Posts from — September 2011

It’s the large elephant in the week — September 11th — and it begs you to discuss it, remember it, dissect it.

I didn’t know how I wanted to write about it.  I could only acknowledge that my mind and heart felt like I needed to write about it, that neither wouldn’t be able to continue on to other thoughts or ideas until I had put this one to rest.  So I started working backwards, figuring out how I didn’t want to write about it.

I didn’t want to relive it.  I didn’t want to tell once again where I was when I found out what had happened.

I didn’t want to pull out my student’s recollections on September 11th and post a part of it here.  That felt like I was trespassing on their hearts.  Though I am still sitting with the idea of Googling a handful of them, reaching out to mark the moment with an email reminding them what they said ten years ago.

I didn’t want to discuss the news coverage.  I didn’t want to go down to the memorials.  I didn’t want to photograph anything or roundup posts.

Which leaves us with this.

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I am a huge lover of analogies and metaphors.  It would probably make for an amusing piece of cloud art if someone culled all the various analogies from my last 5+ years of blog posts.  I blame my mother — she is the master of the analogy.

I think it is human nature to want to explain something we don’t know by using something we do.  It is not even always something we don’t know; sometimes it is just something too large, too messy, too emotional to be able to look at it directly.  Sometimes we use an analogy in order to reduce something in size, make sense of it, contain it.

And I think we often do that with the concept of healing.

We know what it means to physically heal.  Either we’re physically hurting, or we’re not.  Either the bone is broken or it is mending or it is now imperceptibly different from before but still on this side of well.  We know what it means to have physical scars that show a physical trauma.  Healing doesn’t necessarily mean going back to exactly the way it was before, but with physical issues, we can usually define where we are on the spectrum from hurt to mending to healed.

Slightly more fuzzy becomes the idea of mentally healing since our mind is not as well-defined as our other body parts.  Still, we know when our brains are on the mend, when it seems like a medication is working or not working.  Control over the situation may wax and wane, but it still feels like something we can discuss in the realm of healing, of returning or bringing the brain to a place where we want it to be.

But where I think the analogy breaks down is applying what we know about physically healing to emotionally healing.  We seem to believe that people emotionally heal in the same sense that we physically heal.  We have sayings, for example: “time heals all wounds.”  We know this isn’t true physically — do nothing to stop the bleeding and time won’t be able to jump in there and heal you.  But it also isn’t really true for emotional pain, is it?

Sometimes I think a better analogy would be comparing emotional pain to a pair of binoculars.  When you are in the moment, everything looks even closer and larger than it does if we had a bit of perspective.  We focus on these tiny bits of information, replaying them over and over again in our minds.  Maybe because the whole is too enormous to contain.  And then time passes, and we turn the binoculars around.  Years later, it pretty much all looks the same, except farther away and we’re more acutely aware of how the image we’re seeing fits into the bigger picture.

Maybe this is how empathy exists — because if we truly healed (applying the physical concept of healing), we would forget.  But instead, we can all still visualize the object of our emotion pain, only it is faraway, remote, held in place by other points on the landscape.  We don’t access it in the same way; we can’t turn the binoculars around again and view it close-up any more than someone who is in the throes of the moment can choose to turn their binoculars around and hold their pain at a distance.  But we still see it; quite clearly albeit far away.

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The other problem is that when we apply what we know about physical healing to emotional pain, what we get is impatience.  There is this idea that time has passed, therefore, you have to heal.  We give people an incredibly small amount of sympathy all things considered, and then expect them to buck up and rejoin the human race.  People become incredulous — “you need to move on and stop moping!” — or simply stop asking about the loss.

We don’t coddle our mourners on a day-to-day basis, which is why I’m a bit uncomfortable with this idea of a ten year check-in for September 11th.  Will we be okay if we discover that widows are still finding it difficult to get through their day?  If we find out that children are still devastated without their parents?

We are expecting all of them to say that life went on, that they’re living wonderful lives despite their pain.  Humans need that — we need to hear that people can go on to lead full lives because it is what we grasp when we are in the trenches.  We need to know there is a stopping point because how else can we survive if we face the fact that emotional pain is often open-ended?  It changes in sharpness or frequency, but for some people, it doesn’t quite disappear fully?

On one hand, is there any other way things can go except forward?  We all suffer from emotional pain and the world can’t grind to a halt.  As much as WH Auden implores us to “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone / Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone / Silence the pianos and with muffled drum / Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come,” how can we let life remain at a standstill?

If we didn’t move from emotional pain, life would become a cacophony of an echoing past, much the same way sound hangs in the air in Tomba Emmanuelle.  You need to move gingerly in there, and life cannot really float on ginger movements.  Every single person on this earth is in a state of mourning someone.

But on the other hand, isn’t it equally as damaging to expect people to “get over” something?  To move on?  To forget?  We know what to do to make a bone heal.  We have protocols to treat a whole host of illnesses (sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t).  But we don’t have a cut-and-dried manual to emotional healing.  We tell people to write about the loss, to talk about it, to join a support group.  But we also tell them to get back to living (since when is someone not living just because they are mourning?  Isn’t mourning a part of living?).  To stop obsessing over it (since when is thinking about something that has affected you enormously obsessing?  Wouldn’t obsession be a huge focus on a fairly small situation; disproportional?  Isn’t it understood that enormous, life-changing events will occupy a large stake of our emotional energy, possibly even blotting out everything else?)

I wish we had a different word for it.  I wish we didn’t treat emotional healing in the same way that we treat physical healing, if we didn’t paint both with the same broad brushstrokes.  I know that I feel differently today than I did ten years ago, but I wish the word that we used wasn’t “healed” because I think it also doesn’t pay tribute to the way an event changes you.  We don’t slide back into place easily, continue from the same point we were before a loss.

We instead build a new life, over and over and over again, more like a phoenix.  It looks like the same bird, but it is wholly and completely different.

I assume that what we’ll see from September 11th, ten years on, is a snapshot of a life.  It may show a scene where a person is holding down a job and making coffee every morning and raising their children.  But I would guess that below the surface, there is a wide-range of emotional states: a wider-range than can be described with the term “healing.”  There will be those who hold it together all day on the outside, and fall apart once they’re alone.  There are those who will admit that there are triggers, but they mostly power through their day-to-day without thinking too long or hard about what they have lost.  There will be those who will kick themselves because they don’t think they are sad enough ten years on and there will be those who will kick themselves because they feel like they shouldn’t be quite this sad ten years on.

And I am guessing it is this way with all loss — not just the ones we mourn on a national level.  We all could do well to release ourselves from the word “healing,” from believing that what we know about physical mending can be applied to emotional mending, and to create a new vocabulary for dealing with loss.  Something that brings in elements of healing, but is its own idea altogether.

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My heart goes out to everyone who is mourning, who is navigating the world without a person they love in it.  I want to tell them to take the time they need, whether it is five minutes or a life time.  Please don’t allow the mental timetables of others dictate how long you need to feel whatever you need to feel.  Forgive me if you needed me to ask about your loss and I haven’t.  May your rebirth from each loss be a peaceful one with time.  The reality is that we need to let the clocks run again as well as let the telephone ring, but only you can decide when the right time is to see the secondhand turning or pick up the line.

I guess that is what I needed to say about September 11th.  What do you need to say?

One day, hopefully a long, long time from now, I will die, and when I do, I would like my death to be Twibbon-free.  I would like your Twitter profile to remain whatever colour it is now.  I have fewer feelings about requests on your Facebook status updates.  Though I’d be thrilled if someone started something akin to what Msfitzita does every year asking people to do acts of kindness in memory of her son, Thomas.

Despite my last two posts and what I just said above, I don’t really have a problem with social media memes.  I had a problem with the fake pregnancy one because it had the potential to affect my friendship when I believed that my friend had kept her pregnancy news from me.  Plus, it was cryptic, doing nothing to actually educate people on the cause it purported supporting. (Quick, tell me three things you learned about breast cancer due to that meme.)

The reality is that my eye passes right over the Twibbons and Twitter profile colours and Facebook status updates because they’re usually not asking anything of me beyond two seconds of my attention.  So it’s not that I’m ignoring them; it’s just that no one asked me to do anything therefore, I do nothing.

People skirted around the term in the comment section, but the urban dictionary word for this sort of thing is “slacktavism.”  I’ve pretty much only heard it applied to online activities, and Wikipedia describes it as:

The word is usually considered a pejorative term that describes “feel-good” measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little or no practical effect other than to make the person doing it feel satisfaction. The acts tend to require minimal personal effort from the slacktivist.

Ouch.

I feel like writing is the most powerful tool I personally have at my disposal and my medium of choice is the Internet.  Is writing about social causes such as… let’s say… infertility without a clear call to action essentially “slacktavism?”  Am I a slacktavist?  Is it only activism if you’re moving towards a goal (for instance, insurance coverage for fertility treatments) vs. doing something more touchy-feeling and amorphous such as discussing how infertility makes me feel (and perhaps, in doing so, providing another person an outlet for processing their feelings)?  If you don’t feel good from it, is it not slacktavism?

And I guess that’s what I want to talk about: is there anything wrong with slacktavism?  Is something better than nothing?  Without the ability to chart the far-reaching affects of someone’s slacktavism (Wikipedia’s “practical effect”) and because it could possibly lead to activism, is it good to do something on the off-chance that it could indirectly lead to change?  Why do we put more emphasis on tangible support such as money vs. the emotional support that can come from community building such as seeing people you care about express their feelings on an issue?  If some people are emotionally hurt while other people are helped, is it worth it?  Do badges and Twibbons do anything beyond state where we stand on a subject?  Do we expect them (or need them) to do more than that?

Crap that’s a lot of questions.

I don’t have clear answers to those questions; I guess I wanted your thoughts.  And I think we need to separate out statement-based online projects from action-based online projects.  A statement-based online project would be something like the fake pregnancy meme.  An action-based online project would be something more akin to the status updates that came out of this such as Elphaba’s or Keiko’s.  They took a stand and then took it further, telling the reader what they can do in order to lend support.

I think the Internet is an amazing tool that has a bad rap.  Because people misuse it — just as people misuse any tool — other people see it only through that lens.  I take issue with the idea that online activities are “lazy” (as opposed to physical protests such as sit-ins or picketing) because we have actually seen social media change the world.  Online does not equal unproductive: there is plenty that is being organized, disseminated, and discussed online in a very active way that is provoking change.  It’s not the medium that is the problem; it’s the project itself.

So no Twibbons for me, though I can understand (and respect) why others do it.  Though, really, in the event of my death, no Twibbons.  Organize a massive comment-spree, hold a yearly Day of Comfort, create an email forward of people writing each other kind words done in my name.  You don’t even need to wait for my death to do so.

But no Twibbons.

What are your thoughts on my questions?

I’m sure it wasn’t Mark Zuckerberg’s intention when he invented Facebook to create a medium that reveals our true personalities despite what we attempt to carefully cultivate online and in the face-to-face world.  For instance, there are people who would describe themselves as a good person, go to church, participate in that canned food drive, make an appropriate unhappy face emoticon at their friend’s bad news.  And then they read something on a social media site — perhaps a blog or Twitter or Facebook or the comment section of the New York Times (possibly my favourite spot online to see people’s true nature) — and we get to see what really lurks beneath the exterior.  Sometimes it is just more of what we see on the surface.  Sometimes we get to see the person’s inner asshole.

I was nervous to hit publish on that last post for many reasons, but the reaction has pretty much gone as I suspected it would.  The vast majority of people who read it and commented internalized my words and reflected back that they understood them.  Many have had a similar experience to my own with infertility, and they agreed that the meme made them feel the same way.  Some have had a similar experience with infertility and knew it was a game so didn’t feel the same way, though they could see how it would be hurtful if you didn’t understand what you were reading.  A few people weren’t infertile at all but said they either felt the same way or had participated and now felt apologetic.  And then there were a handful of people who — due to the social media machine laying our true essence bare — trotted out their inner asshole and told everyone who was upset that they were “absolutely ridiculous” and should “get a life.”

Disagreeing with me isn’t what makes you an asshole.  People disagree with me all the time, in the face-to-face world or on this blog.  It’s the way you disagreed, belittling as you explained why people aren’t allowed to feel what they are feeling that makes you an asshole.

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If we could boil down my entire post into a few lines, I’d say it like this:

I am really happy for friends when they are truly pregnant even though I am simultaneously feeling sad for myself.  At the same time, I saw this Facebook meme, and while the intention was not to be malicious, this is how I processed the game.  As you can see, because possibly 10% of your Facebook friends have experienced infertility whether or not you know it, you may be unintentionally hurting other people.  Here are some things you can do to raise awareness for a cause if you’re itching to raise awareness for a cause, as I am told was the original intention for this meme.

The only correct response to someone telling you that something you did made them feel like shit is “I am so sorry that you felt that way.”  This is true every time someone tells you in life that something you did hurt their feelings.  If you agree that you actually did something wrong, you can apologize for the actions too, but really, only an asshole hears that someone is upset and counters it with “get a life.”  A person can offer a reason for why they participated, and it’s helpful for the person who was hurt to understand why the action was undertaken.  But the reality is that telling people to “get over your selves and do something positive instead of trying to bring down other peoples fun” doesn’t make you right — it just makes you an asshole.

I’ve said this before but some of the comments made me feel like it bears repeating: humans seem to be able to comprehend that someone else’s sadness cannot make them feel sad.  You can learn on your wedding day that a tsunami has devastated a tiny island population in the Pacific, thousands of miles away.  While you will hopefully pause for a moment and reflect on the terribleness of it and perhaps decide to donate some of your monetary wedding gifts to relief efforts, unless you are directly affected, your wedding will continue on.   You will be a radiant bride walking down the aisle.  You will eat cake and you will dance.  And that doesn’t make you an asshole — that makes you a human being.  We all navigate our own daily mood against the happiness and sadness of others.

Human beings are complex, and we are capable of feeling two completely different emotions at the same time.  We can acknowledge someone else’s pain while still experiencing our own joy and vice versa.  We can acknowledge someone else’s joy while still experiencing our own pain.  The reality is that life always needs to continue; it doesn’t stop for our sadness or our elation.  We experience a loss and we’re expected after a brief amount of time to jump back into living just as we experience a life-changing, happy occasion such as a wedding and we’re expected back to our daily obligations after the honeymoon.

We are constantly thrust back into the real world without really having the luxury of time to deal with our complex emotions.  We need to constantly carry our feelings with us.  Hence how you get someone infertile having to deal with their sadness while simultaneously experiencing happiness for another person.  In a perfect world, we’d have the space to place our emotions in tiny compartments.  But we live in a wonderfully messy world; one where terrible things happen at the exact same time as great things.  And you need to deal with both.  And that is what infertile people who are struggling with the emotional side of infertility do every single day.  And that is what fertile people who need to deliver pregnancy announcements to emotionally-raw friends do every single day.

But just as my sadness can’t make you sad, your happiness can’t make me feel happy.  I understand that another person’s pregnancy announcement is a happy occasion, and I am happy for them (when it’s a real pregnancy and not a Facebook game).  But certainly, if I can’t expect them to feel sad about their pregnancy just because I’m infertile (and I shouldn’t — that person should feel only joy), why should I be expected to feel only happiness about their pregnancy, squelching any of my own feelings of sadness?  For this equation to work, it needs to be solvable in both directions.  And right now, some commenters expressed a desire for the compassion to only flow in one direction.  I am requesting that the compassion flow in all directions.

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I think the most telling part about this campaign is that the meme wasn’t about making up a phony cancer diagnosis to raise awareness.  People weren’t told to post that they had been diagnosed with cancer and had X many weeks of chemotherapy planned.  You know why?  Because we all know that would be cruel to do to the people who love us.  It would evoke strong responses in others, would obviously get people talking, but it would be COMPLETELY inappropriate and thoughtless.

Yet if we know that pretending to be dying would be in poor taste, why would it not be in poor taste to pretend to be creating life?  I guess I’m asking this of the people who support the meme — would you post a phony cancer diagnosis in order to raise awareness by getting people talking?  And if not, why not?

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Part of being a compassionate person is doing it even when you get nothing out of it.  Listening, even when you might not get heard.  Being caring, even when there is no friendship or familial relationship on the line.  And some commenters simply weren’t compassionate.  Perhaps that is the bane of social media — we forget that there are very real people on the other end of the computer because we can’t see them in the moment.  So maybe this can serve as a reminder: there are very real people reading our Facebook status updates who react to our news accordingly.  And there is a very real person writing this blog, and anything you wouldn’t say to my face, you shouldn’t say in my comment section.  If you would say some of the things you said in the comment section to my face, well, I think you know by this point in the post what that makes you.

The Veela in Harry Potter looked like ethereally gorgeous women when they were composed.  When their team was losing in the Quidditch World Cup, they revealed their ugly, beaky selves, throwing fire because they felt enraged at being attacked.  And that’s sort of what I saw with that last post — the difference between the two sides of the Veela, which I think exists inside all of us.  It’s always our choice whether we keep projecting our beauty or reveal our ugliness.  I saw that the vast majority of people choose to attempt to keep the world beautiful, to comfort when they see someone hurt, and to own their actions.  But I also saw a handful of assholes respond to that post — a post that was written with a strong emphasis on the “I” vs. the accusatory “You.”  For those who disagree, I’d ask you to highlight the points where I verbally attacked a group of people and email them to me.  I will happily eat my words if you can find a place where I belittled someone in that post.

I know some people posted about this on social media sites — either pointed out how the meme made them feel within a Facebook status update, or blogged about it, or linked to my last post about it on their Facebook page — and I’d like to hear the response you got.  Did you mostly get crickets from your friends and family when they read your Facebook status or saw the link to my post?  Did you get a great conversation going?  Were feelings mended?  Did you see anyone actually attempt to promote some true awareness for breast cancer?

And on the topic of being cruel, if people were taking the term “asshole” in this post to be a negative statement about their personality, I want to tell them that they’re overthinking this and reading too much into it.  I’m just having fun, and I’m actually referring to a body part, implying that you take things in as well as push things out.  I didn’t mean anything terrible by it.  Lighten up!*

Er… or is it only certain people who need to take things less seriously?  Is it different when something is happening to you vs. happening to other people?  So yes, I do apologize for facetiously calling you an asshole to make a point.  I obviously don’t know you, just as you don’t know me, therefore it’s impossible for either of us to make a true judgment about one another.  So I do apologize that I singled you guys out.  My only excuse is that sometimes we need to turn the mirror on the Veela so they can see exactly how they’re affecting the rest of the world.

And frankly, while this post is aimed specifically at the commenters on the last post, it’s what I think I’ll cut-and-paste from now on for a whole host of social media situations — from ridiculous memes on Facebook to the vitriolic comment section of the Huffington Post or the New York Times.

I’ll end with this: people are allowed to own their feelings, admit them and discuss them.  Denying another person’s feelings or belittling them for having them makes you a… well… you know.

* You may want to peruse the comment section on the last post if you don’t understand where this post is coming from.  Though I have a strong feeling that if you have spent any time on the Internet, you know exactly where this post is coming from even if you haven’t read my specific comment section.  I think at some point we’ve all observed the worst of the Internet (while simultaneously also observing its best).

A few friends announced their pregnancies this week.  I was thrilled for them even though… you know… it stings.  But genuinely thrilled nonetheless for them.

After this spate of pregnancy announcements, I saw a friend’s Facebook status later in the week.  She wrote that she was 22 weeks and craving a Slurpee.  And my heart literally froze as I read the words on the screen.  I had just seen this friend a week earlier.  She didn’t look pregnant, though I couldn’t remember what she was wearing.  Had she been wearing something flow-y that could hide a pregnancy?  Had she dropped hints?  Did she try to tell me and I literally didn’t hear her?  This wasn’t someone who was just sneaking into the second trimester, starting to tell people.  She was 22 weeks along, closer to delivery than she was to conception.

I spent fifteen minutes combing back through the last few months of her blog, looking for a tiny clue that she was pregnant, seeing if I had missed something when I declared Google bankruptcy.  There was nothing there.

But then I started wondering if all our other mutual friends knew.  If they had known for weeks and had kept it from me.  And I wondered if this friend saw me in the role of the broken bitch.  You know the role of the broken bitch — it’s a place of pity, but they also hate you for it.  It’s tiresome to have to walk around on eggshells around you, but at the same time, it’s just so sad that you can’t get pregnant.

And by that point, I was angry.  I was furious because I not only am genuinely happy for friends, but I am outwardly effusive about their pregnancies within reason (I mean, come on, your pregnancy, like your engagement or your house search, is interesting to others but it’s INTERESTING to you.  And you can’t expect everyone else to regard your news in all caps.  Lowercase needs to be acceptable).  I buy baby gifts.  I babysit.  I hold people’s babies.  I touch their stomach.  I hold in my tears until I can get to a bathroom and cry in private.  And what was the point of all of that — of stamping down my own hurt to be genuinely happy for another person — if I still got screwed in the end?

I spent most of the day alternating between sad and embarrassed and angry — this pu-pu platter of unhelpful emotions that stopped me from doing work.  I didn’t want to tell anyone that I didn’t know because I was so embarrassed that I read the news over Facebook when they had probably known for weeks.  I didn’t want to tell anyone because I was afraid that they would tell me that so many of our friends thought this about me; dreaded telling me their news and therefore held off doing so.  I get that it’s hard to tell it because I can tell you that from my end that it’s hard to hear it, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t say it so we can rip the bandaid off and get on to the part where I’m genuinely happy for you and plotting future cuddles with your future child.

And then I found out that she wasn’t pregnant.

Apparently, pretending that you’re pregnant as your Facebook status is supposed to somehow raise awareness for breast cancer.

Yes, nothing other than “how far along you are” and “what you’re craving” — no link to NIH’s page on breast cancer or the Mayo Clinic’s page; something, let’s say, helpful if you’re trying to find out more about breast cancer, you know, that disease that 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with during their lifetime.  Literally, no information other than a pretend week count and a pretend craving.  And that is somehow supposed to raise awareness for breast cancer.

Well, it didn’t raise awareness for breast cancer.  I would hazard a guess that you didn’t learn anything about breast cancer if you saw one of those updates.  But what it did raise awareness for was — hopefully — infertility, and this is what you can take away from this: 7.3 million Americans are diagnosed with infertility.  That’s 11.8% of the child-bearing population.  Worldwide, it comes out to be about 10% of the child-bearing population.  It’s not that rare a situation.

We are your friends or family members.  You may see us in the carpool line at school (yes, you can have a child and be infertile, it’s called secondary infertility) or alone at the supermarket.  You can look at us and not even know that we have a disease of our reproductive organs because infertility doesn’t have outward signs of physical trauma.  We may have never shared with you what we’re going through, even though you may wonder why there is such a large age gap between our children or if we meant to remain childless or why our children don’t look like us.

This post should tell you a little bit about how we feel when we navigate the fertile world.  We know the rest of the world doesn’t need assistance to build their families, and we certainly don’t begrudge them that fact.  People who are infertile would never wish infertility on another person, so we’re thrilled that you’re not making the hard choices we have to make, enduring the treatments we have to endure, filling out the paperwork we have to fill out.  We’re thrilled that you do not have to experience all these various paths of invasiveness.

But we do.

So it would be wonderful if instead of pretending you’re pregnant on Facebook, you use that status update to raise some real awareness.  You can make it about the original intention — breast cancer — and provide factual information so more women know when to start getting mammograms, do self-breast exams, and what are warning signs where they should contact their doctor.  Or you can use your status to educate people about infertility if you learned something reading this post.  Perhaps you didn’t know that statistically 10% of your Facebook friends read that fake pregnancy status and went through the roller coaster of thoughts I went through.  That’s a fairly sizable chunk.

And that sensitivity can go a long way.  You expect it from us.  You expect us to ask about your pregnancy.  You expect us to attend your shower and drop off a meal and hold your baby.  It’s what a good friend does.  But we need that sensitivity to be a two-way street.  So now that you know that possibly 10% of your Facebook friends can’t build their families without assistance, can we please stop playing memes that don’t serve a real purpose; except to make hearts jump and make people doubt themselves.

Cozy Jackson endured many small, excited hands squishing him his first week in our house.  The twins brought in anyone and everyone to marvel at him, and he responded by giving me this continuous, imploring look as if to ask what the hell was happening between those hours of 4 — 8 pm.  During the day, he listened to me type and ate tiny bits of apple and carrot.  During the night, he frolicked around his cage (actually, I don’t know what the hell he does at night — I never hear him).  But from 4 — 8 pm, it is a constant barrage of children’s hands attempting to give him love.

One night, perhaps as a response to a particularly rough afternoon being over-loved by the neighbourhood, he backed himself into the corner and raised himself into a handstand.  He was practically vertical, his tiny feet pressing on two walls of glass about two inches above the cedar chip bedding.  I was marveling at his agility, impressed with the fact that he can so easily do a handstand when I find something as simple as turning a somersault to be nausea-inducing, when his tiny penis popped out like an oven timer in a plump chicken and he let out a stream of piss down the cage walls.  He lowered his legs and stared at me as if to say, “that’s what I think of your neighbourhood kids.”

Seriously, have you ever heard of a hamster peeing in a handstand position?  Is my hamster fantastically unique, ready for a solo in Cirque du Soleil?

I can feel myself bumping that thin line that divides sane pet owners from crazy hamster ladies (which is the less-work equivalent of the crazy cat lady).  I mused aloud one day that perhaps the twins would like to give up all their toys to make room for a few more hamster cages.  I purchased a tiny carrying case for Cozy so we can take him on the road.  I could see Cozy enjoying our next hiking trip or trying to chew a seashell on the beach.  Josh has warned me that we are not taking Cozy anywhere.

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The results from the poll are interesting, and I have some follow-up questions, so I’ll post that this weekend.  So if you haven’t yet voted, get on that by Saturday afternoon or so.

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And now the blogs…

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

• “Same and Different” (The Mud and the Lotus)

Kicking Your Collective Ass: One?  You only found one blog post worthy of directing everyone’s attention to read last week?  I had four and I could have posted more.  You have to do better this week.  There is a whole world of blog posts out there worthy of a little extra attention.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Les Terres Fertiles has a post about the choices we make with assisted family building.  About finding our own comfort zone with the myriad of decisions one needs to make about utilizing treatments or pursing adoption or choosing donor gametes.  I like this post for the raw honesty; for the exploration of the difficulty in making these decisions.

Mommy Odyssey has a post about how her biggest asset is now her liability.  She writes: “Why I can’t break free from this and just LIVE until we get our baby. I’ve realized that it’s something that’s ingrained in me. You see – I have this thing about me, which in the past I’ve viewed as an asset, but is now a liability. When I get my mind and heart set on something I go for it like a guided missile and don’t give up until I reach my goal.”  As someone who shares that trait with her, I found her post thought-provoking.  As well as deeply honest: she explains how this has affected her sex life and comes to a conclusion by the end that will probably have many people nodding.  One of the most helpful posts I’ve read in a long time.

First Time Twins has a post about Beyonce’s pregnancy.  I have to admit that this post was where I first learned that Beyonce was pregnant because I am so far behind on reading People magazine.  I’m still back in Charlie Sheen’s breakdown, in fact.  So this post was both informative AND funny, and I loved this thought directed at the media: “When I finally have a bump, would you be so kind as to send camera crews and thousands of audience members to my house to applaud and tell me how wonderful it is?  Because if it actually happens here, it’s an accomplishment worthy of some frikkin applause.”

Lastly, Finding My New Normal has a post about ending a friendship.  She writes: “In no time flat my feelings would get twisted in a way to make her the victim and me the crazy lady whose baby died and can’t be happy for anyone else. This is not what I want. So I’ve got some decisions to make.”  You can help her make these decisions by weighing in with your thoughts in her comment section.

The roundup to the Roundup: Cozy Jackson has settled into his new home and I am still deeply in love.  Results from the sitemeter poll coming soon.  And, of course, lots of great blog posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between August 26th and September 2nd) 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.