I am head-over-heels in love with dwarsliggers, and I’ve never even seen one.  They’re mini books that open like a calendar — the spine is the top of the book — but you read the text left-to-right (or right-to-left, if your language goes right-to-left).  So when you open it, the text is running horizontally the length of the book, rather than horizontally in a vertical setting.  They can fit a whole book on onion skin paper, and you have a tiny copy you can fit in your pocket.

Squee!

I’ve always wanted to write squee.

I know that I’m nearing the end of my mini book reading days.  I’m not quite ready for bifocals, though I do like to take off my glasses to read at night.  And I’m aware there are other ways to carry a book with you; I have dozens of books on my phone, for instance.  But I’m a paper sort of girl.  I like a physical book.  And this would allow me to slip it in a tiny purse or my pocket.

While they’re widely available in the Netherlands, The New York Times states that John Green’s books are going to be the first ones released in the US as a test case.  Which is unfortunate because I already own his books.  I’m not really seeking new copies of books I’ve already read and own.  Though I reserve the right to purchase one regardless if I see it in the bookstore and my heart starts pounding.

John Green says, “They’re objects that you almost can’t get until you’re touching them.”  Um, no, Mr. Green.  I get it, and I’m in love.  Sight unseen.

Yes or no to mini books?

You’re voting today, correct?  Because the importance of how we vote and the laws we create is contained below.

I saw two stories last week, both concerning pregnancy loss.  You may want to save this post for later if you’re not in a good place to speak about loss.  (But, please, go vote.)

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The first is a disturbing piece from the New York Times looking at miscarriages and stillbirth that occurred due to poor working conditions.  A woman at the top of the article clutches an empty receiving blanket:

One evening in January 2014, after eight hours of lifting, Erica Hayes ran to the bathroom. Blood drenched her jeans.  She was 23 and in the second trimester of her first pregnancy. She had spent much of the week hoisting the warehouse’s largest boxes from one conveyor belt to the next. Ever since she learned she was pregnant, she had been begging her supervisor to let her work with lighter boxes, she said in an interview. She said her boss repeatedly said no.

It’s a side of pregnancy discrimination that we usually don’t think about, one that hits close to home for our community.  The public gets angry about the fact that women are often passed over for promotions or lose their job due to pregnancy.  We’re less comfortable speaking about how the workplace can cause loss.  That the items around us may have contributed to someone else’s pregnancy loss.

It’s a sobering piece, especially when you consider our 40-year-old laws concerning employers and pregnancy:

Under federal law, companies don’t necessarily have to adjust pregnant women’s jobs, even when lighter work is available and their doctors send letters urging a reprieve.

And the fact that the company in the article is a contractor of Verizon.

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The other piece is more moving.  It weave a personal story of loss with historical tales of loss.  Nursing Clio explains how she felt after learning her baby had no heartbeat:

More than anything, I felt how I had lost a story of the future that I had built up in my mind … What has followed in the last two years has been even more difficult than I could have imagined and has required many alterations to our pregnancy story. The loss of the expected narrative and the discovery of new narratives is what I want to focus on here.

She uses her background as a professor of eighteenth century literature to try to make sense of what she lost.  Of how women have processed their losses over the ages, especially how male authors (vs. female authors) discuss loss and the concept of mourning pictures.

It’s an incredible piece weaving the personal with the academic.  And I found it hugging my heart after I read that first exposé on loss.

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

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Being totally immodest: My ability to get stuff done is one of my best traits.  If I tell you that you will have a document on Thursday, I will likely have it to you on Tuesday.  You will not need to send me a reminder.  In twelve years of being a freelance writer, I have never missed a deadline.

I have great sitzfleisch.

At least, I thought I had great sitzfleisch because I am able to put my bum in a chair and get to work.  But I just read the other meaning for the word on the BBC:

It can also mean, in some cases, that one simply sits still and waits for a difficult situation to resolve itself. In that scenario, it’s still about endurance but rather the endurance to sit tight than the endurance to push through with hard work.

That is not me at all.  I do not have the endurance to wait, sit tight, or not nudge.  When I’m waiting for an answer or something to happen, I may not externally let the deciding party know that I’m fretting, but, believe me, I am Googling, journaling, or worrying as if it were my second job.

Are you someone who likes to move things along or wait and see what happens?

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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.

There was a great question asked in my post last week about reading diversity that I want to unpack with a story.  There’s a very good reason why I fret when I realize that I’m only reading white men, and it all goes back to high school.

[Pretend there are wavy lines indicating that we’re going back in time.]

I am taking the AP English Literature exam, and I’ve entered the free response section.  The task is to read a short excerpt and write an essay.  I have 40 minutes.  I begin reading the piece and realize that I do not understand it.  I do not know what a nativity scene is.  I do not know the word crèche in this context.  I cannot picture what this is about any more than you can picture a scene set in a sukkah and write a timed essay about the importance of a lulav and etrog.  (Unless, of course, you come into the exam knowing about Succot.)

I go to the proctor and explain to her that I don’t know what a nativity scene is.  She looks at me in alarm as she reads the prompt and then says, “I can’t tell you anything.  Just do your best.”

[Wavy lines again, back to the present.]

At 15 years old, I had never seen a nativity scene and didn’t know much about Christmas.  It sounds silly, but it’s really easy to not learn things if you don’t expose yourself to them.  I knew the most basic, surface information about Christmas.  Knew about Christmas trees because I saw them in the shopping mall, candy canes because people passed them out at school, and that the holiday celebrated the birth of Jesus.  But I didn’t know at that time about the three wise men or midnight mass or nativity scenes.  All of that knowledge came later during college and beyond.

If I had read the excerpt outside the walls of the exam, I would have looked up “nativity scene” and understood what it was.  Reading would have introduced me to this foreign idea that was outside my life experience.

Instead, I had to struggle during the exam and find out what it was after the exam was over.

The inability to understand applies to everything in life.  We need exposure.  You can do that through an experience — for instance, celebrating someone else’s holiday and asking questions or traveling to a different place and experiencing a new culture firsthand — or you can do it through a book or movie.  It’s a cheap form of travel: You can read a story from someone else’s point-of-view and get exposed to all the things they know that you don’t.

EVERY person who is not me has something to teach me, but if I stick with authors from a single background, I am likely to encounter the same ideas again and again.  Even when a person is not specifically writing about their culture or race or sexuality or gender, they are still writing through it, and it weaves its way into that science fiction or horror or fantasy story.  Maybe not directly but indirectly.  Authors write about what they know, even when they’re making up a fictional world.  And what they know is what I’m trying to glean.

So when I say that I’m worried because all the authors I’ve been reading lately come from the same white, male, British background, it’s because I’m thinking about that AP exam and how much I don’t know.  I would say the same thing if I was reading mostly Canadian women authors or mostly young African-American men authors.  If I want to organically encounter what I don’t know (because without knowing about it, I don’t even know to look it up), I need to pay attention to the authors I’m reading and shift things around when I see I’m reading too much of the same thing.

I’ll never pick up what I don’t know if I don’t expose myself to it.

In an effort to try to focus beyond everything wrong in the world, a story about something very right.  Two women were able to both carry the same baby using a newer IVF technique.  Bliss (wife #1) provided the egg, and the created embryo was returned to her body to incubate for five days.  Then the embryo was transferred to Ashleigh’s (wife #2) womb where it implanted and she carried their baby for nine months.  Their son was born five months ago.

I don’t know the overall success rate of this option, though the cost is lower than traditional IVF.  But beyond the cost, there’s the emotional aspect of having both women get to experience the life inside their body.  That’s a powerful idea.

Science is amazing.

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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.

Jewish IVF also has a powerful piece in response to the synagogue shooting, but I was first moved earlier in the week on her post about keeping score.  She outlines a frustrating situation with her old clinic and explains why she waited to switch to the new one last year: “I had a hard time thinking about switching; not only because of all the retesting we’d have to do and the cost, but also because of the feeling of failure that comes along with moving. It felt like new clinic was a last resort I wasn’t ready for, even though the reality was far from that.”  It was a really interesting post about taking a long, hard look at your clinic.

ANDMom has a post about conversation enders.  It’s a political post, but it’s really about not being able to see beyond your own situation and imagine the world beyond your door.  As we head into voting next week (you are going to vote, right?), it’s important to remember that your situation could change.  That you may need to live your vote, and you need to be happy living your vote, even if you end up in a different situation and now aren’t benefiting from your vote.  Will you be happy if your fortune changes and things are better?  Will you be happy if your fortune changes and things are worse?  It’s an important idea to remember before you cast your vote.  She says it perfectly.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled is haunted on Halloween by thoughts of the grandfather her father could have been.  It’s a hard holiday, even when you don’t have kids parading up to your door in cute costumes.  She reflects on pictures of her father carving pumpkins with his fictive kin granddaughters and wonders about how things would have been with her own daughter.  It’s a bittersweet post.

The roundup to the Roundup: Science is amazing.  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 October 26th and November 2nd) 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.