So, I heard that Facebook is a real time suckage and since I always have so much extra time at the end of the day (after the bon-bon eating and the watching of my stories), I thought I would turn over those excess minutes to the good people at that site for the sake of social networking.

What is social networking?

Truly, I don’t know why it is so difficult for me to figure out Facebook, but it is literally taking me a painfully long amount of time to add applications and navigate my way around the site. I found a page today that told me that I had over 20 requests waiting for me. I didn’t even know this page existed or that anyone was requesting anything. I now can’t find that page again. I am really lost.

The logistics I can figure out on my own or by begging Josh for help. These are the questions I have about etiquette:

• Adding people: how close do you need to be with the person to add them? I have to admit that I’ve been feeling rather shy about this, which sort of defeats the point of social networking. I found 80 or so people I knew back in high school, but I didn’t make a friend request for any of them because I haven’t spoken to them since the last reunion (and some I haven’t spoken to in 16 years). Obviously, if they were at one point a good friend and will immediately know who I am when I “friend” them, it seems kosher. But what about the people who may or may not remember me? Or bloggers who may not know me even though I read their blog?
• No response: what happens when you friend someone and they don’t respond? I mean, within a week or two since people go away on vacation or get busy and don’t log onto Facebook for a bit. When you “friend” someone and they don’t respond…it feels a little like “you’re not my friendster.” And yet, is that simply the nature of the beast? That people simply ignore requests for friendship and it means nothing? I am guilty of this as well–an organization friended me and I can’t figure out why. I understand doing it when you don’t recognize the name or how the person knows you, but what about when the person knows it’s you and they…well…they just don’t want to be my friend?
• Requests: which brings us to question three–the pending requests. What do you do when someone sends you a request for you to add an application to your Facebook page? Do you have to keep adding each application? Do you pick and choose? Does it mean anything if you don’t upload the new application? Does it mean I hate Mother Earth if I don’t have Lil Green Patch? If I hate Mother Earth, will I have fewer friends?
• The point: once you have everyone “friended”…well…what is the point? Beyond the online Scrabble games? What is the networking part? What happens next?

I’m thinking this too much, aren’t I?

This is an open invitation for anyone to friend me if they would like to be my friend. I’m not sure how to link to a Facebook page since my understanding is that the profile can only be accessed once you’re friends. So look for me via my email address. If we don’t normally email and I don’t know your name, write the name of your blog in the message feature on the friend request (or however we know each other). You know…so I don’t ignore you and turn this into a massive ego-bruising exercise of you thinking that you are not my friendster.

Forgive me if you ever don’t get a response back. By chance, I clicked on something and discovered that Allison challenged me to a game of Scrabble (which I am currently losing, by the way). Everything seems to be lagging behind and I’m not getting notifications of requests. And I can’t find the request page again anyway…

This is the sixth installment of Barren Advice. You can ask questions that are fertility or non-fertility related.

Barren Advice is posted each Tuesday. If you have your own question for Barren Advice, click here to learn how to submit. Please weigh in with your own thoughts in the comment section and indicate which question you’re addressing if there are multiple questions in the post.

Dear Mel:

Okay, this is a pregnancy mentioned question. I am finally out of the closet about this pregnancy. So, now that everyone knows, the stupid advice has started flowing in mass quantities. It has barely begun and I am already going crazy.

Everyone wants to know if I am taking the right kind of vitamins and whether I know not to eat soft cheeses and sushi. My mother-in-law just told me that I have to stay away from cats because they kill unborn babies. I have yet to receive any actual, true advice. Not a single person has told me a real fact yet. And the next person who emails me that cell phone story will not find out about any future babies until they can talk well enough to announce themselves.

I am smart enough to do my own research (especially being that no one has even been right yet). I majored in psychology in college and I spotted every error in that cell phone study before the authors of the study themselves announced that it proved nothing and the media was blowing it out of proportion. The worst part is that everyone means well and it’s just because they care and are really excited. (This is the worst part because I have to bite my tongue on all the sarcastic comments that are dying to slip out of my mouth. Plus, I am too nice to actually be mean in return.)

My question is does anyone have any good ideas of things to say that are polite but might get my point across? I need a few answers that I can memorize, so that the polite answer can come out of my mouth while my brain processes the sarcastic things I would like to say. I will also take funny stories about things that other people said to you, so that perhaps I can begin to laugh about this and it won’t bother me as much.

–Jen from Here We Go Again

See, that’s the whole problem, the person means well and is giving the advice because they love you and they desperately want to be involved. There’s not a lot they can do when the child is still in your belly. Sure, they can help you shop or set up the room, but for the most part, they’re left standing around staring at your belly, throwing out whatever small tidbits they’ve managed to collect since the last time you spoke.

Advice you can’t use is the worst kind of advice because you can’t get angry–the person meant well–but you get angry because they are inadvertently calling into question your intelligence and judgment.

Barring that the person is speaking from a place of animosity, make your first response sweet and kind. Make your second response firm. If you have to get to a third response, I give you full permission that it can be a free-for-all. So, what are some sweet responses you can practice?

• Wow, I didn’t know that.
• That sounds like a very interesting study.
• Thank you for letting me know that!

And then change the subject to make it clear that you are done with that topic. If they keep coming back to it, you’ll need to ramp it up to firm. Or, if the same person keeps coming back with more and more advice, you may need to jump immediately to a firm place:

• I know you mean well, but we’re only taking advice from our doctor.
• Thanks, we heard the same study but our doctor told us not to worry about it.

Lastly, you may need to be a little more pointed in your response to get the advice to stop.

• I know you’re saying these things because you care about us but do you really think we’re not capable to taking care of ourselves?
• We really need a moratorium on the advice; all of the stories are simply giving us more stress than helping.

And if it continues after that point, a hearty, “shut the fuck up!” always stuns the crowd.

Er…um…oh, this was Grandma giving the advice? Then maybe a “shut your piehole!” is better?

No really, the beauty of a blog advice column is that you get to weigh in with your two cents too. Let the questioner know if you support the advice, add to the response, or dispute it completely. And you heard the girl: she wants the best assvice ever given to you.

Leave a comment in the reaction box below–only keep in mind that conflicting advice is embraced and rudeness is not. Want to ask your own question? Click here to see what you need to send in order to be included in a future Tuesday’s installment of Barren Advice.

Welcome to the twelfth tour of the Barren Bitches Book Brigade–a book club from the comfort of your own living room. Grab a cup of coffee and start clicking away at the links below.

Just to explain, this book club is entirely online and open to anyone (male or female) in the infertility/pregnancy loss/assisted conception/adoption/parenting-after-infertility world (as well as any other related category I inadvertently left off the list). It is called a book tour because everyone reads the same book and then poses a question to the group. Participants choose a few questions to answer and then post their response on their blog. Readers can jump from blog to blog, commenting along the way.

Book: Water for Elephants
Author: Sara Gruen
Start Date: April 17
Post Date: May 26
(need an explanation of how a book tour works? Click here to go to a list of posts on the past book tours as well as information about all upcoming tours and book events.)

Barren Bitches Book Brigade List (click on any of the links below to take you to a stop on this book tour. Jump from post to post to read a plethora of opinions and thoughts on Water for Elephants).

Life After Infertility and Loss (JuliaS)
All Things Deb (Deb)
Slaying, Blogging, Whatever… (Delenn)
The Road Less Travelled (Loribeth)
Everyday Stranger (Helen)
Falling or Flying (Jodie)
Carrying On (Katherine)
Weebles Wobblog (Lori)
Crazy Yet? (Jenna)
Desperately Seeking Baby (Heather)
Fertility Notes (Gabrielle)
Excavator (Excavator)
Southern Infertility (Samantha)

Even if haven’t read Water for Elephants, you can still add your own thoughts on the blog tour or react to someone else’s critique.

Like the idea of being in a book club without leaving your living room? The next book for book tour #13 is The Empty Picture Frame by Jenna Nadeau. The author will be participating too. Y’all know who this is, right? It’s Jenna from Epi-blog, which is now invite-only. The purchase of the book also benefits Resolve since she donates part of the profits. The book chronicles her IVF attempts and contains the thoughts of her husband, Mike, woven through the pages as well.

The Details: Tour #13 (lucky 13!) will start May 27. Participants will read The Empty Picture Frame by Jenna Nadeau. On or before July 1st (Canada Day), everyone will send one question based on the book (to get a sense of questions, click here to see the questions sent for book tour #2) to me. I will compile the questions into lists that will be emailed out to you by July 3rd. You can also send along any questions you have directly for Jenna Nadeau. Everyone will choose 3 questions from the list and answer them on their own blog on July 9 or 10 (we will break up into two or three smaller groups and you can choose which day works best for you when the date gets closer). Each day of the tour, I’ll also post a master list and people can jump from blog to blog, reading and commenting on the book tour.

If you would like to sign up to participate in book tour #13, leave a comment below or send me an email. I need the title and a link to your blog as well as an email address where you’d like the two or three book club emails sent. If a spouse wants to participate too and he/she doesn’t have their own blog, have them set up a blog solely for book tours (as we did with the Annex) and send me a link to that blog. And if you’re a reader without a blog, now is a great time to set up a space for yourself on Blogger. People will be able to find brand-spanking-new blogs because they will be on the book tour’s participant list. The next few tours are always listed on the new upcoming and past tours list. Happy reading.

Welcome back to Show and Tell. Just to recap for any newcomers, here’s how it works:

• Everyone is welcome to join, even if you have never posted before and just found out about Show and Tell for the first time today.
• If you would like to join circle time and show something to the class, simply post each Sunday (or earlier in the weekend or on Monday if you can’t do Sunday), hopefully including a picture if possible, and telling us about your item. It can be anything–a photo from a trip, a picture of the dress you bought this week, a random image from an old yearbook showing a person you miss. It doesn’t need to contain a picture if you can’t get a picture–you can simply tell a story about a single item.
• Label your post “Show and Tell” each week and then come back here and add the permalink in the comments section below (make sure you don’t just comment that you participated: add a link to your blog in your comment so people can click over). I post a new Show and Tell post every Saturday night or Sunday. I usually move people up into the body of the post every few hours.
• Oh, and then the point is that you click through all of your classmates and see what they are showing this week.

Let’s begin.

This week I am showing two items that are both guitars of a sort.

The one on the left was given to me by my uncle who died. It is the toy that I took away from the ChickieNob and Wolvog because I was afraid they would break it. It is so quintessentially my uncle, my childhood, that time period. It’s so Mork and Mindy. I wish I hadn’t just put away the camera because I would zoom in on the font on that orange sticker. It is called the Magical Musical Thing. When my mother gave it to the twins, I hadn’t seen it in a long time and I sat with it for a while. It felt so fragile, like it had become more breakable with all of the meaning I bestowed on it. It has been hidden in the top shelf of the cupboard. Please don’t tell the twins. It still plays and whenever I take it down, there is an overwhelming need to run through a few rounds of Mary Had a Little Lamb.

The guitar on the right is something I made in Home Ec in 1987. It had been a source of huge frustration–the item that dashed my childhood hopes of becoming a clothing designer. If I couldn’t piece together a simple stuffed guitar, how was I supposed to make couture gowns? Cocktail dresses with cabbage rose sleeves? My mother saved this project and also passed it along to the twins. The ChickieNob likes to play rock star with it and jam out in the toy corral. It is funny to see it lying around my living room, this object that is from Home Ec, from middle school, from an entire different life time.

What are you showing today?

1. Coming2Terms
2. Weebles Wobblog
3. Life From Here
4. My Sanctuary
5. Stop the Train, I Wanna Get Off…
6. There’s Hope
7. The Life and Times of Me!
8. The Sweet Life
9. Infertility on the Brain
10. Kore Chronicles
11. Spuddy Buddy
12. Sticky Feet
13. Bloorb This!
14. Fumbling Towards Eggstacy
15. T.K.O…more or less
16. Letting it Out
17. Isn’t it Pretty to Think So?
18. In Due Time
19. Mommy Sparklykatt
20. Baby, Borneo, or Bust
21. Fertilized
22. Life, Part Deux
23. I’m a Smart One
24. And the Rest is History…
25. The Road Less Travelled
26. I Think I Hear Your Mother Calling
27. Working on It (invite-only blog)
28. Bee Bangbage
29. Who Shot My Stork?
30. Serenity Now!
31. Worth It All
32. The Therapist is In
33. I Won’t Fear Love
34. Imagine Alyzabeth An
35. The Only Constant is Change
36. Southern Infertility
37. Soulbliss
38. Adventures [in]Fertility Wonderland
39. So…who’s next. Don’t be shy, don’t be shy. Even if other posts are above this one, you can still add your item to the discussion. Though if it’s after Tuesday night, maybe save the post until next week. We do this every weekend.

If you want it…
I’ve now placed a Show and Tell archive on the sidebar that will be updated each week in case you miss it. And click here for the icon code if you wish to have it for your blog. It links to the archives.

Updated at the bottom:

On your marks.

Get set.

Go forth and comment!

Um…okay…so you have seven more hours (remember, it runs May 25–June 25). Currently, there are 207 people on the NaComLeavMo list and the list officially closes in a few hours at midnight, EST. So a few people may slip under the wire, but right now, that seems to be the semi-final number. Which means that to be an Iron Commentor, you need to leave 207 comments once a week for all four weeks. That is a crazy amount of commenting, true, but I have full faith in you.

For everyone else, please do peruse the list and find the new blogs–not just the ones that are at the top of the list, but all of those people in the middle too (if you have the icon on your blog, you can simply click on it and quickly access the list–see, I’m think-y). The list is about 80% IF, but the other 20% are everything ranging from psych post docs to a parent of two teenage boys.

Ideally, leave 5 comments a day + return one comment (meaning, choose someone who has commented recently on your blog and comment on their blog). If you haven’t written anything new and do not have any comments to return, simply leave a random 6th comment that day.

Let the games begin!

Update:

The list is now closed–12:01 a.m. Sunday, May 25th. Let the commenting commence! 214 participants in all.