Category — Microblog Mondays

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

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There was a great essay written while I was away, and I just got a chance to read it. Catriona Innes puts the thesis in the title: “All my life, society has told us to be mothers. How can we break free from that conditioning?”

Describing it as conditioning drives the point home. “There are things we want, then there are things we don’t want and then there are the things we’re not sure we want, but are told we should.”

It’s really a great piece on the ache and the joy in her life.

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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.

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

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You can take a photograph and remember how something looked. You can make a recording and remember how something sounded. But you can’t capture a scent.

The moment I stepped out of the Tube in South Kensington, I smelled the air, a permanent mixture of diesel, burnt sugar, and petrichor. It smells the same in every season, and I always forget how it smells days after we get back until I get to breathe it in again.

It’s not a good scent. It’s not baking bread or coffee or soap. But it’s this scent that anchors me to a place. And I wish there was a way to capture a smell like you do a photo or a recording and return to it when you’re far away.

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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.

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

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I didn’t realize until I flipped over my planner page that Inauguration Day aligns with Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It may happen more often than I think, and I just haven’t noticed since we only have an inauguration every four years. Though looking it up, it has happened only twice before this: the second inaugurations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

So maybe not that often if it’s only the third time.

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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.

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

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I read a fascinating piece on the power of retelling stories. Not your own story (though there is a different power in that), but taking Shakespeare or a Greek tragedy or a favourite fairy tale and giving it new life by playing with elements of the story.

The reason:

There’s comfort in returning to worlds we already know the rules of and characters we already love and understand … writers are drawn to retellings because they’re often the stories they grew up with, or have heard again and again. These stories might have taught us what stories were.

More than the story itself, it is the choosing of the story. Why are we drawn to certain situations? Certain characters? Certain settings? How does changing one element of the original story change your entire understanding?

What story would you love to see retold? I’m drawn to a bunch of Hans Christian Andersen stories, including “The Nightingale,” which sounds so much cooler when you call it Nattergalen.

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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.

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

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Was it Erin McKeown’s newsletter about writing a will or planning an upcoming trip that triggered this thought, but do you schedule graveyard visits when you’re going somewhere new?

A long time ago, visiting graveyards and photographing graves was one of my top trip destinations. I remember getting to Oslo late in the day, setting down my things, and immediately setting out to find Ibsen’s grave in a nearby cemetery.

Josh was less enthralled with going to graveyards. He wasn’t against it, but he wasn’t taking three modes of transportation to get to a graveyard outside a city just because a favourite writer was buried there. I mean, it makes sense: you’re not seeing a place where they lived. You’re just seeing a stone with their name on it. So graveyards were dropped from the itinerary, and it went from being my number one scheduled activity to a only-if-it-happens-organically activity on trips.

Do other people visit graveyards when they travel?

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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.