758th Friday Blog Roundup

I’ve been mostly avoiding Facebook this week — not due to the endless back-to-school posts but because I saw something really disturbing on the site. It was the first time it happened to me (stumbled across an upsetting image in a group), and while I intellectually knew that people posted disturbing images (and Facebook employees were emotionally scarred working to block them), I didn’t realize how much being confronted by an image when I least expected it would stick with me for days afterward.

I don’t want to write about the image itself — I reported it, an admin took it down minutes later, and I was able to block the person (not a friend, just a stranger in the same group) so I never accidentally see his posts again because I don’t trust the stranger to exercise sound judgment.

It gave me pause about spending time on the site. Up until that point, I would have said that I enjoy scrolling through my feed. Even if seeing stuff I wasn’t invited to stings, overall, my feed is usually a happy place. I check it once or twice a day for a few minutes. It makes it easy to keep in touch with people I would have drifted away from in another era. It makes me happy to see their lives continuing to unfold. But now I’m really freaked out when I think about the site.

It is, of course, equally possible to see a disturbing image in the newspaper or encounter something upsetting in day-to-day life. But… there was something so unnerving about a person sharing a disturbing image in order to make a joke… I don’t know. It made my heart go out to the people whose job it is to cull those images from the site. And apologies if I miss a bunch of your posts while I avoid the site and read books about magic instead.

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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 in order 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.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “The Day Before” (Torthúil)
• “Ask the Grumpies: Getting Started with Money” (Grumpy Rumblings) — thank you for this!
• “Living with Anxiety” (My Path to Mommyhood)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Lavender Luz has a post about adoption language at the zoo and why our words matter. Her guest poster explains, “The adoption world has spent decades encouraging adoptee-centered language, even down to the way we abbreviate words, with the purpose of strengthening relationships, empowering all in the adoption triad, and supporting positive views of the adoption experience.” There’s a reason for the word choice. When we ignore it, we’re saying so much more than just the words that come out of our mouths. It’s an interesting discussion on language.

The Road Less Travelled has a post about her very amusing “back-to-school” Facebook post (which I wish I had seen in real time vs. via her post; another thing I missed avoiding Facebook this week). She admits about the back-to-school posts, “I ‘liked’ them all (well, most of them 😉 ) but as the day went on I was feeling more & more fatigued by the onslaught.” Her solution — add something very cute to the conversation. I’m grateful for it.

Finally, FinallyMyLines has a post about grief intensifying as she’s parenting two children. She writes, “What has gone away is the fear and the heartbreak of the possibility of a life without living children … At the same time, I feel my grief has grown, shifted back to something closer to how I felt shortly after my later losses. That’s because I suddenly understand exactly what Alexis, Zoe, and Quinn missed.” It is a beautiful and heartbreaking post about the thin line of loss.

The roundup to the Roundup: Why I’m avoiding Facebook. 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 August 30th and September 6th) 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.