I read Normal People (Sally Rooney) a few weeks ago, but this isn’t really a post about Normal People. (It was good, by the way. Very good.) It’s a post about infertility.

There’s this part in the book where one of the characters is going through a depressive episode. During this time period, they go out to a book reading and end up having a nice evening. They go home and re-read old notes they made about a story they wanted to write, and the character describes this moment of happiness inside the hell that is depression “like watching a perfect goal, like the rustling movement of light through leaves, a phrase of music from the window of a passing car. Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything” (p. 228).

Despite everything.

The words felt familiar because there were moments like that with infertility; moments where I felt this break in the heaviness and I got a full ten minutes of feeling happy before the other feelings started flooding back in. It reminds me of painted photographs. Do you know how people take black and white photos and use paint to dot in colour in one tiny section of the photo? Like a black and white photo of a woman, but the rose she’s holding is a dusty pink. Or a black and white photo of a child holding a balloon, and the trailing balloon is a cheery yellow.

Spot colour photography. It’s like that. Unexpected colour; unexpected happiness.

So the words felt familiar, but I couldn’t actually pull out any happy memories from that time period. I could remember a lot of not happy moments without needing to consult a diary or photo album to remember. But I couldn’t think of moments of joy like that despite knowing that they must have existed since the words in the book felt so familiar.

Maybe we just remember sad moments during sad times more vividly.

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

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If I worked in this office, no plant would choose me to be their friend because they would immediately pick up on the fact that I don’t like them. Even if they were a flowering plant. Actually, especially if they were a flowering plant. I dislike flowers, too, especially when they’re brought into a building as cut-flowers or a flowering plant.

I would be irritated beyond all get-out if I had to take care of a plant.

But an office pet? THAT I would be all over. If my boss gave everyone a hamster or a turtle to live on their desk and care for every day? I would be a very happy employee. Animals = happiness. Plants = irritation.

How do you feel about plants?

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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.

It’s my birthday today, which means that I have a new immortal friend. Except this time, it’s a polar bear, and this time there are TWO of them––twin immortal polar bears.

The first is named Hillel. I decided to keep with the theme of Jewish philosophers––Akiva, the immortal quokka, Hillel, the immortal polar bear––because my animals are also very wise. You can tell by looking at their furry faces:

I am calling him Hilly, for short. Mostly because I had a friend in college named Hillel that we also called Hilly or Hils. And I always thought that was super-cute.

I was only expecting one polar bear but two showed up. So I named the second one Houdin after Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the father of modern magic. He is from Blois, a city that is special to our family, and… well… I love real magic AND fake magic.

Hillel and Houdin. H is pronounced in Hillel and not in Houdin.

Stuffed representations of my very real, very immortal polar bears.

So… my birthday. I am having big feelings about this birthday. I had a hard time leading up to it, and I’m having a hard time today.

I wish I could cuddle up with the real Hilly and Houdin, though I imagine that if I tried to burrow into their fur that it would smell like fish and sea water. (Let’s not talk about what bears could do to a small lady and pretend that Hilly and Houdin would never harm someone who loves them this much.) But since cuddling with the real Hilly and Houdin is not possible, I’ll just gorge on ice cream instead.

Happy birthday to me.

I went down the rabbit hole twice this week. The first was looking up Brideshead Revisited, a book I’ve never read and now totally want to read. (Or, more accurately, I would love Jeremy Irons to read it to me so will need to purchase from Audible.) A character in a book was reading it, so now, once I start reading it, it’s like a book inside a book inside a book… if that makes sense. I’m picturing it like two mirrors facing each other, reflecting the reading of Brideshead Revisited 1000 times.

The other rabbit hole was the Holocaust document archive. I found both brothers. One ultimately died at Mauthausen. The other went from Flossenbuerg to Buchenwald. And in finding these brothers, I also found their sister and now I’m exploring her story and two of her children. (One other child got to Israel, another got to Paris, and the third died of natural causes.) Various family members have sent me their notes over the years, and using old census forms, scanned records, and conversations, I was able to put all the siblings in birth order. And now they are in a neat row, lost information known.

I feel like I end the week with more order in it. And a book to read.

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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:

• “Happy Retirement, Dr. Ob-Gyn” (The Road Less Travelled)
• “Regulating What We Don’t Understand” (Stirrup Queens) — thanks, Jess!

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Uterus Monologues has a post about the logistics of life after a miscarriage, namely, her inability to plan a holiday because… what if? She writes, “Even things you know in your rational mind are statistically very unlikely seem eminently possible in pregnancy after loss(es). Bad luck is your entire evidence base. And as for the thought of actually miscarrying again while away….” Her description of your life shrinking––that is exactly it. It makes your world feel so small. As well as her description of how it feels to go away and unplug from the endless cycles and family building thoughts.

The Gayby Project is back with a post! She writes, “But I’m back, and I need this space. And I need the friendships I once built here, even though I think many of ‘my people’ have moved on from the blogosphere. And so, maybe there will be new people who I will find and who will find me?” Indeed! Clearly all of us. Her child’s diagnosis has thrown her for a loop, and she needs––like so many of us––to talk it out to find sense. Go circle the wagons.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ writes about the Pain Olympics and their purpose. She explains, “Playing Pain Olympics helps me to put my own pain into perspective.” She continues later with the point: “Someone else can’t put your pain in perspective for you! … Equally, I can’t try to tell anyone that their pain is less or more than mine (even if I think it). I can however tell myself where my pain fits on the scale.” It’s a beautiful post, marking the Pain Olympics as a part of the healing process.

The roundup to the Roundup: Brideshead Revisited and family members found. 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 May 24th and 31st) 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.

Lifehacker lays out a scenario where someone cancels plans, and then asks: “What are you going to do with this unexpected freedom?” Seriously? Are there really people who stand like a deer in headlights, not knowing what they would do if their plans get cancelled? Doesn’t everyone know the only acceptable option is to binge Netflix?

No?

After I stopped rolling my eyes and they returned to their normal position in their sockets, I started thinking about what I would do if I found myself with a free evening and wanted to be productive. I have a long “do this at some point” list: work on the family tree (I want to recopy it because I’ve written all over it, and it’s a little messy), work on a photo project that I’m doing of the kids, or work on the Scotland photo album. (Yes, we’re talking about the trip from 11 months ago… no… it isn’t finished.)

I do work on those things, but it’s hard to carve out time for them when there are so. many. shows. on. Netflix.

What would you do with found time?