Posts from — February 2009

This thought occurred to me when we were driving home from Berkeley Springs this weekend:

Can you get maple syrup outside North America?

In other words, do other countries beyond the US and Canada have sugar maple trees and produce maple syrup or is it always an import or is it not imported at all? Do you have real maple syrup, or do you only have pancake syrup made with sugar or corn syrup?

It literally occurred to me that I’ve never noticed it when traveling because I’ve never eaten anything that would necessitate using maple syrup while traveling.

And what about root beer?

I asked this a year or two ago and received only a few answers so I’ll try again. A camp counselor once told me that if you haven’t had root beer by a certain age, it is a taste that you can never enjoy. Why? I’m not entirely what the scientific process is behind this possible-fact. But it was his explanation for why non-Americans rarely like root beer–because it is a drink pretty much only found in the US and therefore, most non-Americans do not encounter it until they are beyond the magical age line. Is this true?

There actually is a point in wondering what you can’t get outside the US.

What products have you wondered about in terms of foods you associate with your own country? I’ll tell you if we can find it here.

As always, it has been about a month since we met, bitched, cried, comforted, and caught up each other on our cycles and lives. Pull up a seat and I’ll pour you a drink. Let everyone know what is happening in your life. The good, the bad, the ugly. My only request is that if a story catches your eye, you follow it back to the person’s blog and start reading their posts. Give some love, give some support, or laugh with someone until your drink comes out of your nose.

I have a ton of assvice in my back pocket and as a virtual bartender, I will give it to you unless you specifically tell me that this is simply a vent and you do not want to receive anything more than a hug.

So if you have been a lurker for a while (or if this is your first open bar as someone who found this space through IComLeavWe), sit down and tell us about yourself. Remember to provide a link or a way for people to continue reading your story (or if you don’t have a blog–gasp!–you can always leave an email address if you’re looking for advice or support. If not, people can leave messages for that person here in the comments section too). If you’re a regular at the bar, I’ll get out your engraved martini glass while you make yourself comfortable. And anyone new, welcome. I’m glad you found this virtual bar.

For those who have no clue what I’m talking about when I say that the bar is open, click here to catch up and then jump into the conversation back on this current post.

So have an imaginary cocktail and tell us what is up with your life.

This is the 29th installment of Barren Advice. You can ask questions that are fertility or non-fertility related.

Barren Advice is posted each Tuesday-ish. If you have your own question for Barren Advice, click here to learn how to submit. Please weigh in with your own thoughts in the comment section and indicate which question you’re addressing if there are multiple questions in the post.

Dear Mel:

So there’s definitely a divide between people I read (“friends”) and people I interact with (friends that I happened to meet online). And I’m willing to bet that many of the people you’re ditching once they get that positive are people you read. You haven’t built up a friendship therefore, the happiness you are supposed to express comes from emotional slush funds that are empty.

Wait, I need to back up for a second. You need to think about this in terms of banking. Every relationship you have is an emotional bank account. You bank figurative money in the form of trust, support, comfort. And you have a separate account for every close person in your life. Once you’ve placed “money” in, it can’t be taken out unless the bank messes up or you overdraw…in other words, this is why we can return to some friendships after months of not talking and jump right back into a great space full of trust. One of my best friends and I do this all the time–we won’t speak for a month or two and then we have a three hour phone call to catch up and we can tell each other the most intimate things regardless of the time that has passed since our last phone call. It’s because we put a lot of “money” in that account back in our college years and we replenish the account often enough that we can live off of it for the rest of our lives.

You also have an emotional slush fund. This “money” isn’t earmarked for a single person–it’s what you have to spend at your own discretion. And frankly, from your description in the question, it sounds like your slush fund is empty. It happens from time to time–everyone goes through points in their life where they just don’t have emotional energy to spend on others when they really need to use all of their resources on themselves. Of course, it becomes a problem when you are always without an emotional slush fund, but that is a topic for another day. When you’re emotionally in a great spot, your slush fund is overflowing and you can reach out to others. When your slush fund is empty, it’s time to turn inward and work on self-preservation.

And no, you can’t really open an emotional bank account with every person you meet. There has to be a hierarchy of relationships in your life or you’ll go crazy. Partners, siblings, parents, close friends–they get their own account–everyone else pulls from the slush fund.

So if you’re happy, you tend to have deep emotional stores in the slush fund that you can pass along to anyone. It’s sort of the Mary Poppins effect–if you’re twittering about, singing about spoonfuls of sugar and can see the world in this rosy way, you also have emotional money in the bank so to speak. You can lend it out freely knowing more exists. But if you’re already emotionally bankrupt, it is hard to give out what doesn’t exist in your pockets. You can’t hand out money you don’t have and you can’t hand out happiness you don’t have.

I would be willing to bet that it’s harder for you to walk away from the blogs where you have built a relationship with the author. Where you have been trading support and therefore building up capital in your emotional account. I’m obviously assuming that you’re talking about walking away from blogs where you’re simply a reader and an occasional commenter. In those cases, I would probably say it’s part of the nature of the blogosphere. You are free to walk away when times are good for that person and come back (or not come back) when times are bad for that person. I wouldn’t feel badly commenting again–they probably didn’t know the conscious choice you made to avoid their blog.

If you’re walking away from blogs where you’ve had an account open and a lot of capital in place, well, I guess I have a different answer. If you’ve forged a relationship with the person that goes beyond simply reading their thoughts and offering up a “that sucks!” or “that’s great!” every once in a while, I don’t think you owe them an explanation, but you do need to consider what you’d want in your own future. If you always pull out from the relationship when their weather doesn’t match your weather, it begs the question–why build that emotional capital at all? I mean, why save this figurative emotional money by building that rappo
rt and trust and doing all the work that it takes to maintain a relationship if you don’t want to have that support through your own thick or thin? What I’m saying is that I don’t really understand the point in putting in the work of building the account if you’re not going to use it in the future.

Just as you wouldn’t go around town opening up random accounts at every bank and then leaving the money behind when you move, I don’t really understand the point in building up an emotional bank account with another person and then ditching it. And I mean this both in terms of face-to-face relationships as well as the ones that begin online. If you’re taking the time to invest, make sure you protect and nurture your investments. You would never throw out a 401K account and say, “feh, it’s just money.” So don’t throw out friendship. You can throw out “friendships” but not friendships. See the difference?

In those cases, where you felt a connection while you were both in the trenches and took time to nurture the relationship, I would allow it to continue on–taking the space you need and being good to yourself, but also knowing that it may mean that you need to view their joy even if you don’t need to feel their joy (after all, you can’t make them instantly sad because you’re sad and they can’t make you instantly happy because they’re happy). Which means saying “congratulations” when they get the positive, perhaps holding back and just reading for a bit, and also offering sympathy if all goes to hell.

In the cases (which are probably the vast majority of cases because we all read more blogs than we have personal relationships) where you simply have been reading along and leaving a few comments from time to time, I don’t think it speaks volumes about you as a person. I don’t think that it means you’re mean or that you would do the same thing in the face-to-face world. I think it shows that you know how much emotional capital is in your figurative slush fund and that you’re not withdrawing more than you have on hand and leaving yourself in a deficit.

Therefore, step back with the joy and step forward with the sadness. You’re actually a great person to have around because you have the umbrella up in your own personal rain storm and it sounds like others could benefit from having that umbrella placed over them as well rather than only being surrounded by those who are standing in the sunshine and reminding them of the weather they just lost.

We can do small good things without having everything we do be small good things. It doesn’t negate the small good things–the offer of support in a moment of sadness–nor does it make commentary on ourselves as complete humans. It would be wonderful if we only comported ourselves with joy, doing small good things with every breath. But we are human and we’re messy and we’re complex and even with our foibles, we’re still wonderful. What you consider to be a problem in your personality actually has a very positive side: you are possibly the best person to comfort someone whose misery needs a little company. And that can’t be dismissed as less important. It is just one more way to build support and those emotional stores between two people as you share in sadness.

No really, the beauty of a blog advice column is that you get to weigh in with your two cents too. Let the questioner know if you support the advice, add to the response, or dispute it completely.

Leave a comment in the reaction box below–only keep in mind that conflicting advice is embraced and rudeness is not. Want to ask your own question? Click here to see what you need to send in order to be included in a future Tuesday’s installment of Barren Advice.

Welcome to A Side Order of Help With That, a monthly post where you can ask your blogging questions–both technical and etiquette-based. The questions for the month are below. If you have a question for the next post, please email me and I will include it (though please peruse the archives to make sure that your question has not already been asked and answered). Do not leave new questions in the comment section below, but please do leave comments and answers.

When answering a question, please include the number for easy scanning by readers.

1. People have told me that my blog feed is no longer updating in Bloglines. I have contacted Bloglines about it, but they cannot find a problem on their end. I use Blogger as my blogging platform. Has anyone else run into this problem? How did you fix it? (Stirrup Queens)
2. Is there any worth to putting those links at the bottom of every post to sites such as Digg, Kirtsy, or Stumble Upon? Do they really create more traffic or do people find them to be one more step in posting that isn’t really worth it? (Anonymous)
3. How do you resize badges such as the one for the “Creme de la Creme” and “IComLeavWe” so they can be seen fully on my blog? The layout I have cuts them off. I’d rather not change the look too drastically, but I’d like to see the badges in full! My software is Blogger. (A Fifth Season)
4. How do you create a second sidebar column on Blogger? (Mrs. Spock)
5. How do you create a button/badge that links back to your blog or a post, and has a cute picture and whatever wording you want? (Mrs. Spock)
6. What is the advantage of self-hosting, especially if you’re happy with your free blogging software? Is there a reason to self-host instead of use a free service? What host do people recommend? (Anonymous)
   

Do you have a question for next month?

• A Side Order of Help With That (ASOHWT) is usually posted on the second Thursday of the month. I generally post a reminder for questions in the Friday Blog Roundup the week before.
• Email me your question. Please place ASOHWT in the subject line. Try to keep it brief, but include as much detail as possible. Make sure you include your blogging program (Typepad, WordPress, Blogger, etc). In addition to technical questions, you can ask for a general opinion (eg. “why do you think it’s worth it to switch to self-hosting instead of staying with a free program”). Unless you wish to remain anonymous, please include your blog name and url so people can click over to see your blog if they have questions.
• I will compile the list and post it on the second Thursday of the month (3/12, 4/9, 5/14, 6/11)
• When the list goes up, please answer the questions in the comment box so you can (1) see if someone else has already answered it and (2) others who realize they have the same question can see the answer. Oh, and (3) the answers will all be in one place so others can access them in the future.

I thought this article in the New York Times Magazine was brilliant. Peggy Orenstein, who also wrote Waiting for Daisy about her struggle with infertility and recurrent loss, asks an excellent question: “Better safe than sorry, I say. But safe from what?”

I know it wasn’t a piece about parenting after infertility but I couldn’t help but read it through that lens. When I went shopping with Lindsay for Baby Fred gear, I felt like the grim reaper, creeping down every aisle chanting the horrific things that can occur with various baby products.

Do you go for glass bottles which can fall off the table and cut your baby to shreds or do you trust that Avent removed all harmful chemicals from their new and improved bottles? Do you go with the organic formula that has only been on the market for a few years or the more popular brand that has been around longer?

Because it’s all about what if? What if you choose the wrong brand and expose your child to harmful chemicals? What if you choose the wrong school and they get left behind on a field trip? Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in what ifs and I too will say, “better safe than sorry.” But as Orenstein asks, safe from what?

We can’t protect our children from everything, but we can drive ourselves (and them) into madness worrying about it.

Read the article–it’s short–and tell me what you think. For me, it spoke volumes.

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.

I have to start this off by saying that we don’t live in a particularly Jewish area. I mean, there are Jews around here, but it’s just not a Jewish-ish town like where we used to live.

Every Purim, we make packages of candy and cookies and send them to friends and family. Some people live in town and we drive around packages for drop off a few days before Purim. But some need to be mailed and we do those in three big batches. I also tend to be a bit scattered and unorganized with this whole undertaking so there have been many times that I have filled and labeled the packages while at the post office. Since I take over a corner of the post office to do this, I explained one year that it was for a holiday called Purim and everyone’s eyes sort of glazed over. A few years ago, I started making one extra package for the post office as a thank you for humouring me as I took up all their counter space.

I went to the post office with the first batch this week (and yes, I know it’s really early). When I set down my box in front of one of my favourite postmasters, he got this huge grin on his face. “Is it Purim now? Does this mean you’re going to be sending cookies and candy again? Do we get a package again this year?”

I really love that our tradition has made post office lore history. That this group of Christian postmasters remember it and look forward to this every year. That we’re Jewifying our little town. Who knows–maybe someday soon they’ll join me in a rousing version of “Ki Va Moed” as they hand me my mail. The postmaster helped me price out every packaging option and found the best one for us financially and timewise. He even set me up with boxes and labels so I could fill them at home and just drop them off at the post office.

As I was leaving, the postmaster reminded me that he really doesn’t like the poppyseed hamantaschen (nor do I, sir, nor do I) but they do enjoy my coffee or tea-infused toffees. Just wanted me to know. And if I was doing those sea-salt caramels again this year, they’d like a few of those.

What are you showing today?

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