Trisha Cornelius

Figuring it out as I go

Snippets that I don’t want to throw away

Hello Blog,

This is a snippet that has been living in my drafts folder since January and I don’t want to throw it away. It does not have a clear beginning and conclusion.  But I think that the snippet has enough worth to stand on its own:

Terry Pratchett once wrote that it is the dream that we can go back and tell our younger selves what we know now and then act with the knowledge and wisdom that we have acquired. Being, Terry Pratchett, he of course takes it a step further and reminds us that who we are then bares very little resemblance to who we are when we are older, because you then are in fact a tit, who needs all of the stuff ahead of you to happen to you in order to become who you are in the present.

One of my friends relayed a parenting theory to me that in the three weeks before and after a child’s birthday they are more emotionally charged than usual. And, when we discussed it made sense to me, and it reminded me that as much as I don’t make a huge fuss about birthdays (although that is changing, and I am seeing them as a reason to celebrate existence simply because we exist) I do tend to go through a little bit of a stock-taking exercise each year around them. (I definitely did stock taking before entering in my thirties, and I am pleased to say that I find my thirties to be the most enjoyable decade yet, the one where I am happier with who I am, and more confident in being my true self, rather than the self that I think the world would like more, and discovering that the world likes me plenty enough as I am, and those who don’t, don’t. And it is okay that not everyone likes me. )

Love and incomplete posts,
Trisha

Women who have shaped me

Hello Blog,

Over the past little while I have spent a bit of time reflecting of what has gone into the cauldron that has shaped me. Specifically, the women who are not necessarily close to me, who don’t know me, but who have shaped my views*. Last week Saturday I went to an evening function and needed to choose an outfit. One of the outfit’s that I tried on, was a form fitting beaded black dress, and while I was looking at my reflection and tucking in my tummy, the thought crossed my mind: “Venus de Milo, didn’t tuck in her tummy, and I don’t’ have to”. This thought allowed me to shift my mindset and acknowledge that the dress was very pretty. (I chose to wear slacks and a different pretty blouse, but I did not feel ugly or fat when I was wearing the beaded dress).  I credit my shift in mindset of becoming a kinder, more gentle person to myself to a number of woman who I don’t have a reciprocal relationship* with but who have collectively broken through a societal narrative that beauty falls within a very narrow ambit.

The women and the messages that I have specifically, been thinking of are (in no particular order):

  • Amanda Palmer, from whom I have taken the message to live authentically as myself, knowing that not everyone is going to like you but that you will still be safe in your tribe. (I think the words of the Ukulele Anthem are words to live by)
  • Marian Call, on embracing my geekiness, and whose song “I’ll Still Be A Geek After Nobody Thinks It’s Chic” often pull me back to myself
  • Kim Boekbinder, who has in little ways reminded me to believe in myself. She is not a hugely famous rockstar, (yet), but a fiercely independent soul whose art (both music and words) has helped me heal myself in ways that I cannot quite describe, nor know that I needed to be healed.
  • Samantha Smith, on embracing my “inner bitch”, and not being afraid to be assertive when I need to be. This was the most recent piece of the puzzle for me, and I have become a much happier person, for not believing that I need to be nice the whole time. (I was lucky enough to meet her when I went to a Supernatural Convention in San Francisco last December and she was an amazing person).
  • Karen Walrond, who inspired me to look for the light when I was experiencing a major depressive episode and whose insights I collect and they pop out of my head at the most opportune moments.
  • Jennifer Lawson, the Bloggess, who lives openly with an autoimmune disease and some mental health issues, and probably helped me handle last year’s brush with Hashimoto’s better than I would otherwise have, and who gifted the world and me with the mantra #depressionlies.

These are some of the woman who have helped me become who I am, and who I am incredibly grateful to.

Love and reflections,
Trisha

*There is an entirely different collection of people who do know me and who have also put a lot of ingredients into the cauldron of who I am, but this post is not about them…it is about the people who I don’t have a two-sided relationship with.

Keeping Track in 2018

Hello World,

2018 seems to be flying by. Towards the end of last year I created a an excel workbook of things that I wanted to do in the coming year fully aware that I might not get half of them done. One of these sheets includes books that I am planning on reading for my professional development (I have a separate shelf in my bookshelf for some history books that I want to read as well).

Part of me is a bit concerned that I am rushing ahead at too fast a pace, that I will need to recalibrate things. But I think it is a case that I should rather just track things and stretch and try and figure things as I go along as well. There is no pressure to knock every item off the list, it is a stretch goal. Perhaps, I will do it slow and sporadically with big things every once in a while but I am trying to be consistent and get the things that matter more sorted.

It is also useful to keep track of where things that seem unproductive get done, for example I needed to have someone come and measure part of my ceiling to come and replace it where it got water damaged from a leaking geyser. All of the little admin that takes time that just needs to get done.

With every goal on the spreadsheet I set out a criteria for evaluating completeness, which was surprisingly difficult to do. And then I played around with some conditional formatting so that when I mark the items as complete with a Y, the rows turn green.

There are a total of 44 things to get done on the list which I broadly categorised as administrative, personal, professional, creative and health goals. There are 42 books that I want to read. I have only completed the one, the Sketchnote handbook and I will post some notes about it in the near future, but it has changed my way of notetaking completely.

In addition to the main sheet which keeps track of the overall goals, I have created a summary sheet and so far I have been adding weekly sheets with a bit of planning on them as well. I think that being able to see everything that I need to do (and add in additional bits) is helping me figure out where I am and what I am getting done. A lot of what I do is repetitive administrative tasks and because you only really see the results if they are not done rather than the results of the work being done I think this is a way of re-assuring myself that my invisible work matters.

Okay, enough rambling.

Love and plans,
Trisha

New Year’s Day Technical Trouble: Fixing the White Screen of Death caused by WordFence

Hello Blog,

On New Year’s I decided to write my new year’s wish, and when I came to visit my site it gave me the white screen of death (WSOD).  (For the blessedly uninitiated, the white screen of death refers to the empty browser window filled with white instead of your WordPress installation). My reaction was along the line of: “Seriously! Exactly two years ago my site was down like this. I am through with [REDACTED hosting company name]”. New Year’s day is a difficult day for me, being the anniversary of my dad’s death. But, unlike two years ago I felt that I could do my own technical support. I settled in to fix my blog. Step zero was making a complete backup of the server.

My first port of call was to start a technical support chat with the hosting company’s technical support. (Based on issues I have had along the way with them I was not entirely unconvinced that they had messed up. Spoiler: they hadn’t) So, the helpful guy on the other end of the chat had a quick look and came back with the verdict that it looked like WordFence was causing issues on my site.

It is definitely prudent to run a Web Application Firewall (WAF) on any WordPress site at the moment, but I admit my frustration that my site’s downtime was caused by the very thing that is meant to protect it. I have neither reached out to WordFence, nor looked through their documentation, in order to see whether I was just particularly unlucky or there is a known issue that was causing the particular crash.

Once I established that WordFence was the issue I went into my cPanel (you can just as easily do it through an FTP client) and began renaming the plugin folder. This gave me some progress, instead of getting a WSOD I instead got the error message:

Warning: Unknown: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0 
Warning: Unknown: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0 
Fatal error: Unknown: Failed opening required '*/wordfence-waf.php' (include_path='.:/opt/cpanel/ea-php70/root/usr/share/pear') in Unknown on line 0

This meant that I had something to Google which led me to find that WordFence adds some php to the user.ini file, and that I needed to delete:

php_value auto_prepend_file '/home/public_html/wordfence-waf.php'

from it. Thank you to wfasa for her reply on a ticket in the WordPress.org support thread which allowed me to figure this out.

That should have taken care of the initial error, but when I tried to access my site again (even after clearing my browser’s cache) I got that same error.  Between myself and the  support agent, we figured that W3TC might be presenting the cached error messages instead of the site. And so, next step in this mission was to disable W3TC without having access to the /wp-admin dashboard.

This was where things got slightly more technical. Firstly, because I needed access to the .htaccess file I needed to change my control panel’s settings to view hidden files. My Google-fu took me to a helpful post by Journal Xtra on how to remove W3TC manually. I was battling to get his fix to work with my wp-config.php permission set to 755 so I decreased the permissions to 644 (I don’t have sufficient server side knowledge to know if this was a bizarre quirk, something related to the cPanel issues I was having due to my Firefox preferences of opening links in a new tab (eventually I was doing the technical things in Chrome), or something unrelated that got tweaked along the way). After permissions were set to 644 and I had deleted:

  • w3-total-cache-config.php
  • db.php
  • advanced-cache.php

I edited my .htaccess to remove the blocks of code inserted by both WordFence and W3TC. This was made easy and stress free by the fact that I had done a complete backup of the files on the server before I started tinkering and that the code inserted into the .htaccess by both plugins was clearly commented out.

Finally, when I refreshed my site and was greeted by my WordPress installation. I then eventually, hours after I had planned to was able to write my post).

[Sidenote: When I rename files or folders like this I literally append _renamed to the folder or file because it changes the path and makes it super easy to find what you have changed. When you are doing this type of thing you really should keep track of what you are changing for two reasons, one so you can replicate the fix in the future and two so you can undo the fix in the present if you mess something up. ]

Love and fixing my own stuff,
Trisha

A New Year’s Wish for 2018 and some bits about grief

Hello world,

This is something that I shamelessly stole from Neil Gaiman. The idea of a New Year’s wish, even though this year he did not make a wish for us:

I still have a wish, on this difficult day. My wish for 2018 is that you find your balance. May you find the balance between taking care of yourself and looking out for others. May you find the balance between the frost and the fire. May you find the balance between fighting fights that need to be fought and walking away so that you are not always fighting.  May you find the way to channel our destructive emotions into useful things and use it to find your balance.

Love and balance,
Trisha

P.S. As I typed the wish I realized how much of this was inspired by Sir Terry Pratchett’s Wintersmith and I Shall Wear Midnight.

***

Today marks two years since my dad was murdered. This time two years ago I was getting ready to spend the night at my parents-in-law’s house after I had come to my childhood home and seen that the horror of the truth of a phone call that I hoped was a terrible mistake was a harsh reality. And so, on this difficult day I am grateful for music that helps me feel. The specific song that called to me now was Song for my Father by Kim Boekbinder. A haunting piece of music, whose lyrics I identify with:

In between me and you
are a million points of light,
I’ve cast them up into a darkening sky.
You can follow them to me
when you are lost or you are free
and I will wait here, I will wonder why.

I don’t presume to know the meaning that Kim Boekbinder intended, but I know that for me the idea that my dad tossed up a million points of light into the darkening sky to guide me is comforting. Death doesn’t end relationships, it changes them to be one sided and made up of memories and interpretations. I was always a daddy’s girl. Ironically after I became a mother I now identify more strongly with her and understand her more, but she is also gone, but naturally (even though suddenly as well).

And I know in the music and the memories I will always find my dad.

Love and grief,
Trisha

Tactical retreat

Generally my anxiety and depression are quite well managed and under control. At the moment, specifically, my depression is misbehaving.

I don’t think that there are any particular triggers at the moment. I just know that it is hard. Part of me is telling myself to carry on regardless to just fight through. The wiser part of me knows that the best thing to do is pause, acknowledge that this particular battle is a difficult one. This part of me knows that there is no shame in taking a breather, giving myself space and cutting myself some slack. I will not lose my war, but I am going to retreat from battles that I cannot win. And that is a victory on its own.