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.

You know that urban legend that says everyone who appears in your dream is someone you saw once before.  Even if they’re not familiar, your brain registered their face in the background of a crowd, because humans cannot imagine faces we’ve never seen.  Which may or may not be true, but it’s the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw the pictures of the AI-generated faces.

Those people don’t actually exist.

It kind of freaks me out.

And this:

It’s easy to see this technology used in the creation of realistic-looking images for marketing or advertising purposes, for example. But it’s just as easy to imagine someone using it to create fake “evidence” of events that never happened in order to promote some agenda.  At the speed this tech is progressing, it soon might be impossible to tell whether you’re looking at a real photograph or a computer generated image.

Is anyone else really uncomfortable over the idea of generating fake faces?  (Or, for that matter, fake cats?)

There is a great quote by the writer Lydia Davis:

I had reached a juncture in my reading life that is familiar to those who have been there: in the allotted time left to me on earth, should I read more and more new books, or should I cease with that vain consumption—vain because it is endless—and begin to reread those books that had given me the intensest pleasure in my past.

Explore or exploit.  To find the new or to dive deeply into the things you already know you like.  The answer is mathematical: explore when you have a lot of time ahead of you and exploit when you have limited time left.  So explore in childhood, exploit in old age.  Explore your first year of college, exploit in your last few months before graduation.

It’s easy to know which way you should go when you know exactly when something is going to be over.  But what if you don’t know how long you’ll live?  When does old age begin if you have no clue if you have three days or three months or three years or three decades left?  When should you switch over and start becoming pickier, spending time only with what will make you happy rather than giving your time over to find things that could make you happy?

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The ChickieNob was telling a story about an “old man” who turned out to be in his 40s.  “I’m in my 40s,” I told her.  “That means you think I’m old.”

“But you are old,” she reminded me from her 14-year-old point-of-view.

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Josh and I were driving, trying to guess a person’s age that we just met.  “He’s in his mid-to-late sixties,” I guessed.

“I couldn’t get a read at all.  He may have been in his fifties.”  We were trying to figure out if this person may be nearing retirement age.  Josh shrugged, “Sixty sounds really young to me right now.”

Me too.

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

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I know next to nothing about Karl Lagerfeld, but I was fascinated by this article about his mourning instructions.  Not burial instructions, because I think most of us have those, but five pages of mourning instructions.

For example, he “provided his staff with the acceptable answers he wanted them to give to customers when they offer their condolences. On the approved list: ‘Thank you for your condolences’ and ‘It is a hard time for all of us’.”  He left behind the statements he wanted written about himself: “He leaves behind an extraordinary legacy as one of the greatest designers of our time, and there are no words to express how much he will be missed.”

I am equal parts in love and confused by his chutzpah to dictate what other people think and feel after his death.  It’s not that other people don’t write their own obits, but they don’t take that space to speak effusively about themselves with the emphatic statement: I will be missed.  We hope someone else will do that.

What do you think?

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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.