Category — Uncategorized

Measure of Love is on sale for 99 cents from now until the end of the month. 99 cents. Even candy bars cost more than 99 cents. And in this case, you get a whole story. 6 to 8 hours of entertainment, depending on how quickly you read.

It has been a long time since my last book, and I’ve been playing with a new story for a few years. I’ve put it aside because it is so hard to wrap my brain around anything right now with the twins leaving. But maybe this is the kick I need to pick it back up again.

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Stop procrastinating. Go make your backups. Don’t have regrets.

Seriously. Stop what you’re doing for a moment. It will take you fifteen minutes, tops. But you will have peace of mind for days and days. It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second, helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week. To read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Pronatalism and Anesthesia” (Finding a Different Path)

Okay, now my choices this week.

PocoBrat asks if grief makes you mean. She is becoming irritable with people after the loss of her dog, and she writes, “I don’t know if some B.S. detector switch has flipped in my brain or if it’s business as usual and grief has nudged out extra emotions making them conspicuous to me. Either way, I’m finding it difficult to live with this version of me.” Grief burns through energy, and patience is an action that often requires a lot of energy. Sending peace of heart.

Lastly, Infertile Phoenix writes about feeling your feelings. She talks about what happens when you don’t let out your feelings. And she explains: “If I frequently cry quietly… If I occasionally cry loudly… If I use my words to tell a person why I am mad, sad, or disappointed… If I journal honestly… If I blog vulnerably… It gets out. The feelings get out. And they don’t stay stuck.” I needed to read this post this week.

The roundup to the Roundup: Measure of Love is on sale. Your weekly backup nudge. And lots of great posts to read. So what did you find this week? Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between June 9 – 16) and not the blog’s main URL. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week. Read the original open thread post here.

I’ve said it before: I am terrible at saying no. The whole thing makes me feel guilty because I can usually say yes, just at the expense of my own happiness. So I guess I have no difficulty when I have a clear-cut reason attached to the “no,” such as being out of town. But if I technically could say yes, but I’m not saying yes because we all have limited time, emotional energy, or money, I feel guilty, which makes me botch the no.

So I always pause and read any article about how to say no. And this is a good one.

Beyond the how-to, I liked the idea that there is a difference between selfishness, which feels purposeful, and putting yourself first, which feels healthy when done if necessary.

Putting this here in case it helps anyone else.

I feel like a broken record about the kids leaving because I am a broken record about the kids leaving. I wake up and think, “They won’t be here in a few months.” And my heart squeezes like a fist, sometimes taking my stomach with it.

I go through the day having that thought over and over again. I think about what we need to buy, the forms we need to fill out, and the tasks we need to do. I flip through my datebook, looking at the thin number of pages between now and going. I go to bed at night and lie awake, thinking about what the moment will feel like when I have to leave and drive home.

I know I’m boring. I’ve become one single note, played over and over again. I want to say that one day I’ll become a symphony again, but I don’t know if that is true. I only know that right now, I am a broken record, replaying the same thoughts as day spins into night and back into day.

Embedded had an interesting piece about Hank Green’s cancer diagnosis and how we form one-way online and sometimes offline attachments. A Reddit commenter captured the feeling:

My close friends… I’d be on a plane and baking cookies and lasagnas. How do I give support to someone who is so good and means so much to me/us/this community when they literally don’t know I exist?

The Embedded essay states that “the practice of ‘following’ someone simply hasn’t been around long enough for us to grapple with the unpleasant parts of life that are expected, like the realities of getting older.”

Except that it has. The internet has certainly opened the door to a person sharing ongoing thoughts, and that is different from a celebrity sharing parts of their life in an interview. But we have grappled with feeling emotionally close and understanding we’re emotionally far (or unknown) before the internet.

We clearly do need to create rituals around supporting from afar or grieving from afar.

There was a Longreads essay that I saved to read when I had time because I knew I was going to love it when I reached these lines:

I enjoy the soft anticipation of what she might create next and how she will create differently, year to year, as she grows. What and who will influence her next? Who will she leave behind, pick up, come back to? Who and what will stay with her the rest of her life?

She’s talking about watching her daughter grow up, but it fits with anyone you age with. Isn’t that the nicest part of any relationship? The anticipation of what the other person will do that you will get to witness. To see who or what influences them? What they try out and reject. Or return to.

It’s interesting, certainly, to do this exercise with yourself, but those changes don’t feel the same as observing them in someone else you love. A friend, a partner, a child, a sibling. Someone you love watching become themselves again and again and again.

I’m glad I saved it. It’s a really lovely piece of writing.