Two similar pieces popped up back-to-back in my world last week.  One was a video calculating how much longer you have on this earth so that you’ll spend the time with people who are your priorities rather than staring at a screen, like you’re doing right now by reading this post and watching this video… that is made by an alcohol company.

The other was this old blog post from Wait But Why, breaking down how many winters you have left, how many presidents you’ll live to see elected, how many more pizzas you’ll eat.  It’s your lifetime, focused on the finish line.  Or, as he tries to teach, “If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.”

Both pieces totally depressed me, missing their mark. Instead of focusing on the message, my very basic brain started running around inside my skull, screaming, “Everyone and everything you love will be gone one day!”

Big sigh.

Sorry to ruin your post-Christmas glow. I pass them along (as they were passed along to me) with the hope that you get something different out of them.

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

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The Internet is a wonderful space because it allows me every year to vicariously experience Christmas.  So feed my heart: how do you do Christmas?  What did you do last night?  What will you do later today?  Have you opened your gifts?  What did you get?  Who are you with?  What is the best thing about this Christmas, or, if it hasn’t been a great day, what is the worst thing about this Christmas?  This doesn’t just need to be a place to gush; you can also use it as a space to vent.

Christmas 2018 — spill it.  Let me know how you’re spending the day if you celebrate it.

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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.

Valery and I were emailing after she mentioned that she re-read her own blog, and it occurred to me that I have never done this.  I’ve re-read specific posts, and sometimes, if I’m looking for something, I’ll read the posts around it.  But I’ve never started at the beginning and read back through it as the story of my life.

Which is, you know, what it is.  It’s the story of what I’ve thought about for the last 12+ years.  A quarter of my life.  But I’ve never gone back to the first post and read from June 2006 until now, seeing how those thoughts have changed or reliving moments.  Who knows what I’ll find in there that I’ve forgotten about?

Have you ever read your own blog from beginning to end?

We forgot to watch our usual winter movies this year: About a Boy, Love Actually, and Lord of the Rings.  There’s still time for Lord of the Rings — we knew December would be busy, so we’ve already decided to start the first movie in the trilogy in January.  But About a Boy and Love Actually contain Christmas.  You can’t watch Christmas movies after Christmas.  That’s like watching beach movies in October.  I mean… yeah… I get that people do it, but it feels discordant.

I’ll probably let Love Actually go, but I may try to work in About a Boy tonight.

Do you have winter movies?  What are they?

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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.

Little Bird has a post about thoughts that come after she crosses back and forth over a bridge during a busy day.  When she stops moving, her brain turns on: “My first thought: I miss Charlotte. That’s usually the first thought when things get quiet. Then: This has been a really hard year.”  There is good in the hard, a new baby in the hard, but it is still hard.  And I love her goal: “My 2019 goal is to get a little bit better. I’m not planning on moving soul mountains, but if I could shift my perspective even slightly towards more positivity we’d all benefit.”

POF and Now What looks at a heart-pausing moment from two angles.  A comment her daughter makes takes on new meaning through the lens of donor eggs.  I’m not going to say more than that because it’s a short post, and I think it packs the biggest punch if you go in and hear the words as she did in the moment.  It’s a great reminder that what seems one way to us can seem quite different to someone else.  I also love, “Back in the box, you thousand thoughts.”

Lastly, Not a Wasted Word has a post about being pregnancy avoidant.  Even though her family building days are behind her, she still feels strange around people who are pregnant.  I love this self reflection: “I tell myself it’s because pregnancy terrifies me … I kind of hope that is what is happening, otherwise it feels like I’m just begrudging people their happiness during one of the most exciting times of their life.”  It made me think of my own pregnancy avoidance, trying to get to the heart of the reason.

The roundup to the Roundup: I missed my winter movies.  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 December 14th and December 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.

In the same week, I had one friend muse via email that she wants to start blogging again and another muse that she wants to stop blogging.  In both cases, it came down to people feeling like no one was hearing their words.  Or, at the very least, no one was responding to them, hence why the blogger thought the Facebook grass was greener, and the Facebooker remembered the blogging grass as greener.

Here are my thoughts.

I’ll start with Facebook.  I’m not against Facebook.  I think of my blog as my house, and I think of my social media accounts as additional homes I have in other cities.  It makes sense, in that case, to rent apartments that require little upkeep in those other cities since my blog — my home — is my main living space on the Web.  That’s sort of what you’re doing on social media platforms: you’re renting space that you’re paying for with your content and personal information.

Some people are happy to live light or not deal with the stress that comes from owning a home.  But I’m not that person.  I like having my home, and I like having my blog.  I don’t think I’d be happy posting my thoughts solely on social media sites in the same way that I never loved renting apartments.  Again, I realize that is me.

We trust that people will see our Facebook posts, and that’s not always the case.  Some people whom you’re connected to on the site will not go on the platform, so they will not see it.  Some people will not have the algorithm show it in their feed, so they will not see it.  Some people will have your status in their feed, but there’s so much information on there and it moves so quickly that they’ll scroll over it without interacting with it.

And here’s the thing: they don’t even know that they’re missing it.  Facebook shows them one of your status updates and they believe they’re seeing all of your status updates.  So they don’t know what they don’t know.  Unless you are opening and closing every single one of your friend’s profile pages, you have no clue how many posts you’re missing daily.  And as much as Facebook wants to believe that they can predict what you want to read, someone of those posts you miss will be important to you or to that person.

Which brings us to blogs.  What I like about blogs is that I see every post.  If I like a blog, I enter their URL in my reader so I am notified when a new post goes up.  I sometimes read the post in the reader, and I sometimes hop over to the blog itself if I’m on my computer so I can comment.  Reading on a mobile device makes that difficult, so while I know blog readership has fallen over the years, I also believe that mobile devices keep us from knowing the whole story.  There are more people reading than people know by looking at their stats.

The Internet was a different place 12 years ago.  There wasn’t a lot to read, so we read everything.  We went back to the same blog post several times, reading the comment section to see how people were reacting to it during the day.  We had long conversations in there.  But now, the information flows so quickly, it is easier not to return.  But the one thing that hasn’t changed is that I visit each blog, one at a time.

Because that’s the biggest difference between social media sites and blogs; why I keep writing mine and why I keep reading them.  Because I like visiting one person at a time.  I go to their blog and see what they have to say, and then I go to the next blog and join that conversation.  I give one person at a time my complete attention.  On Facebook, it’s like trying to visit 100 people at once, and not doing a good job connecting with any one of them because there are so many people around.

I miss blogs.  I miss specific blogs — A Little Pregnant, Infertile Fantasies, Vee from Three Little Birds, Too Many Fish to Fry (she still sometimes has infrequent posts) — and I miss blogs in general.  My reader is still full at the end of the day because I subscribe to so many of them, but it’s not like it was back in the old days when there were so many of us.

Which blogs do you miss?  And will you ever go back if you stopped writing?