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Ship of Me

I am a few weeks away from a milestone birthday, making me sentimental and reflective.

Do you know the Ship of Theseus thought experiment? It comes from the story of Theseus. Wikipedia explains: “Each year, the Athenians would commemorate this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honour Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several hundreds of years of maintenance, if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one after the other, was it still the same ship?”

Are we the same? Are you the same person if your body replaces all of your cells? Our bodies do that to the tune of billions of cells per day.

About 330 billion cells are replaced daily, equivalent to about 1 percent of all our cells. In 80 to 100 days, 30 trillion will have replenished—the equivalent of a new you.

What about if your belief system is dismantled and replaced? What about your values? What if you lose your memories one by one? Are you still you?

And if you’re not you, who are you?

Inside of me are fifty versions of Melissa, a patchwork quilt of Melissas. I can only identify a handful of things that were true at birth that are still true now, and maybe a handful more if we count from upper childhood. Everything else has been overwritten or replaced, like Theseus’s ship.

I’m just trying to mentally unpack it, trace the changes, and remember who I was and what I may be in the future.

May 8, 2024   No Comments

Setting the Timer

I’ve been limiting how much news I consume for a long time, either setting a timer when I think I’ll need the reminder or simply noting the time when I begin reading with a promise to get off after 10 – 15 minutes. Reading the news makes me upset because it’s all terrible, and it is better to read until informed and then move away to process instead of continuing to read opinion after opinion, each telling me that the world is absolutely definitely going to end.

Is it the end of the world?

It feels different, but then I see pieces like that, and I realize that I’ve said before it feels different. So maybe we’re 100% in a state of falling apart, but it never comes?

There is this:

A peer-reviewed 2021 survey of people aged between 16 and 25 around the world found that 56% agreed with the statement “Humanity is doomed”. In a 2020 YouGov poll, nearly one in three Americans said they expected an apocalyptic event in their lifetimes, with the Christian Judgment Day relegated to fourth place by a pandemic, climate change and nuclear war; zombies and aliens brought up the rear.

The end of the article perhaps has the answer.

May 7, 2024   1 Comment

#Microblog Monday 488: The Yuck in the Yum?

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I have reservations about calling a person a yuck, but what do you do when a favourite talk show, podcast, or fill-in-the-blank for your favourite interview medium has on a guest that you don’t want to hear? I mean, I know the simple answer is to skip the episode, but I’m curious if people skip the episode. Or do they listen, watch, or read because there are often openings or closings that don’t contain the words and thoughts of the person who annoys/upsets/distresses you?

Do you skip the episode if you enjoy the host but feel annoyed/turned off by the guest??

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.


May 6, 2024   2 Comments

All The Same Places

Once upon a time, children, we traveled with travel guides because we did not have mobile devices. If we wanted to know where to stay or eat, we needed to look it all up in this paper contraption called a book.

The series I liked pointed you to the big tourist spots and had little sidebars that told you about lesser-known attractions, such as visiting Palazzo Zuccari when you were done with the Spanish Steps in Rome. I loved those little sidebars because I thought I was seeing something special. Everyone knew about the Spanish Steps, but all the people using those other travel books didn’t know about Palazzo Zuccari, right? Not counting all the other people standing in front of Palazzo Zuccari holding the same book.

Travel isn’t seeing the unknown as much as seeing the known with your own eyes. Except for unplanned interactions with other people or stumbling into a great randomly chosen restaurant, most travel is about going to see and do things you have seen images of or heard about. It’s not discovering insomuch as witnessing.

But how can you travel so far and not see the things the place is famous for?

We’re planning a trip right now, so I’m thinking about that balance between witnessing the known while leaving time for wandering, which may or may not lead us to something interesting, something not in a tour book.

May 5, 2024   1 Comment

985th Friday Blog Roundup

If August 2023 was a month that I dreaded for years, May 2024 is a month I’ve looked forward to for… well… not years. But certainly months. Pretty much since August 2023.

This year has felt like one of those confidence courses they string up in trees where you wear a harness and walk across a wobbly log suspended twenty feet about the ground. I’m not a fan (you’ve probably guessed) of confidence courses, though there is something about that moment when you step off the wobbly log onto the stable tree platform, and your whole body shakes as the adrenaline drains and you think, “I did it. I actually did it.”

Unlike a confidence course, I will need to do it again. When you don’t like something, it doesn’t really help to think about how you got through it last time. But August 2024 feels far enough away right now that I’m just going to enjoy trying to shove their belongings into a storage unit and jumping into the car, celebrating the start of summer. Soon soon.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

Okay, now my choices this week.

Grumpy Rumblings has a thought-provoking (and purposefully controversial) question: “Do people really love it when bad things happen to people and hate it when good things happen to people?” An interesting conversation is happening in the comment section (just like the old days!), so jump in.

Lastly, Finding a Different Path is celebrating her birthday (happy birthday!), and she muses on being close to “old enough that the x-ray technicians don’t ask if I could be pregnant.” [Side note: Do not get me started on getting charged for a pregnancy test pre-MRI EVEN THOUGH I COULDN’T BE PREGNANT. Grrr…] Here’s to celebrating (instead of dreading) growing older.

The roundup to the Roundup: It’s finally May 2024! Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between April 26 – May 3) and not the blog’s main URL. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week. Read the original open thread post here.

May 3, 2024   3 Comments

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