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Two articles — unrelated — came together for the perfect storm of heart squeezing this past weekend.  I’m putting them out there because I’m hoping I will feel differently if we talk about them.

The first one is this.  Yes.  All of it.  Every single word of it.  We are the “wrong place, wrong time” generation.  We are:

The Title IX babies who were the first women in their families to go to college. Or go away to college. Or to live on their own, launch a career, marry in their late 20s (or never) or choose to stay home with their children … They’re smart. They’re grateful for what they have. They’re also exhausted. Some of them are terrified. A few of them are wondering what the point is.

Yes.

Josh passed along the article to me because he thought it would make me feel better to know that everyone is worried all the time, but it actually just made me super sad.  Especially the idea of ambiguous losses:

“Ambiguous losses are a particular type of loss that lack a definition and lack closure,” says Kelly Maxwell Haer, PhD, of the Boone Center for the Family at Pepperdine University, in California. “The ambiguous loss of singleness is particularly challenging to navigate. The person could be found in five minutes. Or never. You’re not going to get an email from God that says you’re never going to have a partner. That hope lingers on, and it’s really hard to live in hope that is not met, but there’s no end. Humans don’t do uncertainty well.”

Replace “singleness” with “infertility” and “found in five minutes” with “successful next cycle.”  That idea of having hope that doesn’t have an expiration point.  It applies to everything big in life: partnership, career, family building.  And it’s exhausting.  It is exhausting to be a constant state of uncertainty; a constant state of striving or trying.  To feeling like once you get one duck in a row, another goes out of line.

So there was that.

The other post was “When I Realized That Some of My Dreams Will Never Come True.” I clicked on it because I was curious: Which of her dreams didn’t come true and was it really too late for it to happen if she wanted to make it her life goal?

I mean, yes, I am well aware that there is an expiration date on certain dreams, or in order to achieve the dream, you need to change the dream a lot.

But there are plenty of things that can still happen up until the day before you die.  Get married?  Run a half-marathon?  Publish a book?  Become a doctor?

But what she’s talking about is… well… all of the above.  The American dream.  Of doing as well as your parents.  Again, we’re the Title IX generation.  We are supposed to be able to have it all, do it all, be anything and everything.  We’re the Free to Be You and Me generation, and we believed Marlo Thomas when she told us that we could be mothers and welders.

I adore my messy storage boxes.  I refuse to clean them up, insisting that I do need every single torn-out magazine article.  I do.

Which is why I feel vindicated by Steven Johnson’s “keep your folders messy” ideology:

The key is to capture as many hunches as possible, and to spend as little time as possible organizing or filtering or prioritizing them. (Keeping a single, chronological file is central to the process, because it forces you to scroll through the whole list each time you want to add something new.) Just get it all down as it comes to you, and make regular visits back to re-acquaint yourself with all your past explorations. You’ll be shocked how many useful hunches you’ve forgotten.

I am a hunch gatherer.  A hunch ruminator.  I love jotting down ideas on post-it notes and only returning to them a year later to figure out what I meant.  I am a bookmarker, a screen-shot taker, a page-ripper-outer.

Drop in a box.  Drop in a box.  Drop in a box.

I think that is why I love my bullet journal so much.  When I have an idea, something I want to explore, I mark an empty square next to the idea.  About once a month, I go back and look for all the empty squares and tackle some of the ideas in blog posts or emails or research.  If I feel the idea is done, I check the box.  If the idea still needs to be explored, I leave it empty so I can find it again in the future.

Do yourself a favour this year: start a bullet journal.  Carry it with you.  Make sure you update it.

Who knows what you’ll find that you didn’t even know you were looking for.

When I first heard about Lazy Jar, I thought it was an actual jar.  Like you know how some people have a swear jar in their house, and they drop money in it if they curse?  Or they make their kids drop money in it if they curse?  Or something like that?  Anyway, I thought it was a physical jar in your home that you dropped money into whenever you skipped your workout.

But, no, this shit is real.

Lazy Jar is an app that takes your money if you don’t workout.  If you do workout, you get nothing except the good feeling of knowing all of your money is remaining in your wallet.  If you don’t workout, it takes your money.  It begins with a deposit (that you get back eventually if it judges you as having tried to stick to your goals) and then takes away a weekly penalty (that you set) for missing your workout.  It donates most of the money to a charity of its choosing.

It’s sort of brilliant.

Because I skip my workout at least once a week.  I’m a terrible morning person, but I’m great at excuses.  But if I knew that the makers of an app were taking my money, I would (probably) stop hitting snooze as often.

Though it may be more motivating to work toward something than be punished.  Like put a dollar in an account every time you workout so the money builds rather than removes.  And then spend it all on really comfy pyjamas that you don’t want to get out of in the morning!

Okay, maybe taking money would work a little better.

The New Yorker had an article listing the worst food hacks of 2017.  I didn’t know the vast majority of them:

Is your pot always boiling over? Place a wooden spoon across the top. Smelly sponge? Microwave it. Need to bring a stick of cold butter to room temperature quickly? Place it in a plastic bag and then go at it with a hammer. Need to ripen bananas in a jiffy? Pop them in the oven.

What else do I not know?

How does someone discover these kitchen hacks?  Like what possessed someone to stick their bananas in an oven?  A wooden spoon across the top of a pot; fine.  It’s a convenient resting spot, and the person may notice that it stops the water from boiling over.  But bananas in an oven?

That article led me into the strange world of kitchen hacks.  Google it.  There are over 4 million hits.  There is a whole world of cooking tricks I never knew about.  Overnight veggie stock?  Steamed eggs?  Mind blown.

What is your best kitchen hack?

P.S. My only one comes from Rick Bayless when we were talking at a BlogHer conference.  I told him that I didn’t like dressings with raw garlic because I hated to have the taste of raw garlic in my mouth afterward.  He told me to dry roast the garlic before using.  Just pop the cloves — skin and all — in a dry pan over medium heat.  When the skin is black, let it cool and peel.  Use it and you have a mellow roasted garlic with no aftertaste.

I’ve never found a message in a bottle. Granted, I’m not going to the beach daily, and most of the time when I’m on the beach, other people are on the beach, too. So there may have been bottles and someone else grabbed it before I could see it. But… I’ve never found one and this guy has found 1200.

I really love that he writes back. And that there is a whole world of drift bottles out there, and I only had the vaguest notion that this was a thing. Something people looked for and collected or sent out to see if their message will be returned.

A first blog post feels a little bit like sending a drift bottle into the vast internet sea. You write it, wondering if anyone will read it. And then one day a comment pops up on the page; human contact letting you know that you’ve been found. Heard.

Am I the only person out there who has never found a message in a bottle? Or do you have a good message-in-a-bottle story??