Posts from — December 2009

This is, most likely, the last Roundup of 2009.  The Creme de la Creme falls on a Friday and while an orgy of blog posts upon an orgy of blog posts sounds delightful, I have to assume that the Creme trumps the weekly Roundup.  Therefore, this is it.  Goodbye Friday Blog Roundups of the aughts.  Hello Friday Blog Roundups of the teens.  The tens?  The teens?  What is the next decade called?

Had I realized this prior to today, I would have sent off the year with a fireworks display and parade of elephants.

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The Weekly What If: What if you had unlimited funds to buy one object or experience (read: must be purchasable.  It could be a trip, but it couldn’t, let’s say, be a round of IVF or paying the agency fee) for another person in the blogosphere as a Christmas present?  Would you give it anonymously or would they be able to figure out it was you?  And what would it be?

Added: uh, uh, y’all.  It has to be a purchasable gift to give someone.  We’re talking hedonism, here–not good deeds.  I, for one, would buy Jendeis a Wii so we could play each other via the Internet from our houses when we’re feeling too lazy to cross the bridge.

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I am having a lot of trouble with one section of the Creme de la Creme which is the blogs that closed in 2009 section.  If you have any blogs in your Reader that have clearly stated that they are closing, blogs that you used to read that have been deleted, or blogs that literally haven’t updated since last January, send the name to me with “closed blog” in the subject line.  I have a handful, but I know that I’m missing dozens.  Hundred?  Thousands?

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And now, the blogs…

Barren Blog has the story about her egg retrieval.  She tells the story with humour and grace, leaving no detail out and because of that, she gives a heads up to every woman who will come after her in this process.  And even though I’ve read a lot of egg retrieval posts these last four years, this one was particularly helpful and well-written.

MeAndBaby’s Blog has a post that begins with a quote by Lance Armstrong: pain is temporary; quitting lasts forever.  It’s the perspective she brings to her 8th IUI after numerous losses; it’s the strength that powers her words.  By the end of the post, you’re cheering her on and I just send good thoughts and hope for this cycle.

Adventures in Reality has a post about the different grief processes after two different losses.  As she explains: “I’m not the same person. Losing Daniel took a piece of my heart. And losing Joy took another piece.”  I love this post not only for her perspective, but because she retells the story of my friend, Paz.  The first time I read this post, there was something familiar in the story she talks about reading, and in the second read-through I suddenly said, “this is Paz!  And I know that Starbucks!”  And it made me smile that our corner of the blogosphere is so small.  It was like finding out that two of your friends know each other and you never knew they were in the same circle.  Her unfulfilled due date for the baby she mentions in this post is coming up this weekend and it would be lovely to flood her with love right now.

Lastly, A Woman My Age has a post about being tired, happy, and annoyed.  In lieu of a shower, she held an open house so people could meet her new son.  Which is both the tired and happy part–that joyous sleepiness from having too much on your plate, but thankful that it’s all there.  The annoyed part is the unsolicited advice coming from all directions.  I love this post because it feels cozy.  It made me smile.

The roundup to the Roundup: The winding down of 2009.  Answer the Weekly What If (think of it as the ability to send a virtual gift to someone).  Help me with the “closed blogs” section of the Creme de la Creme.  And lots of great blog posts to read.  Merry Christmas, if you are celebrating Christmas today.

Show and Tell is wasted on elementary schoolers. Join several dozen bloggers weekly to show off an item, tell a story, and get the attention of the class. In other words, this is Show and Tell 2.0. Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today. So yank out a photo of the worst bridesmaid’s dress you ever wore and tell us the story; show off the homemade soup you cooked last night; or tell us all about the scarf you made for your first knitting project. Details on how to participate are located at the bottom of this post.

Let’s begin.

We got our own Wii as a Chanukkah gift from Josh’s parents which meant that not only could we finally return Lindsay’s Wii (thank you, Lindsay!), but we could also make our own Miis.  Er…which is to say “me” in Wii-language.  Your Mii is the little electronic version of you on the screen that you see replicating the movements you’re making in real life.  So if I jog in place, my Mii moves on the screen.

After we made everyone in our family, we made two additional Miis for others to use when they come over.  They are fraternal boy-girl twins, 35-years in age, named Pru and Henry.

I think I might be falling in love with them.

We’ve begun constructing a very detailed history of their lives as a family.  The four of us talk about them as if they’re real people that we know, chuckling about a funny thing we pretend Henry said that day (oh that Henry!) or wondering what Pru is having for lunch.  The Wolvog announced yesterday, apropos of nothing, that Henry has gotten a dog named “Arf Arf Nigel” after the John Lennon poem.  And now we have constructed a fictional life for his dog as well.

Prudence is on the far left.  She has been trying to have a child with her wife for the last two years.  They’re currently gearing up for another round of IVF–this time using Pru’s egg and her wife’s womb.  She is a librarian and works exclusively with electronic sources.  She speaks Italian–not very well, but enough to get around Italy.  She spent a semester in Florence back in college and went back to Italy between college and graduate school to live in Rome.  She has a tattoo, but you can’t see it when she has her clothes on.

Henry is still trying to find himself.  He’s on the far right.  Huge heart–so giving and loving and thoughtful, but also so irresponsible.  He thought he wanted to be an environmental educator in Costa Rica, but then he realized it was just taking douchebag tourists around and he was fired for showing up to work stoned (oh that Henry!).  He just makes poor choices, though his heart is always in the right place.  As Josh says, “he’s sweet, but dumb.”  He has a sleep disorder and Pru is worried about him, but she already has a lot on her plate.

They come on the screen, even when they’re not in use.  When I’m jogging around the island, I’ll pass them running in the opposite direction.  They show up to cheer me on when I’m bicycling.  Aren’t you smitten with them too?

I have started a site that records my daily workout in case anyone else wants to make the commitment to lose weight in the new year using the Wii Fit.  The site is called The Shrinking Ass and it refers not only to my derriere, but to my ass-y-ness in general.  I will be posting the on-going sagas of Pru and Henry in that space as well as my daily workout and calories burned.

If you are also making the commitment to lose weight and keeping a similar online journal, let me know and I’ll add you to the sidebar so we can have a supportive web-ring for everyone working out and we can trade routines.

What are you showing today?

Click here or scroll down to the bottom of this post if this is your first time joining along (Important: link to the permalink for the post, not the main url for your blog and use your blog’s name, not your name. Links not going to a Show and Tell post will be deleted). The list is open from now until late Friday night and a new one is posted every week.

Updated at the bottom

Perhaps too serious a blog post for the days before Christmas, but something that I think needs to be discussed nonetheless.  Feel free to save and read when you’re in a different space.

Like all college freshman who thought they were massively deep, I took an intro to psych course.  And long before we actually got to the unit that covered the story of Kitty Genovese and the concept of the bystander effect, I had sat staring at her picture and scaring myself with the brief story about her murder accompanying her photograph.

In 1964, while at least 12 people watched from their windows or listened from their bedrooms, a woman was murdered in New York, stabbed to death while she screamed for help.  It was 3:15 in the morning, but more than one person served as a witness afterward, and another had shouted at the attacker to leave her alone.  The attack took about a half hour and included a second round of stabbings and a rape.  The woman died on the way to the hospital.

The murder of Kitty Genovese created two ideas–diffusion of responsibility and the bystander effect.  The first is the idea that the more people who witness an event, the less likely help will come because each will believe that another person has already called for help.  The way to counteract this is to direct your request at a certain person.  I was always told to make eye contact with someone or point and scream, “you; call for help.”  Because then responsibility is placed on a person and they are more likely to carry through as to not suffer guilt afterward.  The bystander effect is a similar concept in that the threshold seems (generally agreed) to be three people.  If you have more than three people witnessing a cry for help, people will feel more uncomfortable about jumping in and getting involved.  Fewer than three and you’re more likely to have all three come to your aid.

Which is something I’ve come to notice online.  The support per reader is probably greater the smaller the blog.  While there has been no scientific studies done (as far as I know from a few quick Google searches), I have to believe from anecdotal evidence that while a person with five readers will likely collect four comments on a post that indirectly solicits support, a person with 500 readers may receive 25 comments.  The gap between the number of eyes on the words and the support given is larger in proportion to the readership.

It’s just something I’ve noticed.

This week, a woman tweeted for her followers to call 911 immediately and gave her address in her Twitter feed.  She had been depressed prior to that moment and while some people close to her took action, the vast majority stood around discussing it.  700+ people read the Tweet.  Only a handful called.

And it’s not that people didn’t care about the mental well-being of another person, but a cry for help online requires several elements to line up to be feasible.  One, it requires eyes to see the tweet or blog post.  She may have 700+ followers, but how many had their eyes trained on their Twitter feed in that moment of time?  Two, it requires people to know personal information about you beyond an email address.  This woman provided her home address in the tweet, but for the most part, other stories similar to this one contain a cry for help and the listeners impotent to do something.  I may know your last follicle count or your beta doubling times, but except for a handful of people, I don’t know your home address or phone number or any way to reach where you physically are to help.

Three, everyone needs to overcome the online bystander effect whose pull I think is stronger than the face-to-face bystander effect.  It is too easy to pretend you didn’t see the call for help, to assume someone else already has it covered, to question your intimacy with the person and feel like you’re overstepping a boundary to reach in and help.  If people are squeamish about commenting on a new blog, how brave are we to pick up the phone and call the police in another town to report that someone needs help?

The other side of this that struck me is the psychological implications on the online bystanders.  When there are cries for help in our face-to-face world, they usually come from a person close to us and they come in a private form.  We pick up on a strange vibe and ask what’s wrong.  They send us a note, make a phone call.  Rarely do we have someone stand up in the middle of a church service and frantically announce to 300 parishioners at once that they’re scared they’re going to kill ourselves.

And we do it this way because even though we may rely on our communities for support, we also don’t place the burden of responsibility on the individual members.  We place this burden on those who are supposed to help us with our struggles via unwritten social contracts.  Which is why I think it stings so bitterly when a family member acts callously when you are in deep emotional pain about infertility, but the actions of an office worker usually warrant a scathing blog post or a “you’re never going to believe this” email to a friend.  We expect our family and close friends to come to our aid if we’re considering harming ourselves.  We don’t necessarily expect the man who sits two pews behind us to come to our aid unless he inadvertently crashes into the situation in the right place at the right time.

And yet, not everyone has friends or family in their face-to-face world who are listening to them.  Who are hearing them or expressing care about them.

But how would those 700+ Twitter followers felt if they hadn’t answered her call for help and she had harmed herself?  What responsibility do we have to others in an online community both in terms of giving support and not placing unfathomable amounts of responsibility on a stranger who may be thousands of miles away?

This incident comes on the heels of a mother who tweeted immediately after her son drowned and while these two are not related in the sense that one specifically asked for help from readers while the others connected with followers for support, I couldn’t help but have them move together magnetically in my head.

If you saw that someone was depressed in a blog post, would you click away without leaving words of support? What if there were no comments yet and few comments on older posts?  What if there were already 400 comments in place?  Would that make a difference on your response and why?  In other words, is there an online bystander effect where you feel more responsibility to act in some situations over others?

What is our responsibility to each other as witnesses?  And what is our responsibility to the potential witnesses who encounter our struggles or grief?

In the United States, we have a phone line–1-800-273-TALK (8255) which is the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.  All people should know this number and be able to pass it along to a friend–online or face-to-face–in need.

Update:

The comments are giving a lot of food for thought.  I just wanted to clarify that I meant specifically a post where someone states that they are depressed, where they are worried about harming themselves, where they think no one cares about them or life would be better off without them.  I’m not talking about posts that relay bad news, or where the person is mourning a loss (either recent or past).  I am talking about the sort of post or tweet where the person is clearly in a place of danger at the time the post was written and without any follow up information, you must assume the person is still in a place of danger.

Which sort of gets to another question.  I have a friend who will call me in a crisis, I will talk her through things, and then she never follows up to tell me how the situation resolved until the next time she returns with a new crisis.  And I have to admit that while I’m worrying between phone calls, trying to reach her and leaving her messages of support, there is another part of me that is constantly annoyed that she leaves me in a state of panic while she knows that she has entered a place of calm.

That has been a similar complaint when crises online arise, including this woman who tweeted that people should call 911 (and to answer Mina, I believe she tweeted it to see if someone would respond–and therefore show the care that was needed.  I think Perez Hilton tweeted instead of calling 911 himself for attention.  If he privately called 911 himself, received aid and kept it quiet, the other person wouldn’t have been “publicly punished”).  A day passed before she posted again that she was okay and at her ex-husband’s house.  There are times when a person can’t get back online and post an update, but there are other times when a long, ominous silence follows a difficult post or tweet, intensifying the fear.  I’m not saying this is an intentional act, but that we need to be mindful that when we involve strangers in our crisis, that we are affecting them psychologically.

Everyone has the choice to walk away from the blogosphere.  You can take all the support you want and then simply disappear without explanation or closure–it is entirely within the person’s right.  But I do think that those who come back and give closure uphold their end of an unwritten social contract.  That it shows that we understand others become invested in our emotional well-being by reading our words and that all people have incredible power to affect others emotionally.  If we’ve worked to foster this connection, it would serve all people involved to give closure to a connection as well.

Granted, I’m not Christian.  My understanding of Christmas is based on Hallmark-y movies and Hallmark-y music.  I’ve listened to friends talk about Christmas and read blogs and seen Love Actually at least 14 times.  I come at Christmas as an outsider since my Christmas is generally a stress-free day of volunteer work and movies.  And, at the same time, I know how it feels to be infertile and left out on other holidays and this is how I perceive Christmas must feel for those experiencing infertility or loss.

Imagine there is a holiday called the Great Peanut Celebration. People get together to celebrate the peanut, serving peanut butter cookies and peanut ale. There are other foods on the table as well, but peanuts are the prominent ingredient because it is, after all, the Great Peanut Celebration! Every store is decorated with little sparkle lights shaped like peanuts and everywhere you go, people call out: “Have a Peanuty Day!” There are performances celebrating the peanut and commercials reminding you to eat peanuts and constant newspaper articles about peanuts. After you attend the GPC party at your office, you have to go spend the day with family and friends opening presents while munching on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Oh…and you’re allergic to peanuts.

But don’t worry because there will also be plain jelly sandwiches on the table. Though it really sucks that you can’t eat peanuts. Of course, we’ll all ask you if you’ve tried some newfangled epi-pen that we read about in some magazine and we’ll lament how you can’t eat peanuts and we’ll rub your arm and tell you, “I hope you get to eat peanuts next year because peanuts taste so good.”

And that’s what I imagine Christmas is like for those experiencing infertility or loss.

Peanut allergies can be life-threatening whereas infertility is life-style threatening, so it isn’t the perfect analogy, but I can’t imagine another holiday other than Mother’s Day and Father’s Day which is more child-focused. The entire holiday is about a child–a newborn baby–and everyone going to see this newborn baby. At least at Easter, Christ is a man. But at Christmas, he’s that perfect newborn being celebrated by his parents and community.

There are non-child-focused ways to celebrate Christmas–making out under the mistletoe would be a bit risque for the average school child–but at its core, the holiday is about a baby and the traditions are about family. Getting through the average day with all of the inadvertent reminders of what you don’t have–seeing pregnant bellies while you wait in line, navigating the baby aisles at the food store, or driving behind a car with the “baby on board” bumper sticker–seems like nothing when you drop onto the normal load the weight of all the hopes and dreams people have wrapped up in holidays.

The options are either to leave the traditional celebrations behind–opting to go away on vacation or hunker down in your own home–or take a deep breath and continue with plans as normal. I was talking with a friend this weekend and she lamented that since Christmas had always been her favourite holiday, something she looked forward to all year, it was doubly painful to skip it; to not put up the tree or listen to the music or join in the happiness she always felt prior to learning about her infertility. “You only get so many Christmases in life and I’m wasting them,” she said.

I’m not sure there is a way to bend the holiday to fit the situation any more than celebrating your own mother on Mother’s Day makes you forget that you’re not a mother yet yourself or that you lost your child. Back at Thanksgiving, I made suggestions to get through the holidays, but perhaps more important, more of a boost to get you through Christmas morning breakfast, is the knowledge that you’re not alone. That there are countless other people struggling with the holiday because they also have someone missing from their lives on a holiday that is about a family forming.

How are you getting through the holidays?

mostly cross-posted with BlogHer

To the person who found my blog by googling “how to throw sperm higher”…I am so sorry.  You were probably in a great mood, tossing your sperm around, hoping to perhaps make it an Olympic event, looking for that technique that would get it even higher in the air.  And instead of finding directions on how to flick your penis to get the sperm directly onto your ceiling, you were confronted with tales from my Uterus of Doom.  Sperm go in there never to be seen or heard from again.

I’m not sure how I ended up being the #1 ranked site on Google for that phrase.

Today is a snow day.  It started last night; huge, soft flakes that are piling up on the trees and bushes.  I have to go downstairs to start the soup in a few hours.  Butternut squash soup with homemade breadsticks and a salad.  Snow food.

They are saying that this storm will be as bad as the one that hit the East Coast in 2003.  I was stuck in Detroit for several days at my friend’s apartment because I couldn’t get a flight back.  It was right when we were starting treatments and I finished up a cycle while I was there.  I randomly bumped into a person I knew from college who was my age and already had three children.  The next day, my friend had to go to work and I spent the day deep in grief, watching old episodes of ER and organizing my friend’s linen closet.  I vacuumed every crevice of her apartment and then took apart the vacuum and cleaned out every piece.  That’s how I spent the last huge snow storm.

I’m not really good with being snowed in, but if I had to be snowed in somewhere, her apartment was a good place.  It would also be nice to be snowed in with my siblings or one of my sister-cousins.  And entering into an idealized space, I think it could be quite nice to be snowed in with Jon Stewart.  He’d probably be very amusing and narrate our games of Mah Jongg.  And it could be fun to be snowed in with the Beatles (er…pretending the Beatles are all still alive) and have them sing to us as well as join us in our daily meditation time.  And being snowed in with Alton Brown would be delicious because he’d not only help us cook really interesting things based on what we have in our pantry, but he’d also probably give us all these really interesting tidbits of information with the recipes.  Plus, he could clean out our kitchen utensil drawer.  Oh, and the Mythbuster guys because they’d probably be handy to have around if we lost power.

On the other hand, it is sort of a nightmare of mine to be snowed in with Brad Pitt.  Or Paris Hilton.  I would also probably weep openly if we ended up with a stranded entomologist if he was carrying any bugs with him (I once lived with an entomologist, but she never brought home any work so it was okay.  Plus, she decorated our apartment with bead curtains which sort of canceled out the fact that she touched crickets all day).

Who are your ideal snow-in compatriots–either people you know or people you imagine would be good people to be stuck with in a storm (or come up with a list of both and why)–and who would be a snowed-in nightmare?