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I decided not to write the Roundup this morning as a little birthday gift to myself, taking the time I would normally dedicate to rounding posts and describing why they resonated with me to drink coffee and bother Linus.  Happy birthday to me?

I love writing the Roundup, so I feel a little weird saying that I’m taking the week off as a gift to myself.  But I think y’all know what I mean.

This has been such a strange week of highs and lows.

43 is a prime number; a prime birthday.  You only get so many of those in a lifetime.  Let’s say you live until you’re 100 years old.  You’d only get 25 prime birthdays in there.  Prime birthday years feel solid.  They feel indivisible; like you can’t take the year into smaller chunks.  They scream out for people to start and complete a big project.

A prime birthday in my prime, right?

Yes, I’m still yammering on about Matthew Quick’s book, Every Exquisite Thing.  You don’t have to read the book to follow these posts and have an opinion because I’m using the book as a springboard to other mental spaces.  If you want to read the other posts I’ve written about this book, you can find them here, here, here, and here.

So there was a very interesting passage on page 147 about choice when it comes to stopping something.

Maybe you only quit when you were too exhausted to continue? Maybe you did what everyone else wanted you to do for so long by playing and scoring goals—you were so strong for others—that you finally just reached a breaking point and, well, you broke. And it was then—and only then—that you were able to quit. It wasn’t really a choice in the end, but like refusing to pay for your friends’ lunches only when you have run out of money.

Unpack this with me because it’s a really beautiful way of stating that not all stopping is equal.  There are people who have every choice in the world and they decide to stop.  There are others who have very limited choices and they decide to stop.  Finally, there are people who don’t really have any choice and they decide to stop.  If that last group didn’t decide to stop, then life would have told them, firmly, that they had to stop.

Because they were broke.

Not broke as in broken and damaged, but broke as in depleted.  Out of energy or cash or options.

I think we treat all stopping as equal.  People believe that because one person chose not to stop that means all people can choose that option, too.  But reading that passage above, it comes down to this: There are people who stop paying for a friend’s lunch even when they have money in their wallet because they’ve decided to use that money for something else.  And there are people who stop paying for a friend’s lunch because they have a dangerously low amount of money in their wallet and they won’t be able to get home if they spend it now.  And there are people who stop paying for a friend’s lunch because their wallet is empty.

Chew on that and tell me what you think.

Every time I’ve tried Google Cardboard, I’ve ended up feeling queasy for hours afterward.  So I’ve been avoiding all other VR headsets, believing that I’m just not built for virtual reality.  I almost turned down a chance to try an Oculus while at Mom 2.0.

But I had a few minutes before I needed to be at a meeting, so I shrugged and said okay.

The guy said that he would give me a general VR experience so I could see everything the headset could do.  I visited a planet, watched a fox play by a campfire, and examined an abandoned tea party set-up in a castle.  All of it was cool, but right before one of the segments, I heard the guy say, “You’re going to want to take a step back.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.  Honestly, I had forgotten the guy was even there.

But then suddenly the scene changed and I was standing on the ledge of a building in a futuristic cityscape, staring down 50 stories to the ground while spires loomed above me.  And I burst into tears.  I knew I was in a room; I knew I was safe.  But I was so overwhelmed by the sensation of feeling as if I was about to fly.  I could barely see the last few segments because I was so weepy.

I thought about it all night, and I went back to the display in the morning.  “You can get addicted,” he warned me as he adjusted the headset.  Maybe I am.  I mean, I haven’t had a VR experience since I’ve been home, and I haven’t rushed out to the store to purchase one (though I have poked around about it online to judge the cost).  But I think about it a lot.  I talk about it incessantly.  It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever experienced.

Because it feels so real and the images are so gorgeous, it’s easy to spend time there and forget there is anyone else in the room.  There is a part of me that understands the very thin line that divides reality from Ready Player One.

Have you ever tried a VR headset?  What was your experience?

I just celebrated the 30 year anniversary of my Bat Mitzvah.  By “celebrated,” I mean that I texted my friend who shares the same Bat Mitzvah date and said to her, “Happy Bat Mitzvahversary!”  I intended to get myself a treat, but the day got away from me and then it was time to go to a meeting for the twins’ B’nai Mitzvah.

Because they were born when I was 30, we always celebrate milestone moments 30 years apart.  They started Kindergarten 30 years after I started Kindergarten.  They will graduate 30 years after I graduated.  And they will have their B’nai Mitzvah 30 years after mine.

We’ve had the date for years, but it has always felt remote, like visiting the island of Sark.  It’s one of those places that doesn’t feel that far away (at least it’s not as far as Tibet) and should be accessible, yet I don’t fully believe I’ll ever get to visit.

But here is their B’nai Mitzvah, racing toward us.  Exactly 30 years after I stood on the bimah, pretty much to the hour, I sat at a round table, jotting down notes about assigning honours and ordering cookies for after their service.

It is this weird thing because I still remember sitting on the swing set in my backyard, teaching myself my Torah portion.

I’ve been working with the twins on theirs.  Because I have a translation degree, we’re coming at it from a translation angle.  We sit at the kitchen table, translating their portion together, from Hebrew to English using five dictionaries spread out around us.  We break apart words and look up their etymology and play with form so they can see how different words relate to one another.  As we translate the passage, we keep saying the words in Hebrew.  And that’s how we’re learning it; a few words at a time crawling under their skin, into their bones so that when their day on the bimah finally arrives, it will be like spending time with an old friend.

I still remember chunks of my Torah portion 30 years later.  I can sing the first few sentences without looking at the page.  I wonder if it will be that way for the twins, too, 30 years from now.

Josh and I went to a gala with a magician, and I was called on stage as a volunteer for one of the tricks.  (I know, I’ve been having great luck lately getting chosen from the audience, but to be fair, I had a front row seat this time.)

He first had six of us each hold a piece of string with a bolt, and he talked us through a trick where he made my string and bolt swing wildly in a circle even though my hand wasn’t moving.

He excused four of the people from the stage, and then he had two of us sit down on chairs about six meters apart.  He proceeded to hypnotize us, and I felt very strange while I sat in the chair.  He brought me out of it and showed me a bunch of cards, asking me to read what they said.  They were just a jumble of letters.  He would turn the card toward the audience, and they would all laugh, apparently seeing something else.  Then he would show me the card and it was just a jumble of letters that I couldn’t form into words.  Like A-P-P-L-S-O-S-S.

He put us back into a trance, and then he tapped my shoulder, but the other woman felt it.  Then he walked across the stage and touched her nose with the edge of a pack of cards, and I recoiled because I could feel someone touching my face.  (And everyone knows that I hate it when people touch my face.)  He brought us out and told us what had happened.  He was nowhere near me, but I had felt the cards travel down my nose, their edge making my whole face scrunch up.

It was such a strange trick.

I spoke to the magician at the end of the night, and he mentioned that I was very susceptible to hypnosis; that I went into that state so easily.  It made me wonder if it would be worth going to a professional hypnotist — a therapist who incorporates hypnotism into their work — to get over some of my fears.  I would love to live without some of my more annoying fears (like, I don’t know, fear of flying), but I’m also afraid of hypnosis itself.

It’s one thing to be in a room with hundreds of other people, participating in a magic trick.  It’s another to be alone in a room with someone and trust that they are changing my brain for the better.  What if I emerge with more fears?  I am not great at giving up control, and being in a vulnerable state like that, all alone, would definitely be about giving up control.

Have you ever tried hypnosis to get over a fear?  Did it work?