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If you want a good cry (and I don’t know why the hell you wouldn’t want a good cry — I aim for several each day), try this article about a son immortalizing his father after his cancer diagnosis.

I know I write about chatbots and immortality a lot, and I am clearly on the side of record, record, record.  But I felt myself getting weepy in the first part of the story, when he is making the audio recordings.

The ChickieNob and I have been working on an enormous family tree, stretching back and out and down again through seven generations.  It fills a room when you unfold all the pieces.  Along the way, she has done a few recordings, and our goal has been to get a recording of everyone in the family.

Two of the first recordings were of my great-aunt and Josh’s grandmother, both older women so I knew our time was limited, but recorded years ago when they were both well.  We sat with an early copy of the family tree and had them look at the names and tell us stories.

When my great-aunt passed away, I was able to send the recording to her sons, giving them this tiny new piece of their mother with her laugh and vocal quirks.

Maybe it’s less creepy than a chatbot that is guessing how the person would speak if they were still alive.  No, you can’t ask the person more questions, but you can guess at answers and hear their voice and close your eyes and pretend they’re in the room.

I guess that is my goal this winter: To make more recordings.  To gather more stories.  To keep people here.

I was recently in a sticky social situation, being asked to do something that I’m not comfortable doing or risk losing out on an opportunity.  (Think of it like being told you have to swim in a bathtub full of crickets or lose your spot in your weekly Bunco game, except there was no bathtub, crickets, or Bunco.)

I felt ill about the decision and then decided that even though Morra Aaron-Mele’s book, Hiding in the Bathroom, is about navigating the workplace as an introvert, social situations were also sort of a negotiation.  So I flipped to the chapter on negotiations to see if there was anything in there I could use and kept re-reading the section on BATNA.

BATNA stands for best alternative to a negotiated agreement.  So the next best thing if the negotiation doesn’t succeed.  What will I be left with, and do I actually like that thing just as much as the thing I’m negotiating.  This is important to know because you shouldn’t accept something worse than your BATNA.  You may already have something in-hand or close to in-hand that you like as much as or more than the thing you’re negotiating for.  Get it?  Because we sometimes get stuck in the thrill of the negotiation and don’t really consider what we actually want.  It’s about moving away from being fueled by the desire to win and instead focusing on getting what I want.

It resonated with me because… I am someone who doesn’t really consider her BATNA very often.  Plan B’s, yes, but I consider Plan B’s to be the thing that happens because Plan A didn’t happen.  And that is very different from BATNA.  BATNA is about making the conscious choice to remove yourself from a negotiation, to move yourself towards something else BEFORE it has been decided for you.  It’s the most powerful space in a negotiation because you’re willing to walk away.  You acknowledge there is something else that is different but equally good, and you’re not willing to settle on winning the negotiation by actually losing your happiness (or money or something else) in the process.

Has there ever been an idea more applicable to negotiating family building?  Negotiating with your body or with an adoption agency or with a sperm bank?  Negotiating with doctors or your partner or your family or society?  How brave is it to pull back as you negotiate that world and make a real decision.  What is my family building BATNA?  What am I willing to negotiate away because I get something better in return?  What am I not willing to part with because it would leave me in a worse spot?

WATNA is the opposite — the worst alternative to a negotiated agreement.  The worst that can happen if you lose the negotiation.  Returning to my situation, I looked at the worst case scenario and went pretty far down that rabbit hole.  But if I’m being honest and I pause in a realistic space instead of entertaining one of the unlikely, doomsday scenarios I found down the rabbit hole, my worst isn’t that bad.  In fact, it has a lot of good things, too.

The point of BATNA and WATNA is not just to define in your mind what you want.  It’s to make yourself an equal partner in a negotiation*.  It’s recognizing your power by setting your limits.  And my limits don’t include swimming in bathtubs with crickets.  Not even for a weekly Bunco game.  Defining that in my mind and realizing I was willing to walk away because I had something else equally good let me get a good night’s sleep.

I hope this helps you get a good night’s sleep, too.

* What also helped was taking a closer look at what each of us brought to the table.  I brought a batch of my chocolate chip cookies to the game each week, and everyone raved about them.  It became a joke when I walked into the house and everyone would shout, “The cookies are here!”  Whereas they brought the dice and folding tables.  So when you look at it that way, they had more to lose.  Yes, there are other desserts, but without me, they didn’t have my chocolate chip cookies.  Whereas they brought the bunco.  I can get bunco elsewhere — there are a zillion weekly games in the area — but they cannot get my cookies elsewhere.  Maybe they don’t care about my cookies and don’t mind losing them because they’re fine with Shirley’s snickerdoodles, so I’m not saying that my cookies are worth more.  But they sort of are because one side has something unique and the other side has something that is technically obtainable elsewhere.  Anyway, this framing also helped me consider myself an equal partner who could set limits and knew what would happen next if I walked away.

Longtime readers of the blog will hopefully remember the ChickieNob’s burning desire for clam ownership.  Live clam ownership.  The girl made some excellent points in that recording.

This past weekend, my sister-in-law and I were wandering around a craft fair.  The last table was piled with jewelry and a bowl of oysters in liquid.  I assumed it was water.  The woman at the table gave us her sales pitch: For $20, we could open an oyster and place the pearl inside one of the necklace pendants.  I thought about how oysters are very similar to clams, and $20 isn’t a lot for a pet considering the cost of a dog or cat.

“Are they alive?” I asked, motioning to the bowl of oysters.

The woman furrowed her brow and looked at the bowl.  “Well, they used to be alive.”

She explained that these were just oyster corpses, brined in an alcohol solution.  She may have used a different term than “oyster corpses” because she was trying to tip toe around the fact that she murdered shellfish.  She kept trying to sell us on the idea of the pearl inside.  In her cruel world, the oyster was the wrapping paper that one discarded in favour of the gift inside.  In our world, the oyster was our heart.

We ended up leaving without a pet oyster, alive or otherwise.

I recently wrote an article about President Eisenhower, which led me to the topic of Eisenhower boxes.  What, you ask, are Eisenhower boxes?  It’s a productivity system where you break down tasks into four categories: do, decide, delegate, or delete.

So every day you wake up and divide a piece of paper into four quarters.  In the top, left square, you write what needs to get done today.  Not tomorrow, not next week, but today.  Meaning, you are not going to bed until this task is complete.  To the right of that box, you write things that are important but not urgent.  If you get to them today, great.  If you get to them tomorrow, that’s fine, too.  But they need to get done at some point.

In the bottom, left square, you write things that are not important but they’re urgent.  The article lists it as things you’d delegate to someone else to do.  My understanding is that it’s stuff that is time sensitive, but if it doesn’t get done, it’s okay and you’d let it go.

Anyway, the square that really throws me is the bottom, right for not urgent and not important.

If it’s not urgent and it’s not important, why would I write it down?

I still keep my bullet journal, but everything that needs to get done goes into my journal so it’s not always exactly clear what needs to get done today and what can wait until the next day.  The past few weeks have been unusually busy, and I’ve been tackling my to-do list by creating Ford Squares.

It’s an easier system.

You take a piece of paper.  You fold it in half three times and then unfold it so you see eight squares.  You put the days of the week at the top of each square.  And then you look at your large to-do list and start scheduling tasks on certain days.  So it’s no longer a huge to-do list; it’s just one or two tasks per day.  If I complete the daily list, I allow myself to work ahead and grab something off another day, but I have zero feelings of guilt if I only accomplish the things that are in the single square.  It helps me to say “no” to things because I can see that the squares are already full.  And it also helps me to feel calm because I can see that I will have all the cookies baked for Chanukkah by X date because I’ve scheduled one batch for each evening.

I’m calling my unfancy system Ford Squares.  I’m sure someone else has already invented this, but I’m still keeping my name.  It’s not as brilliant as Eisenhower boxes, but you also don’t need to make hard, categorical decisions.  It’s just Monday or Tuesday.  Two tasks or three.  And when life goes back to a normal pace, I’ll go back to only using my bullet journal.  But until then… Ford Squares.

So a friend posted a great quote on Facebook on Thanksgiving: “There are people who would be grateful to have your bad days.”

The meaning of the words — at least as defined by the other commenters — is that there are always people out there who are worse off and they would be thrilled to have your problems.  A little Voltaire-like inverse Pain Olympics.  Yes, we all have problems, but be grateful for even your bad days because there are people who would consider themselves lucky if they got to live your problems rather than their own.

But before I saw the comments, I read it in a completely different way.

And I’m sticking to the way I initially understood it.

There are people in your life — the people who love you or appreciate you — who are grateful to have you in their life even on your worst days.  Meaning, Josh would rather have Melissa on her worst days than Person X on only her best days.  My kids would rather have me during what I consider my worst parenting moments over another mother during what she would consider her best parenting moments.  My clients consider my “worst” work better than most people’s “best” work.

It’s the perfect life rule: surround yourself with people who are grateful to have you.  And it’s a pretty simple litmus test when you’re trying to make a decision about something.  Does the person appreciate you?  Want the whole you?  See even your “worst” as better than many other people’s “best”?  Then keep them close.  Does the person only highlight your faults?  Try to change you?  Not appreciate your innate gifts or strong effort?  Then let them (or the situation) go.

All the people I love in my life or appreciate in my life are not without faults.  They have their bad days or bone-headed moments that frustrate me.  But I gladly take those people with their foibles because I am grateful to have them in my life; to get even their worst days because even when they’re at their worst, they are still eons better than many other people at their best.

And I’m always grateful to the people who recognize that same idea when considering me.