Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
by krisis
This is a post about manually altering your auto_increment value in a MYSQL table. The solution was just obscure enough drive me crazy for a few minutes, so I figured it’s worth blogging for other DIY MYSQL intermediates (including myself) to stumble onto in the future.
The MYSQL query is:
ALTER TABLE Name of Table AUTO_INCREMENT = Next Value
If you don’t understand the query, or why you might use it, keep reading.
by krisis
Scene.
Thirty minutes past the proscribed quitting time I – in sharp gray suit, curly hair tucked under my stereo headphones, and bright red sneakers – sigh with resignation, shut down my computer, and walk out to wait for an elevator.
(I am most likely singing along to an Arcati Crisis song at the top of my lungs while walking in a circle, because that is what I do anytime I am alone and waiting for or riding in an elevator.)
The elevator opens.
In it is our CEO and all three of our SVPs. They grin like a school of sharks.
I sheepishly slide my headphones off of my ears, nod hello, and squeeze in next to the highest ranking woman in the company.
The doors close. The air hangs silent for a moment, and then they continue with the conversation they were having when I arrived.
I am sorely tempted to push a button. The floors pass ever so slowly. Any button. Each floor passes, doors shut and unrelenting.
After what seems like an eternity of biting my lip and pretending not to understand the fine details of their conversation, the elevator finally reaches our upper lobby.
The doors open, and we all hang for a second to see if anyone is going to give anyone else the right of way. “Oh, you first.” “Oh, no, I couldn’t.” “Well, you are the CEO.” “Yes, but…”
Nothing. Silence.
The wait continues. We are in danger of the elevator doors closing and sending us back up for another excruciating ride.
I am dead center – a straight shot out the door. And I am the lowest-ranking employee, so it made sense for me to exit first.
Were the doors beginning to inch shut? I would not survive a ride back up.
Flashpoint. I dart out of the elevator … at the exact same moment that the highest ranking woman in the company also makes a break for it.
She was, after all, the only woman in the elevator.
We collide.
In the continuing silence my world slips into impossibly slow motion – I feel my cushy hips rebound sideways off of her slight frame, feel as though I can hear my cellulite churning to reform itself.
It is not just a little bump, either. No. It is a straight on, full-contact body-check straight out of raucous-yet-executive game of deck hockey. I pray futilely that the the men will all pile on (or at least cheer) to make the moment less awkward.
If only.
Finally, my forward motion arrested mostly by utter mortification, I turn back to regard my partner. She is askew, as if I delivered said body check followed by a headlock/noogie combo.
Hers is the laugh of drops of water slicking off of an icicle.
“In a hurry?”
Scene.
(ps: Dear management: I redacted all of the names and sensitive information. And the mean parts. Particularly the word “bony,” which I had mistakenly used twice. So, please do not Dooce me. Thank you.)
by krisis
I woke up on Friday at 6:30 without my alarm.
On any other weekday I’ll be thrilled for this god-send of an early rise, likely to deliver me into my cube an hour early.
Except, I had off on Friday. And, I had awoken not because I was well-rested. No. No, not because of streaming sunlight interrupting my quiet repose, either.
I awoke because of the pain.
It was an unspecific, fuzzy ache even with the very bottom of my sternum. I generally have a high tolerance for specific pain and a low tolerance for general discomfort, and this split the two uncannily well.
Probably a stomach thing, I thought. I had overeaten to the maximum limit the day before … four donuts, three sections of tuna hoagie, two veggie burger pitas, and one delightfully large dose of peanut butter before bed. Probably all of the eating.
I walked around for a few minutes, checked WebMD but grew frustrated with its persistent braying about the possibility I was in cardiac arrest, and went back to bed.
I got up again at 7:28.
This time the pain was much more insistent, and it had no intentions of letting me sleep in. Or, really, of letting me sleep at all. Or do anything else for that matter, including walking outside or singing or going out to dinner – all things I might like to do on my day off.
Yes, insistent it was, and persistent too. I would up beached on the couch for the majority of the day, sitting alone and miserable while Elise headed out for the night rather than going to dinner at Striped Bass as we had plan. The pain was omni-present but far enough below my threshold that I would feel patently silly going to the ER to do anything about it. How could one day of overeating – three-fourths of which was entirely healthy and non-toxic – cause all this misery?
It wasn’t until the next morning that I finally put two and two together by stepping back further from my donut binge.
You see, prior to the donuts I had my typical fistful (600? 1200? really, who can say?) of ibuprofen on an empty stomach. Well, not entirely empty, because the evening before I had another typical fistful before bed.
That prior fistful wasn’t on an empty stomach, though. It was on a veggie burger and a number of beers.
I had an uncharacteristic mid-week night out to scout out Just Like Me at the Khyber on the behalf of Lyndzapalooza, and afterwards the already uncharacteristic night turned super-unusual when I wound up having a bit of a guys hour with two friends from my former a cappella life. Between the Khyber and our eventual visit to my official designated spring/summer bar, National Mechanics, I had a fair number of beers.
(This doesn’t really figure into the story, but I saw another terrific band – Parker House & Theory – who I have a major crush on at the moment. Their CD release is this Thursday in Boston. I’ll maybe remember to post about them separately, but we all know how those promises go, so best to mention them here.)
Now, mind you, this was still a work night, so I had been cautious – those beers were ingested over the course of several hours, and I did a bit of dancing and walking in that time, so by the time I got home I was only slightly inebriated, and with plenty of time to sleep prior to work. Still – mindful that I am typically a cocktail drinker and hoping to having a productive morning at work – I took that first typical fistful of ibuprofen as a preemptive strike on any possible morning fuzziness. When I awoke said fuzziness was nowhere to be found, but I took another fistful just to be sure (and, as it happens, had quite a upbeat day at the office).
Now, I’m not too much up on my general medical diagnoses – last time I was in the hospital I was convinced my appendix was exploding, but I in fact had an irritated bowel. However, even with my basic knowledge I know that alcohol, NSAIDs on empty stomachs, and sugary sweets can all contribute to an ulcer and, as it happens, I had ingested slightly higher than average quantities of all three in exactly that order .
Yes, it was certainly an ulcer.
With a better-than-dubious home diagnosis in place Saturday and today proved to be much more pleasant than their predecessor. I loaded up on medical and homeopathic remedies, and my stomach has been converted from thunderdome to a plush, well-lined (though sparsely furnished) bachelor pad.
For the record, to achieve that you want to stick exclusively to my personal variation on the Bananas, Rice, Apples, Toast diet (BRAT) – which omits apples and fulfills the rice requirement with a combination of sushi and Rice Dream ice cream – all while ingesting some combination of OTC Prilosec, Evening Primrose Oil, and Deglycyrrhizinated Licorice (DGL), the latter of which has perhaps the highest foul-taste to efficaciousness ratio I’ve ever encountered in my life.
(Seriously, it tastes like black licorice blended with mashed up aspirin and garden soil. Its label cheerfully suggests “it’s chewable, because saliva enhances the effect of DGL’s natural compounds,” which is worth pointing out because chewing it up and swishing it around in your mouth goes strictly against your natural impulse, which is that it is poison and will surely kill you. But, truthfully, it knocks out any flare of symptoms in about ten minutes flat.)
In any event, I feel fine now, except for I feel like I was in a time warp for the last 72 hours, and that rather than heading to work in the morning I should just now be gearing up for my glorious Friday off from work.
On the plus side, I can now add “cultivating an ulcer” to the list of things I am really good at doing without even trying.
by krisis
I’m often at a loss for what to do with myself when we visit Elise’s families in New Jersey. At home, or at any friend’s house, my default position is guitar playing – it gives me something to do with my hands in idle moments so that I don’t feel like I have to carry on a non-stop conversation at all times.
I don’t usually bring my guitar with me to NJ, which means the families haven’t witnessed this particular phenomenon too often, but Elise was planning to leave me marooned while she went on a wedding dress tour, and I needed a way to pass the time. I added a wonderful new “print-version” feature to my lyrics database, so for the trip I printed out sheaf of my fifty most incomplete songs to workshop while Elise was out on her wedding whirlwind.
Isn’t that a little crazy – fifty songs that are unfinished and still relatively new?
I really vacillate about this sort of thing. At this point Gina and I have a solid sixteen song set, and I have ten or twenty of my strongest songs that go in and out of solo rotation. It’s a comfortable point to be at, but then I look at my freaking database and I see all of these unfinished songs – some of which I really adore and like to play, such as they are in their unfinished state. And, since my current setlist is heavily influenced by my 2003-04 stuff, there are incomplete songs hanging around that are about to be four years old.
Four years old! Which is a problem when I have a whole new fleet of unfinished songs to be working through – I only have so much headspace to to to push these things forward. So, I sat down with my sheaf today and had a touch of a workshop. I re-notated a few things in a more complete fashion, and I think finished one from 2001 – “4th of July” – once and for all.
All that rehearsal meant I was plenty limber for my post-dinner conversational gambit. Except, these are people who aren’t used to my schtick – that I like sit and underscore a conversation without needing anyone to pay attention to me, and that if there’s a lull I might sing for a bit before tucking my voice back under the din.
It made for a few awkward moments … I don’t know that Elise’s father has ever heard me play my own songs before? Certainly not songs about his daughter, anyhow. But, they won’t be getting rid of me anytime soon so they might as well get used to the incessant underscoring of my life. Along the way I turned in possibly my best vocal of all time on the bridge of “Love Me Not,” and also a very respectable version of the recently on-hiatus “Little Love.”
All of which is why I need to go home tomorrow and record a Trio. And then I need to record another another one. And then another. And so on.
Right. But, first I need to drink this glass of wine. And maybe another one.
G’nite.
by krisis
Tonight we took in a bit of high school theatre, watching Elise’s (and, hey, soon my!) younger brother in his first ever play.
I’m self-aware enough of a blogger not to regale you with a blow by blow of his performance, but it did recall a certain memory of the last time I witnessed any pre-collegiate theatre.
It was in the same auditorium, seen with the same company, possible seated in the same row as tonight, again watching another of my soon-to-be-siblings on stage – this time Elise’s sister.
The main difference was that we were on the other end of our relationship; we had been dating three weeks at the time, and the show was a prelude to my first time meeting Elise’s family.
After the show I milled to and fro, self-conscious and worried about first impressions, while Elise ducked backstage to say hello to former costars. She was still connected to her school – certainly more than she was connected to me.
Tonight she picked those old cast members’ younger sibling out of the playbill, more mine than anyone else’s.
I like this life.
(Also, let it be said that Elise’s brother rocks incredibly; he’s like a better, more talented version of teenaged me. He’s made me – who from an early age had vowed to strangle any potential siblings in the cradle – really re-think my position this whole only-child thing.)