Category — Uncategorized

I am not writing my blog right now because I realized mid-August that it felt like a burden instead of a release. I am too sad, navigating the twins leaving for college. I scheduled these posts that day so the blog wouldn’t be empty, but I could pull back and use the time left with the twins. A cop-out, but forgive me. Having them go is really, really hard. I need mental space to feel what I am feeling, help the kids through the transition, and sit in the quiet for a moment on the other side.

Loss is inherent in infertility–the negative beta at the end of the cycle, diminishing hope, forgoing opportunities. We have spent so many years of our life together in a perpetual state of continued loss. And mixed in with the loss is the physical pain and the emotional embarrassment. The financial holes and constant anxiety. And, of course, shwanking off in public.

When my husband, Josh, would complain about the donation rooms, I would lift up my shirt to show him my bruised belly. Needles, in my mind, always trumped a date with your hand because at the end of masturbation comes an orgasm as opposed to the end of a Follistim injection which comes with an annoying sting and a little medication dribbling out. How could he ever compare rubbing one out with nightly injections?

And then I took a field trip to the donation rooms and listened to the nurses discussing the viscosity of a semen sample on the other side of the thin wall and I had a newfound appreciation for my husband’s prowess to zone in on an image of breasts (always my own, always my own) and get the job done despite the andrologist crooning “Careless Whisper” in his office, three feet away.

Read the rest here.

Before the pandemic, I lived a plant-free existence. It wasn’t an accident; it was a choice. I did not want to take care of plants, and I made no space for them in my home. And then the pandemic hit, and I wanted various herbs without going to the store. After much trial and error and many many many dead plants, I learned what grows well inside. I’ve kept a small indoor garden going for over three years.

My parsley plants died this summer after my self-watering system failed while we were in Montreal, flooding the plants. My basil plants kept going for a few more weeks, but they, too, experienced a quiet death.

My instinct was to replace them — most of our plants only last a half year or so — but Josh thought replacing them before college drop-off was a terrible idea. If I did it after, I would have weeks before I had to try rigging up the self-watering system again.

But it’s weird not having plants. I went from no plants to feeling like the colour is off in our home without plants.

I’m back to being in a state of wanting something I can’t have. With infertility, the want was apparent. With life after active parenthood, the desire is less clear. I want them home. I want them to be little. I want them to need me and interact with me like they did for the last eighteen years. But it’s strange because inside all of that want is the conflicting feeling of wanting them to have an amazing time in college and loving seeing the world through their eyes and celebrating their independence.

I want that superpower that the guy in About Time had where he could relive any day he wished. And then, he could jump back to the present, simultaneously enjoying what he has and what he had.

At this time next month, we will be apart. I will have plenty of photographs and not enough videos or audio recordings to jump back in time mentally, which isn’t the same thing at all.

There was a Slate article that people kept sharing a few weeks ago capturing what we used to do after work because work had a clear end-point. Before technology became commonplace and everyone was expected to have a cell phone and computer at home, work mostly stayed at work, except for a few jobs. Sure, I could grade papers after work, but I generally didn’t drag work home. Work stayed at work, so there was a time after work.

Slate captured what happened before, during, and after work in the age before cell phones:

Sean: We really would just drive to someone’s house and see what they were doing. You and a couple people would be in the car and you’d be like, “Let’s go by Brian and Mike’s.”

Matt: Either we’d made plans or we’d just go to the same few places. During the week it was the Front Page in Dupont and GG Flips, or on Thursdays or Fridays it was Lulu’s on M Street. Someone I knew would be there.

Enjoy the whole article.

While there are many bad uses of AI, and I feel a strong sense of relief that I grew up before a world where everyone had a camera with unlimited “film” in their pocket, I think this use of AI is touching and beautiful.

The person is using AI to try to re-create images of childhood memories from her grandparent’s house. And while I clearly wasn’t there, they look real.

She writes, “I’ve been really intrigued by the process — because it feels exactly like trying to describe an experience to a child, exactly how you remember it, who can grasp the vague lines of what you’re picturing but has no life context and is imagining something slightly tangential in real time…”

There are moments I wish I could see again or show to someone else, but they only exist in my head because we didn’t have a camera then. Sometimes technology is good.