Category — Uncategorized

Lifehacker had an article a few weeks ago that I finally got around to reading this week.  It’s about how “walking in another person’s shoes” actually makes us less empathetic.  That those in the community, going through the experience themselves, have less empathy than those outside the situation.

Um…

The article quotes the study from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

We found that people who endured challenges in the past (like divorce or being skipped over for a promotion) were less likely to show compassion for someone facing the same struggle, compared with people with no experience in that particular situation…Taken together, these results suggest that people who have endured a difficult experience are particularly likely to penalize those who struggle to cope with a similar ordeal.

Listen, you can sort of see it in our community when we play the Pain Olympics, or we judge another person for the way they’re choosing to address their infertility, but I wonder if those researchers — overall — would find the same results if they were to study us.

Because I think there is a big difference between the empathy we feel for universal experiences vs. the empathy we feel for specialized experiences — the ones that most people will not go through.  The example of bullying in the article is a universal experience.  Most people will feel the effects of bullying at some point in their life.

But infertility is something most people won’t experience, and because of that, I think it brings out a level of support missing from the general world.

I think you can get more empathy here from other IFfers than you can get from the general population, and that is perhaps because we know the two-fold level of emotional pain that comes from infertility: It’s not just that you’re dealing with the emotions of infertility.  You’re also dealing with the emotions of not being like the rest of the world around you as you deal with the emotions of infertility.  And triggers are always around you, in the form of pregnant women and babies and happy families eating next to you in restaurants and baby clothing sections at clothing stores.

I don’t know.  I’m just thinking back to all the times when I’ve been at a baby-centric life cycle event and while the general circle of women aren’t very empathetic, a fellow stirrup queen will always walk by and rub my back or give me a meaningful look for a moment.  And I know that they know.  And they know that I know.

Maybe we’re just the exceptions to the rule?

What do you think?  Do you get more empathy from people who have been through infertility or people who have not?

The first MicroblogMonday entry two Mondays ago was about whether people really change.  My first, knee-jerk response was yes.  I am not the person I was years ago.  Things that used to phase me now don’t bother me at all, and things that I used to love now are anathema.  Like camping.  Ugh.

But the longer response is that at the core, I remain the same.  Everything that makes me… Me.  Like me with a capital “M.”  My me-ness.  Those things remain constant.

But that solid core is surrounded by softer and softer layers, until the outer leaves are as flimsy as romaine lettuce.  Those outer leaves, the ones rubbing up against by the world, change massively over time, change in smaller ways day-to-day. It’s the outer layers that worry me, especially when I feel that the change is negative.  That I’m losing a piece of myself that I once liked.

I feel like something clicked out of sync last spring, and I’ve been trying to get it back.  But maybe it really is like lettuce.  Maybe those outer layers need to be shucked, tossed aside.  Because… you know… lettuce isn’t really repairable.  Maybe the key to getting back to having outer layers I like to look at is to remove the damaged ones and move on, rather than trying to fix, smooth over, perfect.

Side note: Tomorrow is #MicroblogMonday once again.  Get writing!

Screenshot of Crown of Kings (a.k.a. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons)

This is a cautionary tale about an online review that led me astray.

Back in September, my cousin and I were talking about old video games, so on and so on, and I ended up buying all of the games on the Activision and Atari apps, and then adding in the Midway Arcade app since they had Joust.  It wasn’t a bad purchase at all — I’ve played them a lot — but most of the games I really missed weren’t offered as part of the in-game purchase.

The games I wanted were on the Intellivision Flashback, but I was nervous to buy it because of a review I read online.  It was long and detailed, which is probably why I fixated on it.  Though now reading it again after playing with the machine (oh, yes, the machine will enter my house… spoilers!), I can see that if I knew the reviewer personally, I probably would have decided that we purchase gaming machines for very different reasons and what matters to him/her will not be what matters to me.  More on what does matter to me in a moment.

So I wrote that GeekDad post, and the head of Intellivision wrote me.  We got into a conversation about the apps and the machine, and they offered to send me a console to test out myself.  The next day, I got word that it was on its way.

Somewhere along the way, it went from being a “yeah, that would make a fun blog post” to “my childhood is on a plane, flying toward me, and I am tracking it across states.” I got very jittery about it, like I was about to see an old camp friend after a long winter.  I sat there with the postal tracking system open on my computer, hitting refresh several times each hour.

I watched videos of other people playing Intellivision games on YouTube, like I was looking at old photo albums, wondering if things would still be the same when my friend got here.

Uh… my machine friend.  Like… my Intellivision Flashback friend.

It will surprise exactly zero readers to learn that I cried playing it.  The sounds… and the colours… and the click click click of counting my arrows in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (which is now called Crown of Kings) and the song in Snafu… all of it.  I felt like I was eight again.  I felt like myself again.

Do you know what I mean?  That moment when you magically access some deeply buried muscle memory, and it combines with the sounds and sights from your childhood.  Suddenly you are eight years old again and sitting on the floor (criss-cross applesauce), the only one awake on a Saturday morning.

But it’s even better now because the twins are in love with it, too, and they want to play with me all the time.  All those years when I couldn’t find anyone to play Utopia with me, and now I have two best friends living under my roof who say things like, “Let’s not go to bed.  Let’s stay up all night playing video games.”  Okay!  Let’s do it!

By which I mean I tucked them in and then went back downstairs to play by myself for a few hours.  Mama needs to get better at Brickout, let’s just say.

So this is the thing about that review: I don’t see the same things at all.  The quality of the video and sound?  It looks perfectly good to me.  Maybe it’s his/her television, because the games look and sound as I remember them.  Granted, I’m not a purist, and I don’t have an old system to do a side-by-side comparison.  But everything so far has played as I remember it.

But what my review would say, and I am planning to write a review to counter that one, is that if you want to feel like you felt playing your old Intellivision games, then you should get the Flashback.

It’s sort of like that old Maya Angelou quote: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”  I will forget how the games sounded or how the games looked, but I will never forget how the games made me feel, and these games still make me feel that way.

So I’m really grateful that they made this machine and let me try it out.  You can peruse the game list on the Intellvision Lives! site as well as get the overlays and old manuals.  You can read more about the Flashback system over on GeekDad where I wrote about it a few weeks ago.  But moreover, better than a review, you can ask me any questions you have since I’m holding the product and happy to test anything out for anyone else.

And if you don’t have any questions, then at least share your favourite game list so I can see where we match up.  Mine: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Crown of Kings) will always and forever be number one.  In no particular order after that: Astrosmash, Space Armada, Horse Racing, Utopia, Snafu, Pitfall, and Brickout.  On the Atari, my favourites were Adventure and E.T.

A.M.S. (who no longer blogs… sniff) and I share a love of tiny houses, yurts, and homes that look like this.  I’ve been trying to convince Josh that we need a tiny house at the beach.  He is equally enamoured with tiny houses, less so ones placed on land that may be underwater in a few years, and we sometimes watch Tiny House Nation, talking about our own future tiny house.

Last week, we were watching a Halloween-themed episode when the host mentioned that the community of rentable tiny houses was located in my home state.  Are you kidding me?  Would A.M.S. come up to visit so we could squee?  I grabbed Josh’s hand and gasped, “Oh my G-d, we need to drive out there now!”

And then I Googled it.

And you know where it was?  My location casualty.

I know I wrote about possibly returning to this area back in 2011, mostly to show the kids Fallingwater, but we haven’t done it yet.  I want to in the sense that I want to show them Fallingwater, but I really don’t want to go back to that area.  It’s a shame because it’s so close, and yet the idea of going fills me with dread, even after this much time has passed.  Isn’t that ridiculous?  Except that if it’s possible to live your life avoiding an area, it’s really hard to talk yourself into going there for fun.  Because… you know… it isn’t fun to be there.

And yet… maybe the siren song of the tiny house will be the thing that pushes me over the edge?

Are there places you never want to return to?

When two people send you the same post within minutes of each other, you read it.  And think.  Thank you, Karen and Life After Divorce… Happy Chaos.  Then Lori added it to this week’s second-helpings in the Roundup.  I’ll read it, I’ll read it!

The post was Tim Lawrence’s, “Everything Doesn’t Happen for a Reason.”  In it, he explodes the platitudes that often are said after a life-changing event, when the person should be encouraged to grieve but instead is encouraged to look at the silver lining in the dark clouds.

It’s a good post, though only presents the point of view of the person experiencing the loss — and there are a lot of sides to a single story — but it starts a conversation, starting with the idea to tossing out the idea of “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” and instead taking up the more accurate notion that some pain is not meant to be “gotten over” but instead carried.  He writes,

I hate to break it to you, but although devastation can lead to growth, it often doesn’t. The reality is that it often destroys lives. And the real calamity is that this happens precisely because we’ve replaced grieving with advice. With platitudes. With our absence.

I like this because it gives permission to the “can’t,” as in, I can’t get over this.  I can’t move on from this.  I can’t not feel this.  I think, in some ways, it’s more important to give that support or permission to those who can’t because for that particular person, that load is just too heavy.  It may not be too heavy for another person, in the same way that what I can physically carry is very different from the loads the twins can physically carry with their twig arms.

So I think this type of post is important because it’s an acknowledgment that some loads may simply be too heavy, and if we wish to help, it’s not telling the person they can do it or try harder or the load isn’t that heavy.  It’s to help carry the load if we can help carry the load, and when we can’t because it’s a one-person job, to support the person emotionally, mostly by listening and not retreating when they comment on the ache in their arms.

And, at the same time, the post demeans an ideology that is very important to some people.  That life isn’t random, that there is a point to everything.  It presents the idea that there is only one way to help, a correct way to help, and all other ways of communicating hinder.

I guess I would prefer a post that acknowledges that there are a multitude of ways through an experience, and the method for helping should match the person in need rather than be the method preferred by the help giver.  Moreover, I want a post with an acknowledgment that sometimes the person experiencing a loss has no clue how others can help, has no clue how they wish to be addressed.  If they knew words that would help, they would say those words to themselves.  Maybe the fact that they can’t find these words means that there are no good words, or finding magical words that would assuage the feelings are akin to finding a needle in a haystack.

And I guess I was also bothered by the idea of cutting someone out of your life just because they struggle to support you.  You don’t know their internal thoughts, the words they rejected before they came out with the ones that offended you.  I suspect that I would have zero friends if people truly cut people out of their lives because they didn’t deliver the right words. I am positive I have offended people unintentionally, and I am positive that everyone in my life has said something supremely unhelpful at one moment or another.  There’s a quote I am completely blanking on in the moment about being forgiving because everyone has a story and we often don’t know what the other person has gone through.

So that is my take on the post.  Your thoughts?

Side note: #MicroblogMonday is tomorrow.  Get writing!