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Josh and I talk a lot about getting a dog.  It would be my first dog ever, and Josh’s first dog in a loooooong time.  We pause at adoption events to pet the dogs, and we peruse a local shelter’s website from time to time.  We’re in that should-we-or-shouldn’t-we stage.

Every once in a while, we fall in love with a dog.  I fell in love with one a few months ago.  His name was Frodo.  He was adorable.  He was staring at me from the shelter’s site, begging me to take him home.  Josh pointed out that the dog has “severe emotional issues” and cannot be left alone even for a few minutes during the day.  “What will you do when you want to go to the grocery store?” he asked.  Fair point, sir, but did you see those big, brown eyes?

Josh fell in love with a black lab at an adoption event.  I was at home, so he sent me multiple pictures.  He was the perfect size, gorgeous, and came with a tragic story that screamed, “take me home and love meeeeee!”  Josh carried around the card for the shelter all day, and we spoke about it a few times.  He admitted that the dog was a little frantic, probably not the best match for our chill children.  By night time, the dog had been adopted by another family, which put an end to those thoughts.

If I sat down and built the perfect dog, it would be a small breed, preferably one that lives long.  As in, a dog that lives forever, like a vampire.  On the more sane side, I like short coats: the sort that looks like velvet when you’re running your hands over the dog’s back.

I want a dog that is always going to want to be with me.  Like if I’m in the living room, he’s in the living room, too.  And if I go into the kitchen to cook dinner, he stands beside me, keeping me company in exchange for bits of food.  I want a dog who is going to want to be stroked while I’m reading a book.  A dog who is going to watch me play video games.  A dog who is going to love car rides and beach trips and outings to the dog park.  And if I’m really honest, I want a dog that is small enough for me to carry around the house in my arms.

I want a dog who is going to be my baby.

I am probably not the best candidate for dog parenthood.  I clearly want a furry human more than I want a dachshund.  And a furry human who defies time and lives forever.  But I’m trying to get myself there.

Art is at its best when it wakes us up to the reality that surrounds us that we haven’t noticed yet.  Or, perhaps noticed on a subconscious level, but weren’t able to take a step back and observe critically.

Gizmodo has a post about a new art installation which shows how easily we give away personal information online.

You give them an image, your email address, and fingerprint, and in exchange, you get a cute card.  Holding the cute card you realize how flimsy it is next to what you’ve just parted with, but isn’t that the way it goes on so many sites?  You give them access to your Facebook account and all that entails in exchange for access to a mindless quiz.  Or you give them an image of yourself in order to see how you’d look as a cartoon character.

The artist describes the information collection as a playful process, and isn’t that the way it usually goes?  No one would fill out a form if the data collectors said, “just give us all this information and we’ll bombard you with ads.”  Instead we think we’re just taking a mindless quiz, when we’re really handing over hundreds of data points.

It’s a thought-provoking exhibit.  It made me look long and hard at the ways I gave away information this week without really being cognizant of the fact that the bit of fun was in exchange for facts about me.

Back on October 15th, I got to see Hamlet with Benedict Cumberbatch along with 225,000 other people.  They broadcasted that night’s theater performance into 2000 theaters around the world.  I obviously didn’t jet out to London for a date night.

I mean, I wish I had the means to jet out to London for a date night, but… you know… life.

So I saw it in a totally swank theater that did not have assigned seats.  I had an assigned seat scare when we walked into the theater, but it turned out that you could sit wherever you wished.  They had huge, reclining armchairs, and Josh bought me some Twizzlers, so it was even better than normal theater.

I bet you’re thinking right now, that sounds amazing, Mel.  And it was.  Benedict Cumberbatch was the best Hamlet I’ve seen, hands down. He captured the sad, biting humour in the role, which is so often glossed over. I didn’t agree with the Ophelia direction — the actress was great, I just thought the choices they made with her didn’t reflect the text (of which they cut a few, key lines). I actually didn’t agree with any of the line changes, but that’s neither here nor there. The set was stunning, especially the end of the first part when the black… rubbish blew in.

So yeah, it was a fantastic night. And I really wish they’d release a DVD version because I’d love to see it again, but I believe it was a one-time deal, like so many televised-performance events. Womp-womp.

*******

Back in 1995, I was kneeling in the stacks in the library when I glanced at a folktale pamphlet and put it back on the shelf. About a year later, I saw a mango and it reminded me of the story I read as I thumbed through the folktale pamphlet. Something about the last two fruits that didn’t have a name. One was the mango, and its name came from the character in the story getting the instruction, “Man, go and…” And what? The second part of the instruction was the name of the other fruit.

“Man, go and papaya.”

That didn’t make sense.

“Man, go and coconut.”

I went through every mango-friendly fruit out there. But I couldn’t turn any other fruit name into a pun like how mango neatly became “Man, go…”

I thought about this EVERY SINGLE TIME I went into the produce section of a grocery store. So let’s say three times a week since 1995. I would test out all the things I saw in the sentence. The closest I ever came to a fit was mango and endive (yes, I’m aware those two things don’t go together): “Man, go and dive.”

So it didn’t really fit.

I Google the story all the time and usually never get a hit, but this week, the story was uploaded to Google Books! The story I read in the library back in 1995. And the other fruit? Orange. “Man, go and arrange” is the sentence (say it aloud), and that is how the last two fruits, mango and orange, got their name.

Sweet freakin’ relief.

*******

Back to Benedict Cumberbatch since this post is all over the place. The upcoming Sherlock Holmes Christmas special is going to be aired in the theaters, too.

I don’t know how I feel about that: going to the movie theater to see something that I can see at home. I guess if I couldn’t see it at home, that would be one thing. But I can, so it sort of begs the question: why go see it around a bunch of strangers?

I don’t really enjoy seeing things around a bunch of strangers. If I could have seen Hamlet from my home, I would have watched Hamlet in my home.

But I love the Christmas specials; especially Doctor Who. I feel like winter vacation is this television orgasm with 3000 things all aired at once.

Side note: Tomorrow is #MicroblogMonday. Get writing!

The Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland exhibit we went to on the weekend contained a very sad story about Alice Liddell’s hand-written copy of the book from Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll).

The story began with marriage; namely, the wedding that Queen Victoria wouldn’t allow to take place.  Little Alice in Wonderland and Prince Leopold wanted to get married, but the Queen refused.  So the relationship ended, and both people married others but named their children after one another — an Alice and a Leopold.

Alice’s Leopold grew up and went to fight in World War I along with his brother, and both were killed in battle.  She lost her son, but she also lost her connection to her first love with that death.  Soon afterward, Alice’s husband, Reginald, died, leaving her to mind the house alone with her remaining son, Caryl.  She needed money to maintain the house, so she sold the only hand-written copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in the world.  It was the manuscript that Charles Dodgson gave her for Christmas, complete with his pre-Tenniel drawings that inspired the ones for the book.  An American bought the book in the auction, taking the copy across the sea.

When she was very old, in 1932, for the 100th anniversary of Dodgson’s birthday, Alice came to America to attend a ceremony in New York to mark the occasion.  While she was there, even though she was exhausted and her son feared that the travel would be too much for her, she went down to Philadelphia to see her book one last time before she died.  She spent a night visiting with her book, holding it.

Two years later, she died back in England.

The exhibit has the chair she sat in to look at her precious book.  You can imagine this old woman, holding her childhood in her hands, remembering those times on the river with her sisters when Dodgson would make up stories.  It made me cry to think about her separated from a prize possession, a tangible reminder of a time in her life, before she was ready to let it go.

Part of me knows that they’re just things.  Objects aren’t people.  Her life went on, even without her book.

But the rest of me knows that things matter.  That objects bring comfort.  That something was missing from her life without her book.

In Oxford, the Bodleian Library displays their copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from time to time.  It’s one of the 50 original copies that were recalled after the first printing, so it’s special, but not quite up to hand-written-by-Dodgson-himself quality.

We missed seeing Oxford’s copy by two weeks on our trip to the college.  For a long time after, I had a lot of regrets about the trip, especially when I would read about the book being on display or a special event being held.  Seeing the hand-written copy of the book this weekend erased all of that.  How can I be sad that I missed seeing a printed copy when I got to see Dodgson’s own handwriting?

Again, they’re only things: feeling happy or sad because I was able or not able to stand in front of a case and gaze at an object; it sounds bizarre when you boil it down to the basics.  And yet it means something.

Right?

What is your most cherished object?

I want to start this off by stating the obvious: everyone is entitled to approach and disseminate information about their infertility in a way that works for them.  Some people speak about infertility early and often, and some people only mention it after the birth.

There are benefits and drawbacks to telling people before you know how things will turn out, just as there are benefits and drawbacks to only mentioning infertility after the fact.  You’ll get a lot of support, but people will constantly bring it up.  It becomes your Story, with a capital S.  And yes, infertility is front and center in your brain when you’re trying to build your family and can’t; it’s the sort of thing that makes itself very difficult to forget about since it is happening in your body.  But that doesn’t mean you want it brought up all the time.

So I understand why people don’t bring it up until they also have news to share.

I’m grateful when celebrities step forward and talk about their struggle with infertility, using their platform to help bring information to the general public.  I am equally annoyed when the media runs stories about how so-and-so is sharing their struggle so people finally understand how hard to it can be to experience infertility.

(Excuse me, media, don’t you think that your prior negative spin on infertility coverage is part of the reason the general public believes what they believe?  If they’re not getting their information from personal experience, they are getting their information from the media.)

But part of me knows that if a celebrity is opening up about infertility (vs. having the media speculate on their fertility), chances are, they are currently pregnant and simply not announcing yet.  The announcement comes a month or two later, with a little bump and a due date a few months away.

I am happy for them — and to reiterate, I am grateful that they shared that not every family is formed easily — but the timing cements that wrongly-held belief that there are just so many options out there and one will work for you.  Yes, there are a lot of options, and yes, hopefully one will work.  But it’s not a given, and believing so belies just how hard it is — emotionally, physically, and financially — to undergo fertility treatments.   I am so grateful they exist, but they are not easy.

The baby surrounded by IVF needles picture hits a little closer to reality.

It’s a blameless situation, yet it spreads a message through the general public.  You announce your infertility, you have closure to your infertility, you move on to parenthood.  That is their story; there is no other way to tell it because that is how it happened for them.  Or, the only other way to tell it is to tell it based on someone else’s timeline, which isn’t fair.  Yet clearly timing matters.

That truncated story of infertility to pregnancy becomes the story in the general public’s mind when they aren’t given a multitude of stories to follow.

I am grateful for celebrities who announce their infertility at all, just as I’m grateful for non-celebrities who speak about their infertility.  Every story matters.

But I wish there were more people who began their story in medias res; in the heart of the unknown.  I wish the media would follow their story, not to wring the tragedy out of it, but to serve as a realistic portrait — like that baby surrounded by needles — of the marathon of ups and downs the average patient experiences.  That for the vast majority, there isn’t a neat solution waiting for them when they enter the clinic, but instead a series of tries — some successful, some not — that they hold their breath through month after month.

Maybe their story would end with pregnancy and birth, or adoption, or surrogacy, or living child-free.  But the point is that just like the person experience infertility, we wouldn’t know until we know.