Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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At the beginning of the pandemic, I thought I’d make my way through all the unread books on my bookshelf. And I am reading them… sometimes… but, more often, I’m reading my way through new books borrowed digitally from the library.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I thought I could turn it into a project: read everything unread on the shelves. I tossed it out mentally in the same way that I tossed out things such as re-organizing the basement or finishing a major photo project. Things that I wanted to get done, and I now had time at home to get done.

But I haven’t done any of these things.

Instead, I’ve purchased books along the way, adding to the unread pile instead of subtracting.

Maybe I just need to admit that I’m not going to check anything off the list, project-wise.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

Yet again, a thought that came up while reading Blue Ticket.

We are taught to be suspect of strangers, right? Don’t talk to strangers. Stranger Danger. But…

Babies are strangers. We don’t know them until we actually know them. But we’re not scared of them. I mean, we’re partly not scared because the most they can do is wail and maybe gum our arm. It’s hard to be scared of something that helpless. Yet… I’m terrified of crickets, so size and lack of danger isn’t really an argument.

On page 174, a character (let’s call her X) is speaking with another character (let’s call her Y). Both are pregnant.

Y asks, “Do you ever think what the baby will be like?” The conversation that follow:

I have no frame of reference, I said.

They are two strangers coming to meet us, she said. Are you ever afraid about that?

I am now, I said.

I picture them not as babies but as two tall, mysterious figures walking towards us from a moon-like landscape.

Isn’t it sort of odd with babies? I was scared of my own ability to take care of the twins. I was scared of my own ability to get through the day while keeping them nourished and stimulated and happy. But I was never scared of them, even though I’m terrified of many smaller things including snakes, mice, and bugs.

So why aren’t we scared of babies?

Did you know a full version of “A Little Bit Alexis” exists and you can buy it on iTunes? We discovered it around midnight this week when ChickieNob mused, “I wonder if they ever recorded the song for real.”

Do we currently own it? Yes.

Listen, things have been shitty, and if we can grab five minutes of happiness (I actually think the full song is closer to three minutes, but you get the point) for 99 cents, then it was money well spent.

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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 in order 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. In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ draws a line between feminism and childlessness. She points out: “Discrimination against us, as women without children or as mothers, is a form of misogyny. It does not see us as individuals, but as objects, and judges us by our biology, rather than by our personalities, our characteristics, our flaws and our talents.” She unpacks why sometimes women absorb that misogyny and how it comes out against other women. A fantastic, fascinating post.

Bereaved and Blessed is celebrating the best possible outcome when it comes to the results from an ultrasound on her breast. She felt optimistic going into the test, but points out that she has been on the wrong side of the odds before when it comes to fertility and loss. She writes: “I’ve learned not to take anything for granted or put too much weight in odds. When you’ve fallen into the less than 1% chance category more than once in your life good odds don’t always seem nearly as comforting.” Glad she’s doing okay.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled muses on postponed weddings due to COVID-19. You still get to have the love, even if you don’t get the ceremony, but I’m not belittling the sadness that comes from missed life cycle events. Both for the couple AND for the guests, as Loribeth explains. I miss weddings. I miss parties and getting dressed up, even though I never enjoyed those things before this point. The world changes. We change with it.

The roundup to the Roundup: A Little Bit Alexis. 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 August 28 – September 4) 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.

Another one of many thoughts that came while reading Blue Ticket.

So we have roads-not-taken that we know about, and we mourn those lost dreams or imagined futures. But Blue Ticket brings up the idea of the unimagined future. On page 92, she writes:

Even though I had thought often about becoming a doctor, becoming an emissary had never crossed my mind. There were some futures I had never imagined for myself. But then not so long ago this would have been one of them, too.

Emissaries are the government officers who keep the system in place, and the doctors—in this case—are psychiatrists. So she imagined and rejected becoming a psychiatrist—something she could have done—though looks back wistfully on the thought as she realizes while looking at an emissary that she never considered becoming one. She can’t mourn or regret what she never considered in the first place until she considers it.

We can only mourn the imagined futures, not the unimagined ones, so they hold no power, no ability to bother us or get under our skin.

It’s a meditation on wants and how those wants feed our sadness; a musing on the Buddhist Four Noble Truths and the lack of suffering when our mind hasn’t latched onto wanting a particular future.

Except once our mind latches onto a particular want how do you release it if you don’t fulfill it when the mind mourns our unlived lives? Of course, yes, the answer could be the Eightfold Path, but I put that frame of Buddhism around it. The reality is so much harder; releasing our imagined lives and accepting that we have an equal amount of unmourned, unimagined lives diluting that larger sadness.

Another thought from Blue Ticket, this time about miscarriage. (So skip if you need to skip.)

A blue-ticket woman gets pregnant and frets when she sees blood in the toilet paper. After the blood dries up within the same paragraph, she talks about her fears with her doctor on page 81: “So it could end at any moment… How am I supposed to cope with that?”

The doctor responds: “Yet lots of white-ticket women manage all the time, he said. Interesting.”

The blue-ticket women, in some ways, feel more akin to infertile women. A pregnancy when you have a blue ticket is different; it’s unexpected. It’s hard to achieve. The stakes are the same, but they somehow feel higher.

Whereas white-ticket women expect to get pregnant, and they expect to get pregnant again in the event that they miscarry. The loss is the same, the devastation is the same, except…

Except I kept thinking about the stakes. If you have $1000 and you lose $800, you’re left with only $200 and limited options. How long can you feed and shelter yourself with only $200? But if you have $100,000 and you lose $800, you’ve lost the same amount, but you’ll see that loss through a different lens. It may be just as frustrating or sad in the moment, but it’s also what comes next. Do you assume you have options or do you assume (or actually have) no/limited options?

Of course, multiple miscarriages make all theoretical fertile women turn into infertile women, so fertility isn’t a constant (like having $100,000) but rather an assumption until proven otherwise.

But the book raises the question: Is miscarriage different depending on circumstances?