse and proffered me a tiny strip of paper full of arcane writing and a series of red lines.

“I think it’s positive.”

“What am I reading here?” I said, squinting down at the paper.

“Two red lines.”

two-red-lines “I see them. The one’s a little faint.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she replied. “I’m pregnant.”

Of course, this is me we’re talking about. E is growing a baby while I harbor an OCD Godzilla. She would need to test again. I would watch. Luckily, this was not the pee right on it sort of test. There was a sort of shot glass full of urine for testing purposes. Is that too much information? I’m just trying to be transparent about the utter ridiculousness of the situation. This is how new life is discovered.

We tested and I watched. Like a hawk. From two or three inches away from our second little urine-soaked paper strip while E kept time on a digital watch.

“I definitely see a second line.”

We were pregnant. Definitely. Probably.

“Can we just dip a fistful of the strips into the pee to be sure?”

She sighed, exasperated, maybe realizing she was in for nine months of me being the crazy one … and, that even if her hormones allowed her to briefly surpass my crazy, Godzilla and I would spring back into the lead and maintain it for the majority of our offspring’s 18 years of childhood.

“Imagine,” I encouraged E later in the day, “if we had a way to make just one or two of those cells the best possible cell right now. We’d wind up with a 12.5% better baby!”

That was most of the baby chat for the day. We’re not too precious. But, as I turned over in bed to face E all that was on my mind was cells that were once one and are now many, more even since we discovered them in the morning.

That was our baby.

Note: This post was embargoed until we reached 20 weeks; it was made public on 3/20/2013.

Crushing On: Okabashi Shoes

January 7, 2012 by krisis

When I joined a gym early in 2011 I had one major concern.

Okay, two, but everyone looks silly at points while doing yoga, so I got over that one pretty fast.

No, my major worry was the showers. Really it was an array of several related worries. A bouquet, if you will.

Meet my new gym enablers. I love them.

After a year of gym-going I was able to sublimate OCD Godzilla for long enough to be seen mostly nude by other human beings not on the internet, use gym-supplied towels without breaking into hives, and bypass my typically lengthy shampoo regimen while still feeling clean. Yet, nothing can disengage my genetic heritage of being skeeved out by stuff, and there is nothing more skeevy than the floor of a four-by-four square stall that has sweaty naked men coming and going from it all day.

For some people, a turn-on. For me, skeevy.

It came down to my feet. I am notoriously sensitive about the idea that feet are meant to touch the ground, which other stuff has touched, and thus might be dirty. I was the child that needed to be carried directly from the ocean to the beach towel, so no offensive sand could stick to my tiny toes. Wearing flip flops anywhere but the poolside was (confession: still is) absolutely verboten, less the edge of my heel slip from their rubberized surface to touch the ground in a parking lot or grocery store freezer aisle or any other location where I might catch a deadly foot plague.

Wow, who knew it would feel so good to type that all out?

Back to the gym. Even after I got over all of my other shower hangups, I could not let any part of my feel touch the shower stall. “Of course,” you say, “I wouldn’t either.” Yet, my autopodomysophobia extended to the flip flops. Would they not also become riddled with disease over time due to their contact with the shower stall floor, spreading to infect not only my feet, but my entire gym bag?

For most people this image conveys the idea of a relaxing vacation. For me, it conveys the idea of OCD heart attack. This may explain why I have not been on a beach for over 10 years.

This spawned lengthy, philosophical conversations with my co-workers about what they did with their shower shoes. No explanation was enough for me. I slowly tapered down my gym-going, as on every freshly-showered return to my desk I could do nothing but worry about my feet, which surely had contracted a fungus from my flip flops.

And chlamydia.

And the plague.

I decided I needed a pair of flip flops that could be put in the washer, or dishwasher, or microwave, or some other disinfecting appliance short of the furnace.

Enter my good (also OCD) friend Mary and her suggestion of Okabashi shoes.

These Okabashi people know all about the concept of shower OCD. Their flip flips are molded from just one or two pieces of injected molded microplast, which means there are few nooks and crannies for dirt and chlamydia to infest. They are treated with an anti-microbial agent, which means less fear today and more super-germs in our apocalyptic future. Plus, Made in the USA!

Most importantly: they are completely waterproof and dishwasher safe!

Three days and $20 later, I had a pair of Okabashi shower shoes that are completely impervious to all possibly gym shower floor related phobias and concerns. And, if I get concerned I can just spray them down or put them in the dishwasher.

Problem solved! I have literally been to the gym twice as much since I acquired the new shoes. That’s even better than a New Year’s Resolution!

(PS: The shoes run slightly small, I would consider estimating up one half size.)

How to turn off post revisions in WordPress 3.3

January 2, 2012 by krisis

Did you just update to WordPress 3.3 only to find that post revisions have returned even though you previously engineered some way to turn them off?

Don’t worry, I can help – but, first, some background and chatter.

Way back in 2008 WordPress added Revisions to its core features, and the feature persists today in the newly released version 3.3.

This is the amount of WP revisions I can create in a single week of editing if left unawares.

Revisions captures every published iteration of a post you are working on, so that if you republish with some minor changes you still have the prior version available to roll back to, if necessary.

This feature can be helpful if you make a lot of major changes to your work, or if you are on a multi-author blog and need to occasionally reverse someone’s edits.

It can also be detrimental, or plain old annoying.

The revisions feature nearly destroyed Crushing Krisis. Because, you see, my managing editor is an OCD Godzilla that lives inside my abdomen and due to his influence I have been known to spend my spare time making literally hundreds of tiny edits to spelling and spacing across the million-plus words of this site. Each edit I published spawned a new post number in a new post ID. My database ballooned by thousands of lines, I was using more RAM on my server, and legacy posts and pages linked by their post IDs were suddenly appearing at new permalinks!

There have been plugins to turn Revisions off, but when a new version of WP debuts sometimes those plugins don’t work right away. That’s why I am sharing the manual way to turn off Revisions.

This involves editing core WP files. You do so at your own risk. I am not a WP developer, and I cannot provide support to you if you hobble or destroy your blog. Unlike a plugin, this will not still work after a reinstall or upgrade of WP, so when you move to WP 3.3.1 you need to do it again.

Ready?

In your root directory you have a file called “wp-config.php.” Save a copy of it elsewhere in case you mess things up terribly.

Open wp-config.php and scroll down. At some point you should see a comment that reads “/* Stop editing */” – we will insert our new code just above that.

Insert this code:
/* Disable Revisions Feature */ define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false );If you would rather just limit the revisions that get saved, change as follows:
/* Limit Revisions Feature (by number of revisions) */ define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',6);

While you are here, you could also choose to add a line to define how frequently you would like WP to make single autosaves of your posts, which frequently saves my ass in the case of a browser crash. That code is:
/* Set Auto-Save Timing (in seconds) */ define( 'AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 300 );

Voila! Though WP will still inform you of your revision number in your posts table, it is no longer saving revisions.

Keep in mind, you do still have a number of revisions in your MySQL database, sitting around doing nothing like some vestigial appendix-like organ in your body that may or may not cause a later explosion.

(If you are me, that number of revisions is 250 in the one hour since you installed WP3.3. Yes, I literally make that many edits to CK in an hour. OCD Godzilla is a terrifying beast.)

To do away with them you simply need to delete all of the rows in your post table identified as revisions. Any time you directly edit your MySQL is potentially bad mojo, so I am not going to specifically advocate doing that. However, if you have backed up your DB and know what you are doing, visit WP Recipes for the simple one-line SQL query that will wipe out your revisions.

I hope this helped you! Personally, I get completely frantic when WP updates and one of my old plugins stops working to provide (or, in this case, block) a feature I rely on.

Disaster Recovery

November 9, 2011 by krisis

I like to be in control.

Does this come as a surprise to anyone?

I have a petulant OCD Godzilla tromping around in my gut making demands that must be met. The best way to keep him satisfied is to be utterly in charge of every situation. Things have to be just so. Otherwise, he starts breathing radioactive fire on my gall bladder.

Thus, the utter trainwreck of the past week of my life has me off-balance. OCD Godzilla is not pleased.

It all started when not one, but two of my external hard drives died within a day of each other. Kaput. The end. No chance of data recovery outside of a clean room, a magical place that exists entirely out of my budget to deal with this sort of disaster.

I’m a triple-redundant data keeper, which was the entire point of the extra HDs, so I haven’t lost anything critical. But the time I put in to organizing data, and the cost of the drives … I could have produced an entire new album and then taken a brief, very relaxing vacation.

Next, Gina’s trusty, unbelievably loud Fender amp up and died in the middle of rehearsal last night. Gina’s theory is that it simply could not deal with the power of our rock. That’s flattering, but we only rock at about 3 on the volume knob, so I don’t think that’s the cause. It’s always had a little extraneous buzz, probably indicative of a larger speaker problem.

Lest this rebellion be limited to electronic devices, my body is also rebelling against me. This is OCD Godzilla stomping on my soul, creating havoc from whence there was healthy. He went rogue over the weekend, and then I got super-sick on Monday night as I drove around the wilds of Chadd’s Ford PA, idling in ditches at the side of the road to try to get my bearings.

I typically live such a semi-charmed life that I don’t know what to do with myself in these situations. I can’t carry my data around, which has slowed down my blogging (long story – just trust me). The amp is working intermittently, which is inhibiting rehearsal. I feel like crap, which is putting a damper on all of life in general, and going to the gym in specific.

I don’t know what I’m more afraid of – how many more things can go wrong in a single week, or the state of my insides once my internal control-freak monster is through with his tantrum.