This article was being passed around the internet last week, and I just got a chance to read it in full.  It’s 15 brief interviews with people who came into a sum of money.  Some of the payouts were enormous — a million, for example — and some were much smaller in the thousands.  Some came from hard work and some came from strange luck.  And it’s a really interesting read.

I found myself thinking whether I would have spent the money the same way or felt the same way about receiving the cash.  Sometimes I just let the words wash over me:

A lot of the emotional work I’ve done is trying to distinguish myself from this money. We live in a culture that makes us personally identify with any money we have, and we believe our money is us and we are our money. It’s put a lot of work in my lap in terms of figuring out the responsible thing to do with it.

That was money from a trust fund.  And another from someone who spent money while he was ill building a magazine that changed other people’s lives:

I was really proud to spend all this money. And had I not been so ill, I’m not sure I would’ve been so altruistic.

Or the MacArthur grant winner: “People don’t want to admit the price you pay for working.”  Or the lawsuit winner:

It made me appreciate what a difference money given can make in someone’s circumstances. If someone gave me $10,000 right now, that would be great, but it would also be very different than being given $10,000 that early in my life, before I had loans, and before I was working, and before I had commitments. That $10,000 would go to bills now.

I think people are very reluctant to talk deeply about money, so an article like this feels like peeking into a window.  I’m so grateful to the people who told their story for it.

I have such mixed feelings about turning books into movies and television shows.  We’re currently watching Umbrella Academy with the ChickieNob, so she keeps asking how it’s different from the comic.  And it is massively different from the comic, but it doesn’t bother me in the least.  I love it.  The show is so well done.

And I am beyond excited for Good Omens, even though I suspect it will be nothing like the book.  How could it?  It takes hours upon hours to get through that thing and the details and bit characters are the best part.  You know they’re going to trim it for television, but I want to watch it anyway.

And then there is the Handmaid’s Tale.  They changed some things in the Handmaid’s Tale.  I could not get over how they changed the Handmaid’s Tale, and I refused to watch beyond the first season.  That is where the book ends; I don’t want to see the story continue.  Maybe I’m missing out and the second season was fantastic.  But I can’t bring myself to watch it.

And I haven’t been able to closely look at the cast of the Magicians much less watch a single episode.  I was excited when I first heard that it was being turned into a show, but I love those books so much.  If the Quentin and Alice in my head don’t match the Quentin and Alice on the screen, it will break my heart and mess with the way I visualize the story when I read it.  So I didn’t give it a chance.

So zero rhyme or reason for why I’ll watch one adaptation and not another.

What do you think has been done well?  And what has gone really really wrong?

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

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There’s a company that is looking for two strangers to go on an all-expenses 50-day, 5 continent trip together and agree to have the whole thing filmed.  No, I’m not entering.

Not just because being filmed for 50 seconds (much less 50 days) sounds unappealing.  The other side is the stranger aspect.  They could turn out to be an awesome travel partner, which would make the trip fantastic.  Or they could be a terrible travel partner and end up ruining 50 days worth of sights.  So much of the enjoyment that comes with a trip is taking it with people you like.  Seeing things with people you want to have a conversation with afterward.  Going on a trip with one other stranger is also veeeeeeery different from going alone on a trip with an organized group.  With a group, you may have time apart or multiple people to choose from.

Plus… the judges are three white men.  If the goal is to thoughtfully place two people together who can travel in harmony, they may want to get more diversity on the team.  Unless that isn’t their goal.

So while I would love an all-expenses 50-day, 5 continent trip, cameras and strangers are deal breakers.

Would you travel (filmed!) with a single stranger?

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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’ve been listening to a celebrity memoir on audio book and marveling at how easily everything falls into place in the story.  I’m sure that living his life is very different; that his memoir is the literary equivalent of a curated Instagram feed.  Maybe that’s why I’m not naming the memoir.  I have zero clue if this actor is the type of person who has a Google alert on their name and will admonish me for this take-away.  But all I have to go on are the words on the recording, and those words make things sound very easy, including success the very first time he and his partner tried to conceive.

Not that I wanted them to struggle, but this is success #582958 in the book, so the words “of course” moved across my brain in that moment like ticker tape.

I was recently reading The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness, and the mother and son are having a conversation about the mother’s political campaign.  She’s been waiting for a certain position to open, and she’s currently running for that office.  It seems likely that after years and years of waiting, this is going to happen for her.  And she has decided that this is the time to dump her heart out to her son.  She says on page 155:

“What do you do when your dreams are about to come true?” she asks. “No one ever tells you. They tell you to chase them, but what happens when you actually catch one?”

So little is written about what happens next.  The self-help books seem to take you right up to the moment of success and then step back, as if the only option when you catch your dream is to live happily ever after.

The truth is that sometimes you catch your dreams and you realize that the reality is very different from what you imagined when you were working towards the goal.  The heart is terrible at knowing what will make it happy.  And other times you catch your dreams and it’s bliss upon bliss.  It’s exactly what you hoped.

I was thinking about this quote as I listened to the celebrity memoir because there is no chase.  There’s just a short queue in front of each dream, and he gets into the line, waits for relatively short amount of time, and collects the dream.  And I was thinking about what is lost and what is gained without the chase.

I went to a Wegmans for the first time last weekend.  I’ll couch that by adding that I’ve run in and out of a Wegmans two other times in life with people who wanted to pick up an item, but I’ve never gone to Wegmans.  Like wander up and down the aisles and poke around the prepared foods bar.  I was, for all intents and purposes, a Wegmans virgin.  And proud of it.  Other people told me Wegmans was great, so I screwed myself over and didn’t go.

But my cousin wanted a certain pasta shape, and the Wolvog told me that the shape was at Wegmans.  He is a Wegmans connoisseur.  My mother takes him because I deprive him of all the deliciousness.  So I put my trust in the Wolvog and told the guys in my gaming club that I was going to head over to Wegmans after our meeting.

They seemed slightly confused that I had never been to Wegmans.  They all reassured me that they weren’t Wegmans fanatics, but… yeah… like the rest of the world, they had been to Wegmans.

I entered by the prepared foods section.  You can imagine my face walking through the prepared foods section.  They had vegetarian egg rolls.  Not spring rolls (I’m never impressed with spring rolls) — egg rolls.  Why, yes, I’d love to try two.  And then, yeah, the rest of the store.  They had foods I haven’t seen in other places in years, including three billion pasta shapes.  (Including the one my cousin wanted.). I had to text an apology to my mother for being such a brat about Wegmans all these years.

Then I got in line.  Two people in front of me with half-filled carts, one in the middle of the check out process.  18 minutes later, I am still in line.  Actually, I’m in a second line because the first line wasn’t moving so I moved into a similarly queued line and ended up spending over a quarter of an hour staring at the gum display.

So Wegmans.  It’s like the Hotel California of food stores.

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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:

• “Forgiving Myself” (Infertile Phoenix)
• “Sometimes It Just Hurts” (My Path to Mommyhood)

Okay, now my choices this week.

ANDMom has a good vent/explanation on her blog about the ups and downs in recent life, but it’s the opening that got under my skin.  She writes, “Sometimes I really miss blogging. Having that place to dump feelings and thoughts, and the connection with other people. So I keep coming back, but never seeming to make another real go of it.”  And that does seem to be the hardest thing; not returning to write the first post after a long pause, but coming back to do the second post.  This is actually the second for her, so I hope a third one is in the works soon as she finds her rhythm.

Jewish IVF is thinking about her upcoming 35th birthday and having the birthday blues.  Birthdays are hard.  Even when everything is going well, they can still be hard.  She writes, “I feel that it’s incredibly entitled to feel glum or complain about something as simple as a birthday and/or its celebration. No one owes me anything and I’m incredibly lucky to be turning a year older.”  And, yes, that is one angle, but there are also big feelings tied up in birthdays and holidays.

Lastly, Bereaved and Blessed has a powerful, must-read post processing the feelings after a suicide.  My heart is with her, and I think everyone needs to read her words, even if suicide has never touched your life.  There are so many places where we need to hear and absorb the words, “It’s not your fault.”

The roundup to the Roundup: No longer a Wegmans virgin.  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 February 22nd and March 1st) 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.