Hell yes.

Over in Scotland, women are calling for schools to add information about miscarriages into the sex education curriculum:

Now, charities and women have called for the issue to be discussed in schools as part of normal sex education classes, and say this would help future generations understand how to cope and remove any taboo surrounding it.

Raise your hand if you felt totally alone after a miscarriage?  I remember once being with a group of women. One woman was talking about her miscarriage, and pretty much everyone in the room stepped forward with her own story, and the first woman cried something like, “Why didn’t you tell me before now?  I felt so alone.”  No person should go into family building without knowing this possibility.

If we’re telling kids about sex, STDs, and pregnancy, why aren’t we telling them about miscarriage, stillbirth, and neonatal death?  Isn’t the whole point of education to prepare people?  To impart knowledge?  Why would we withhold important facts from a conversation?  And while we’re at it; if we speaking about fertility, we should tell people about infertility.  Let’s take the surprise and stigma away by making it an integral part of every person’s education.

Sending support over to Scotland and hoping we implement something here.

Josh and I were once at an Elvis Costello concert in DC, and we started talking to the couple next to us.  They were a long way from their home on the west coast.  They told us that part of their retirement plan was to look at where favourite musicians were playing, and then randomly visit a city and see the show.  So they flew across the country to check out DC during the day and then see Elvis Costello at night.  If the city was boring, they still had the concert, and if the city was amazing, they got to have a fantastic trip all-around.

It sounded like a cool idea.

The ChickieNob worships Tig Notaro, and she asked me to check if there was any way to see her live.  She wasn’t coming to DC, but she would be in a city a little over two hours away.  We decided to be like that couple and plan a trip around a performance.  So last Saturday, we drove up to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, ate chocolate at Hershey’s Chocolate World during the day, and then headed over to see Tig perform live.

Third row seats, baby.

The twins were a tad younger than the rest of the crowd.  As in, we didn’t see anyone else close to their age.  But they didn’t care.  We laughed so hard; that kind of laugh that also sort of hurts because you can’t catch your breath and tears are rolling down your face.  And when it was done, we walked back to the hotel, repeating our favourite moments.  And the Wolvog asked if we could become Tig Notaro groupies and just follow her from show to show.

Um… sure?

So that’s where you’ll find us from now on.  Just going from Tig Notaro show to Tig Notaro show, and watching her Netflix shows in between.

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

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Someone made a comment on a listserv that I’m on that 10 – 15 years from now, we’ll only need 20 – 30% of the workforce.  Meaning, there may not be jobs out there for people who want to work.  I tried to check the figure online, and while I didn’t find that one specifically, there are plenty of AI experts making predictions on how many jobs will be going away in the next few years.  Are we watching a crisis unfold?

I’m jumpy.

So, yeah, that job from yesterday is looking pretty damn good right now; not least of which is the job security.

Do you worry about an unemployment crisis in the future?  Because even if you’re not affected because you’ll be done working, if younger generations aren’t working and contributing taxes and continuing the system, we’re all screwed.

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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.

Like super odd job.  So the title of the article is “The Job That Will Let You Do Whatever You Want in a Swedish Train Station, Forever.”

Did I click?  Of course, I clicked.

It’s one part art installation, one part social experiment.  Anyone in the world can apply.  An explanation:

Each morning, the chosen employee will punch a clock in Korsvägen train station, currently under construction in Gothenburg, Sweden, which will turn on a bank of bright fluorescent lights. Other than that, “the position holds no duties or responsibilities besides the fact that the work should be carried out at Korsvägen. Whatever the employee chooses to do constitutes the work,” reads the job description. The employee can also choose how publicly visible or anonymous they would like to be while on the clock.

So you could become a full-time, paid writer.  Or a full-time, paid thinker / sleeper / daydreamer.  Or a full-time, paid pom-pom-animal-creator / Cheerio-necklace-maker / Barbie-hair-cutter.  Or, I guess, you could take your current job if it’s portable and collect a double salary doing your position in a train station.

It’s really brilliant, and I love this quote: “As Gothenburg’s working class finds itself marginalized, Goldin and Senneby see a job that gives total control to the worker as an act of economic imagination.”  In other words, there is a problem, so let’s see how people solve it.  How do they create work for themselves?  And does this work benefit society as a whole?  Just the individual?

What would you do if you got the position?

Thoughts in random order:

1. We have Tig Notaro tickets.  So excited to see her perform again.  (And it’s the first time for the twins.)
2. Really loved Maureen Johnson’s YA book, Truly Devious.  Like loved it so completely that I ran out to the library to get the next in the series and feel super sad that the third won’t be out for a while.
3. I bumped into the ChickieNob’s old ballet teacher at the post office.  I hadn’t seen her in nine years.  We ended up talking for a while, and it made me so wistful to think about the ways the twins have changed over the years.  Ballet was her life until she decided she didn’t like performing.  She’s my backstage crew girl now.

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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.

Inconceivable has a post about luck as she moves towards her final transfer.  Maybe I related a bit too much to this: “I like predictability, stability, and known quantities – and privilege has allowed me some insulation from the unpredictability of life in other areas. This, I suspect, is why infertility in general has messed with my sense of self so much.”  Me too.

It’s Inconceivable (it’s an inconceivable extravaganza this week with two different, similarly named blogs) has a post about International Women’s Day.  She asks how the world sees women without children: “Where is the ordinary heroine, living her life after infertility, or baby loss or who is childless by marriage, or one of the many other reasons women haven’t had a child? When do we get to hear about her story, the grief, the despair she’s overcome to get here?”  Celebrate ALL women.

Lastly, Baby Ridley Bump created a book for her child to explain her donor gamete story.  These words made chills go down my arms (in a good, happy way): “But for us, and so many other donor recipients, we take pride in our story and I know for me, I want Georgia to understand and own her story just as much as we do.  We want her to know that every single thing that we did in our journey through infertility was for her, and was from a place of love.”  I just loved this post.  It’s a gorgeous book.

The roundup to the Roundup: Tig, Truly Devious, and ballet.  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 March 8th and 15th) 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.