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Josh and I watched the Tig Notaro movie on Netflix.  It’s a documentary that covers a little more than the year between her groundbreaking set at the Largo and the anniversary set she performed at the Largo a year later.  This is the trailer:

So the “one shot” she refers to in that trailer is making a baby using her genetic material.  To give context on the weight of those words: she was looking into building a family, she lost her mother very suddenly, she was diagnosed with cancer (putting her family building dreams on hold), she was told — fairly cruelly in the film — that she shouldn’t attempt to have a child because it could cause the cancer to return, and she decided to attempt IVF with a surrogate one time.

So the “one shot” she refers to in the trailer isn’t actually one shot at living or a “carpe diem” message about doing what you love and being with whom you love.  It’s literally her one shot — out of the nine embryos, only one survived the thaw.  There wouldn’t be a follow-up cycle.

She films the whole process, from meeting the surrogate to going injections to harvesting her eggs to the countless updates from RE on the embryos.  But the part that I found so gutting to watch — without knowing the outcome — was the period between transferring the embryo to the surrogate and waiting for the first beta results.

She’s a comedian and she jokes about everything — from removing her breasts to relationships — but there is so much earnest hope and love on her face when she talks about this embryo.  There is a moment when they are performing the transfer and she talks to her embryo — whom she has named Jack Notaro — and she leans forward, almost as if she is trying to pretend she is alone, speaking to her child, despite a room full of people.  There is just so much love in her voice as she tunes them out for a moment to tell him to stick around.

And then, when she is waiting on the sofa with her girlfriend, waiting for the call about the beta, she again speaks about parenthood with so much hope in her voice, explaining how this embryo is her last tie to her mother; that last chance to pass along her mother’s genes to her child.

We watched the documentary because she’s a really funny woman, but the moments I connected with the most and found the most moving were the ones where she was expressing this hopeful love for someone who barely exists; a cluster of cells.  It — to me — was proof of the power of love.  Of how much we can love another person before they’re even here.

So I cried through that part from transfer to beta, just like I’m crying now, writing this.  Because it is beautiful and so hard to witness that level of hope.

Not going to write the outcome of the beta, so let me know in a comment that you want to know before you watch and I’ll email the answer to you.

We just discovered that Josh’s co-worker’s mother is younger than he is.  She had her child in her twenties, and her child just passed into her twenties herself a few years ago.  The math makes sense.  It just makes me feel old.

My co-workers are mostly my age.  I think.  Sometimes it’s hard to tell.  I guess I could point in their face and say, “Where were you when you heard about the Challenger?”  I know that someday I will have a co-worker who answers, “I was an infant.”

I am also aware that YOU may be reading this and thinking, “Where were you when Nixon resigned?”  Um… I was an infant.

I recently read a piece on how art and culture gets lost as generations age, and how little remains in the collective consciousness over the years.  It made me sad to think that, one day, people may not know John Lennon.  That, right now, there are groups of people who cannot identify the song “Imagine” much less something like “Starting Over.”

Popular pieces have a lifespan of 5 – 30 years and then start to pass out of the collective consciousness, remembered by fewer and fewer people over time until very little remains.  Take a look down this list of books published in 1919.  How many do you actually know (vs. recognize the author’s name)?  How many have you read?

Three — I’ve read three on the fiction list.

And yet back in 1919 or 1924, people would have been familiar with these works.  They would have read Winesburg, Ohio.

Can you imagine people in 2119 reading John Green books?  Or Twilight?  Perhaps Harry Potter will survive the next 100 years, but I can’t imagine most people still knowing Rainbow Rowell even though there will always been a small sub-set of people who remember books the general public has forgotten.

I’m sad about that future world where people don’t know about John Green books.

They’re probably sad about our world and how we didn’t live to see their greatest AI author, AlphaZ.

What items (books, movies, television shows) that are popular today do you think we’ll still remember in 100 years?

I probably should go directly to Battlefish, my resource for all things Scandinavian, but this was too delicious to just go in an email.  I just read about Finland’s National Jealousy Day (likely a media-created name), which falls every year in November.  This is the day that the tax administration gives access to every citizen’s taxable income for that year.  In the interest of absolute transparency, you can look up any person in the country and find out how much money they made.

I sort of love it.  On one hand, employers are pushed to pay fairly because they know they’ll be called out for providing some people with a lower salary.  On the other hand, Finland has a 16.5% gender pay gap.  America has an 18.2% gap, so clearly worse, but you’d think that the pay gap would be much lower with that transparency.  Regardless, the transparency means that people pay their taxes.  Imagine how different our elections would be if everyone needed to make their tax information public.

Yet it also sort of makes me uncomfortable in the sense that it encourages assumptions.  How many hurt feelings arise out of people judging generosity since they know the other person’s salary, even if they don’t know the person’s financial needs or the plans they have for their future?  Or how many people resent their co-workers when they discover they’re being paid more, even though maybe they should be paid more for their expertise or exceptional output?

Would you look up people in the database?

I recently paused reading a book.  I like to say “paused” instead of “stopped” because I believe that if there was something that attracted me to the book in the first place, but I’m not connecting to it in the moment, there may be a point in the future where the words and I click.  The book — Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat — started off great, but then I lost interest around chapter five.

So I set it aside and tore through Heather Lende’s Find the Good.  I’ll admit that I bought it due to the lemon on the cover.  Looking at the lemon made me feel happy.  The essays were set in her remote Alaskan town; a small slice of finding the good in every life.

In both cases, I was reading the book as part of my 15 minute improvement plan.  I’ve stuck with it for about three weeks now, and I’m tracking it in my bullet journal.  I may not be better… yet (growth mindset!), but I feel like I’m filling my head with helpful thoughts instead of scrolling through Facebook again.

Anyway, there are tons of posts out there telling people how to push on through and finish reading books that they start.  And other posts out there telling people that it’s totally okay to stop reading a book because we’re adults now.  But there’s nothing lukewarm out there telling people to pause and return to books.  So I’m filling that gap?

Do I ever return to paused books?  Yes.  I can’t remember any off the top of my head right now, but I know I’ve done this.  When I return to the book, I start over from the beginning.  OH — Good Omens.  There, that’s a book that I paused and returned to because while I liked it enough as I was reading it the first time, I could tell that I would probably really love the book if I read it at another time.  And I was correct.

But there are many other paused books whose stories are suspended in figurative aspic.  My goal is to come back to them one day.  Maybe.  If it ever feels right.

It’s not goodbye; it’s see you later.

Do you ever return to books you stop reading?

Once upon a time, I was walking across a parking lot and had an idea for a book.

*******

Once upon a time, I had an idea for a book, and I wrote it over the course of several months.  I wrote the book I wanted to read; about a blogger who was catapulted into a wide readership and wasn’t necessarily ready for the attention as she reconstructed her life after a divorce.  This was before sponsored content and branded social media handles, back when we all sat in each other’s comment sections and carried out long conversations about our lives.  Remember that?

It was only eight years ago.

*******

Life from Scratch is on sale from January 16th (today!) until January 31st.  It’s just the e-book version, and it’s on sale on all e-book platforms (Kindle, iBooks, B&N, Google, etc).  Do I hope that you’ll buy yourself a copy?  Yes.  Do I hope you’ll purchase a copy for a friend?  Yes, gifts are great.  Do I hope that you’ll help me spread word via your social media platform?  Yes, that would be wonderful — thank you.

It was my second book; the first piece of fiction that I published.  I will always have a soft spot for Rachel Goldman.