I mentioned last month how Elie Wiesel is linked to my family because my great-grandmother and her siblings came from the same town. When he wrote about his neighbours in Night, he was writing (possibly) about my great-great-aunts and uncles. It makes me feel close to them when I read that book.

Longreads had a piece recently about a grandson proving that his grandfather was the inspiration (and his war stories reproduced) for the character John Yossarian in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. The two men knew each other; were friends during the war, serving on the same base. He would go on a mission, come back to the base, and share the stories with Joseph Heller who turned them into the backbone of his famous novel. So people sort of knew his grandfather without knowing they knew his grandfather.

This isn’t special in the sense that authors base characters on real people all the time. In the same way that it’s hard (impossible?) to imagine a face you’ve never seen, it’s hard (impossible?) to create a fictional character that is not based on any living human. You borrow someone’s bravery and some else’s wit and you change the details in a fantastic story you once heard and use it as a plot point. Or you borrow from your own life. I cannot tell you how many actual moments from my life were fictionalized and added to my books.

Obviously the type of character matters: no one wants to find out their ancestor was the inspiration for Voldemort, but I would love to find myself in a book one day.

Would you want to find out you were fictionalized in someone’s book?

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

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I love reading about other religions. The BBC recently had a piece about the fastest growing religion in Iceland, a combination of Norse mythology and ecology guiding the practice:

The blót had been organised by the Ásatrú Association of Iceland, a pagan faith group that is currently one of the country’s fastest growing religions, having almost quadrupled its membership in a decade, albeit from a low base of 1,275 people in 2009 to 4,473 in 2018.

It sounds like a wonderful group:

Although the Ásatrú Association has no doctrine as such, it does promote virtuous behaviour. “It’s about being honest, upright and tolerant,” Hilmarsson said. “Respect for nature is also important. You have to make sure you live in harmony with nature.”

I mostly like the idea of new ideas and ways of navigating the world popping up. That religion or art or literature or [name your favourite way to process the world] is ever-changing.

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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.

I was fascinated by an article written by a 14-year-old for why she’s not on social media. She finally got on Facebook and Twitter and realized that even though she hadn’t been on those sites before that point, she had an online presence because her mother and sister had posted about her. Moments that most people would find sweet and non-offensive — such as a letter to the tooth fairy — were upsetting to this girl precisely because it was her story and someone else told it.

She writes,

I had just turned 13, and I thought I was just beginning my public online life, when in fact there were hundreds of pictures and stories of me that, would live on the internet forever, whether I wanted it to be or not, and I didn’t have control over it. I was furious; I felt betrayed and lied to.

The girl acknowledges that no one did this to be cruel, and her family stopped the moment she asked them to stop. But it made her think long and hard about the stories she was intending to tell online and the unknown consequences of posting. Plus what her generation has lost:

For my generation, being anonymous is no longer an option. For many of us, the decisions about our online presence are made before we can even speak.

It made me think about a piece I recently read about Apple Martin, and how she approves every time her mother posts about her, no matter how innocuous the post. The article referred to an incident where Gwyneth Paltrow posted a picture of her where you can’t see her face, Apple called out her mother for posting without permission, and Gwyneth tried to justify it rather than apologize and admit wrongdoing.

It made me think about that end scene of The Breakfast Club where David Bowie is playing as Judd Nelson walks across the field. My generation is so strongly defined by that “Don’t You Forget About Me” mentality; not wanting to fade from someone else’s memory. I think we were drawn to the internet like moth to flame because it promised to thrust us in front of each other in 30-second spotlights. Whereas our kids never got a chance to think about how they felt about being remembered and forgotten by the people in their lives. They are remembered whether then like it or not.

What are your thoughts?

“Social infertility” is the term the New Yorker is using to describe infertility when “it’s your biography, rather than your body, that prevents you from having a child.” I already took my stance in my book: the inability to create and carry a child to term comes in many different forms, and calling it infertility in one place and something else in another doesn’t make sense when we can all join together and ADDRESS THE ISSUE vs. fighting amongst ourselves to determine who gets to wear the infertility crown.

I also don’t support the “it dilutes the disease designation” argument. We have the disease designation. We still don’t have designated disease-like coverage. Nor would I have been cool if anyone had pointed out that Josh could marry someone else and technically wouldn’t be “infertile” anymore, therefore, they didn’t have to pay for our coverage because it was his “lifestyle choice.”

If you cannot conceive or carry children, you are infertile. And it frustrates me to all get-out when I hear stories about people wasting time and money to fulfill a rule vs. getting medical care that directly addresses the issue in a cost-effective manner.

My shoulders felt tense after reading this piece.

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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:

• “How to be Childless and Happy in 10,000 Easy Steps” (Life Without Baby)

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ has a post about keeping the lines of communication open and wondering about the balance between sensitivities and emotional protections. She writes, “I’m trying to find a balance between my own indignation at attitudes about parents and non-parents, or comments that might trigger (a loaded word in itself these days) my own hurt, and my wish to keep dialogue open.” It’s not an easy line to find because context matters so much, and the same words may enter our ears differently on two different days (or spoken by two different people). It’s an interesting question about how do you not take offense but how do you also not get hurt.

Mine to Command has a non-IF post that totally fascinated me about the giving of gifts. I’ve never seen the Big Bang Theory, but I love that example from the show. And it’s just an interesting roundup of questions.

An Engineer Becomes a Mom got me with this sentence: “I’m deep into the ‘I can’t fix myself fast enough’ mantra in my head.” It is a tiny post, but that line packed a big punch, for me.

Lastly, My Path to Mommyhood has a post about Father’s Day and a cruddy moment of customer service that her husband found himself in on that day. Cruddy, actually, doesn’t really cover it.

The roundup to the Roundup: The New Yorker’s piece on social infertility. 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 14th and June 21st) 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.

My fears are well-documented on this blog. Crickets. Mayonnaise. Airplanes. And airplanes. And airplanes. And like… life… in general. I’m scared of life. Let’s just sum it up with that because it’s probably the most accurate assessment of my world. I am just scared all the freakin’ time.

So… yeah… I’m in awe of people who aren’t scared. Not people who are scared of other things but happen to not be scared of the things that scare me. Those people don’t fill me with awe. It’s people like Alex Honnold who can spend 12 hours literally on the edge of death and walk away and have a beer. Because while he claims to be scared of things — and I’m sure he is in actuality — his actions all point towards someone who doesn’t move through the world as I do, seeing danger lurking behind every emaciated tree. I’m not sure he really knows fear even though he thinks he knows fear. Or maybe he does. I’m not in his brain.

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I’ve been trying the visualization technique from the article. I need to fly a few times per year, and it fills me with dread for weeks beforehand. I’ll wake up every morning thinking about it, and go to bed every night thinking about it.

I’m focusing on the most realistic and common fear that I have about flying: turbulence. I’m trying to convince myself that it is like hitting bumps in the road. I don’t freak out when the car bounces around, and I shouldn’t freak out when the plane hits air bumps. But unlike Honnold, I can’t find that inner calm where my rational mind plays big sister to my fear response. I am not a thrill seeker. I am a thrill avoider. Or… I am a thrill seeker only when we’re talking about reading horror novels. I like my thrills to come in book form.

But I am counting on this to be achievable in a smaller form:

“I definitely thought about how I process fear,” Honnold says. What he realized was that, in this case at least, he didn’t. He had been in similar situations so many times that it had become normal. There was nothing to process; there was only who he had become. “This is not scary,” he said to himself, “because this is what I do.”

That’s what I’ll repeat to myself the next time I am afraid but I’ve thought through the fear beforehand: “This is what I do.”