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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Robin Sloan (the author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore) sends out a weekly email containing a mishmash of thoughts. In a recent one, he talked about the Gutenberg Parenthesis and the whole idea of recognizing when you’re living between parentheses.

Or, as Sloan states: “Here’s a question you should ask sometimes, about the story of the world and your place in it: am I living inside the normal body text now… or a phrase offset by parentheses, set to close?”

Mind blown.

I think there are our personal parentheses and then there are societal/historical parentheses. And as Sloan says, the point isn’t to prove the theory. It isn’t to find proof that it is or isn’t happening. It’s to ask yourself the questions and simply wonder whether you’re “living (or reading books, or participating in the economy, or or or) at a point along a ‘normal’ historical continuum, or inside a bubble of strangeness?”

Life if pretty strange right now. Do you think we’re inside parentheses or is this just part of a new normal?

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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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

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

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The twins are both named after great-grandparents. We didn’t struggle with their names at all. We knew we wanted to name the kids after these two people, which greatly limited our list of possible names and made the choice pretty straight-forward.

The ChickieNob’s name was one that I floated very early on in our relationship as the name I would use for any daughter, and Josh agreed. The Wolvog’s name sprang into my head one day — long before we were pregnant — and I told Josh that if we ever had a boy, that would be his name. And… well… he agreed again. Then we had to work for years to actually have the kids so we could use the names, but the names themselves weren’t a struggle.

I like being named after someone. I think the kids like being named after someone, especially when we come across pictures or objects or stories we can tell them about those people. Most of my friends and family members are named after people, too. But my friend list skews heavily towards Jewish, where naming your child after someone is common practice.

Are you named after someone? Did you know the person?

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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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

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

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I just came off a week feeling very stressed out by the clock. The twins were at a camp, which was about an hour away with traffic. Every day, I had to leave work to pick them up, driving an hour to get them and an hour back. This meant the first part of my day was truncated to five hours, and the second part of my day was a balancing act of trying to finish work and make dinner and take care of everything else that needs to get done in the evening.

I hated the clock.

There is a town in Norway that is trying to get rid of the concept of time in their community. The people of Sommarøy figure that they’re already living off the traditional clock since the sun doesn’t rise and set in the Arctic in the same way that it rises and sets in the rest of the world. But reading that article made me realize that I still need my clock despite feeling strangled by it.

How do you feel about time right now?

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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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

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 an interesting thought experiment recently:

Imagine that you woke up one day to discover that you were the only person left living on Earth. With no one else around, you’d be able to go and live in any house you wanted – Buckingham Palace even. But would you want to? “You would probably find somewhere that was just comfortable and practical.” The same goes for your expensive clothes, fancy cars, or the latest technology. “When you really follow that thought through, it’s amazing how much we acquire and want only to impress other people.”

It really gave me pause because when I’ve coveted houses, it has been based on location and size, but if given the chance, I would take a Hobbit-house (in a cricket-free Shire) over a palace every single time. Peek inside Buckingham Palace if the earth was empty: sure. But I wouldn’t want to live there.

What do you think?

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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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

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

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Carolyn Hax’s commenters rounded out her recent answer with additional advice. A woman asks whether she needs to invite her surrogate to her baby shower. Hax answers that she doesn’t BUT asks her to check her reasoning.

But it’s a commenter that provides the idea of sitting with the decision and wondering how you’ll feel the day after, “when it’s too late to change anything.” I would have additionally asked how you’ll feel looking at pictures from the event in the future. Will you be okay explaining your reasoning to your child if they see the pictures and ask why the surrogate wasn’t there?

What do you think of the situation? Personally, I would have opted for the surrogate to attend just so I didn’t have any regrets because this one wouldn’t pass the regret test for me.

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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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.