Category — Uncategorized

Bookmark this post because you are going to want to come back to it if you don’t have 45 minutes right now.  I promise that this tiny game will be well-worth your time.

I stumbled upon the Seers Catalogue much in the same way the character in the game finds the mysterious ad in the back of a magazine that leads them on their adventure.  Random clicks brought me to an article on The Verge, and the name of the game stuck in my mind when we were picking our next selection for our interactive fiction club.

“Let’s play Seers Catalogue.”

Where are we? 

A hiding place.

The game takes about 45 minutes to read through.  While you can leave it open and walk away from the screen, you cannot save your progress.  This is — perhaps — a good thing in the sense that the game lulls you into a dream state, and it’s better to commit to reading it vs. playing in drips and drabs.  It can only be accessed from a computer — not a mobile device.

It was like Mysterious Benedict Society for adults (though I didn’t see anything in the first play-through of the game that was inappropriate for kids, and I’m letting the twins read it).  It felt like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in game form.  There is no way to lose the game, but a few ways you can twist the story.

“Anything that is important has power,” says Mr. Bud. “And this is what the powerful use to maintain their control.”

Bookmark this post because after you play, I want you to come back here and tell me where the story took you.

Next Monday, the Electoral College will meet to cast their votes, though the votes won’t be counted until Congress meets on January 6th.  That is also the last day for anyone in the House or Senate to object to the results of the Electoral College vote.

It feels like some of us are in the bottom portion of an hourglass, feeling the grains falling on our heads and wondering if someone will come along to flip the glass in time, or will we be buried and suffocated under an avalanche of sand.

As I said weeks ago, this election is not like any other election in recent history.  Americans elected a group of individuals (since when you’re voting for a President, you are also voting for all the people who come with said President from his Vice President to his advisors to his cabinet) that are not for ideas but against groups of people.  This isn’t the usual case where there are multiple paths forward and all have their pros and cons.  There are few people who will experience pros with this administration.  There are many more people who will experience cons.

When we can actively point out the groups that will be discriminated against under the proposed policies, the fors don’t matter when, in order to put them into action, they go hand-in-hand with againsts.

I wish everyone understood what it feels like to be in the lower bulb of the hourglass and be on receiving end of discrimination.  I don’t want other people to have to actually experience it — it’s awful to feel fear — but I can see from the way people voted that they don’t understand what life is like down here.  If they did, they would never make a decision that could possibly lead to people being in the lower bulb.

I am grateful to the people who have not experienced the fear that goes hand-in-hand with discrimination but were able to imagine how horrible it would be to have people shout a racial slur at you or how it feels to walk up to your shul and see it covered in swastikas and hate slogans and voted accordingly; especially to people who wanted a third-party candidate and chose to vote for Hillary Clinton not because they were for Hillary but because they were against hate and were going to do everything within their power to stop this situation from happening.

Hate isn’t just words.  Hate isn’t just images.  They are proof of an ideology; its manifestation in visible or auditory form.  And history has shown us time and time again the results of that hate-filled ideology.

So we wait for next Monday and then we wait all the way until January 6th to find out if anyone is going to flip this hourglass or if some of us are going to drown.

I’m back hanging out with My Fitness Frenemy.  It sucks to be logging my food once again, but I need something to keep me honest.  I have been slipping.

I start out with good intentions with all the healthier living stuff.  For instance, I wanted to get more sleep, so we instated the “devices off by 10:45 pm” rule.  In addition, we would read from 10:45 to 11:15 pm, then get ready for bed and have the lights off by 11:30 pm.  The first few nights, everything went according to plan.  Devices and screens were off by 10:45 pm.  We read books.  The lights went off.  I fell asleep easier.  All was well.

And then the creep started.  First it was devices that were still on at 10:50 pm.  Then it was checking email one last time before I went to bed after reading for a half hour.  Then it was opting for the television episode instead of the book because it was Daredevil Monday.  (I’m assuming everyone celebrates Daredevil Monday, which is the most sacred day of the week, dedicated to all things Daredevil from the comic books to the television series.)

And now our evenings are a mish-mash where sometimes we’re fantastic about getting to bed on time, and sometimes we suck, and our nights look very much as they did before we instated the rule.  That’s what I mean by slipping.

The same thing happened with SuperBetter.  I went from doing all the exercises everyday, to doing the exercises sometimes, to doing the exercises every once in a while, to having three good days in a row and then a week of nothing.

Or wishing happiness to others.  The alarm still goes off every hour on the hour, and most of the time I send out my happiness wish, though I’ve had a few moments where I have snarled into the silence of the house, “I don’t wish anyone else happiness at this moment, universe, YOU JUST INTERRUPTED MY CHAIN OF THOUGHT.”

It’s not that hard to enter my food and exercise in My Fitness Pal.  It’s a few clicks several times a day.  I know seeing it in black and white helps me to make good decisions, and at this point, I’m over the hump; that difficult period where you’re hungry all the time because your stomach needs to get accustomed to the smaller amount of food.  So I’m not sure why I allow things to slip over and over again, especially knowing that I am generally happier when I follow the plan.

So this is it: Anchoring myself here in healthy living land.  I think.

The best kind of book is when you not only forget that you’re reading fiction but you’re so lost in the story that you keep forgetting that the events aren’t really happening in the world around you.  The last time that happened I was reading The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker.  I had to keep reminding myself that our days weren’t growing longer and birds weren’t dropping out of the sky.  And even so, I kept saying things like, “We can’t do that because the sun will burn us through our clothes!  Wait, no, it won’t.”

It happened again this week reading Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter.  It’s a science fiction thriller about a man who crosses dimensions and encounters other versions of his own life.  That’s pretty much all I can say about it without ruining anything, but I spent the week forgetting that it wasn’t real and that we couldn’t twist the laws of physics.

I kept expecting to see myself every time I turned a corner.

*******

Then The Atlantic continued to blow my mind by telling me that “the world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality.”

Boom.

[That was my mind exploding.]

This is the article in a nutshell:

Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.

All we see are symbols or surface information, and we use that information to guide our decisions, but we never pause to really consider that all we know is this surface information.  Or, to put it more succinctly: “My snakes and trains are my mental representations; your snakes and trains are your mental representations.”

We are all just points-of-view walking amongst other points-of-view.

So how does this apply to infertility?

I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your own headaches. The same thing is true as apples and the moon and the sun and the universe. Just like you have your own headache, you have your own moon. But I assume it’s relevantly similar to mine. That’s an assumption that could be false, but that’s the source of my communication, and that’s the best we can do in terms of public physical objects and objective science.

We think we’re effectively communicating with each other because we’ve both experienced infertility (or we’re both women or we’re both Jewish or we’re both American, etc), but I have no clue if you really understand anything I’m saying because all I have is this first-person experience.  And I read you, thinking I understand you, but maybe I don’t understand you at all because how I am understanding your words is only through my own point-of-view because there is no single reality.

As you can see, I’m having a trippy sort of week.

The twins recently went on outdoor ed.  The sixth grade goes away for three days to a campsite where they do nature-based assignments and team work activities.  They had campfires and night hikes and slept in cabins.  They came home caked with mud, tracking in bits of dried leaves when they pulled off their boots.

Josh and I volunteered both evenings.  It was partly for the twins but it was partly for me.  Thirty years ago, I went to outdoor ed in the exact same place.

*******

It smelled the same.  If you had asked me prior to walking into the main building what the campsite smelled like, I would have shrugged.  But then I got there and breathed in and was instantly transported back 30 years.  It looked the same, minus the graffiti in our cabin and a missing tetherball set.  Even the fence where I released my pet potato bug* was still there in all of its splinter-giving glory.

I liked outdoor ed — I have fond memories of my week at the campsite. (We got a full week, kids.  Welcome to budget cuts.)  But I didn’t give the experience that much thought until I was sitting near the fireplace, watching the kids enjoying the evening activity, and felt my chest get tight as I realized that I would probably never be back in the space again.  We only get to go full circle once.

One spin through elementary school.  One return to outdoor ed.  One B’nai Mitzvah, one trip to get driver’s licenses, one graduation.

One is definitely more than none, but I am surrounded by people who get to do everything two or three times so it is constantly on my mind.  It’s a testament to no matter how much you promise to be satisfied with what you get, the heart still wants more when the actuality of your family doesn’t match the dream family that popped into your brain when you giddily started down this road.

I am grateful that I get the once.  My heart still longs to do everything two or three times.

* I didn’t have a lot of female friends when I was in sixth grade, and I wasn’t allowed to sleep in the boys’ cabin, but I did find a potato bug on the first day at camp, and I placed him in my empty film container from my camera.  He kept me company for the week, but I sadly let him go on the last day.