Josh and I watched the Tig Notaro movie on Netflix.  It’s a documentary that covers a little more than the year between her groundbreaking set at the Largo and the anniversary set she performed at the Largo a year later.  This is the trailer:

So the “one shot” she refers to in that trailer is making a baby using her genetic material.  To give context on the weight of those words: she was looking into building a family, she lost her mother very suddenly, she was diagnosed with cancer (putting her family building dreams on hold), she was told — fairly cruelly in the film — that she shouldn’t attempt to have a child because it could cause the cancer to return, and she decided to attempt IVF with a surrogate one time.

So the “one shot” she refers to in the trailer isn’t actually one shot at living or a “carpe diem” message about doing what you love and being with whom you love.  It’s literally her one shot — out of the nine embryos, only one survived the thaw.  There wouldn’t be a follow-up cycle.

She films the whole process, from meeting the surrogate to going injections to harvesting her eggs to the countless updates from RE on the embryos.  But the part that I found so gutting to watch — without knowing the outcome — was the period between transferring the embryo to the surrogate and waiting for the first beta results.

She’s a comedian and she jokes about everything — from removing her breasts to relationships — but there is so much earnest hope and love on her face when she talks about this embryo.  There is a moment when they are performing the transfer and she talks to her embryo — whom she has named Jack Notaro — and she leans forward, almost as if she is trying to pretend she is alone, speaking to her child, despite a room full of people.  There is just so much love in her voice as she tunes them out for a moment to tell him to stick around.

And then, when she is waiting on the sofa with her girlfriend, waiting for the call about the beta, she again speaks about parenthood with so much hope in her voice, explaining how this embryo is her last tie to her mother; that last chance to pass along her mother’s genes to her child.

We watched the documentary because she’s a really funny woman, but the moments I connected with the most and found the most moving were the ones where she was expressing this hopeful love for someone who barely exists; a cluster of cells.  It — to me — was proof of the power of love.  Of how much we can love another person before they’re even here.

So I cried through that part from transfer to beta, just like I’m crying now, writing this.  Because it is beautiful and so hard to witness that level of hope.

Not going to write the outcome of the beta, so let me know in a comment that you want to know before you watch and I’ll email the answer to you.

A long time ago, back when we walked uphill to school both ways in the snow, there were a handful of television stations.  We got NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, Fox, and channel 20, which was… who knows what.  (No one actually watched channel 20.)  That was it.  If you wanted to watch television, you watched one of those five main stations.

So you always knew when a big event was coming because they would have weeks of commercials ahead of time.  Like Circus of the Stars.  Remember that?  Where all of your favourite television stars would inexplicably do televised circus acts for one night?  You could watch Punky Brewster fly through the air on the trapeze or Mr. T ride a unicycle.  Or Battle of the Network Stars.  Remember that?  Where all of your favourite television stars would inexplicably do televised tug-of-war games for one night?

Anyway, the problem with streaming services and too many cable stations is that it’s very easy to miss big televised events.  We haven’t turned on Fox in… oh… maybe 30 years, so I would have completely missed the fact that they are doing a live version of Rent this Sunday if Josh hadn’t stumbled across the information.  Whether or not we need another recorded version of Rent is beside the point.

That’s what I’ll be doing if I manage to remember this fact for two more days.  Which isn’t a given unless I write it down because I will see zero commercials for it between now and then.  I miss the old days when there was nothing to watch.

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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:

• “The End of Reading as We Knew It” (Lavender Luz)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Risakerslake writes about reassuring herself that she’ll be okay.  She explains, “I know I have two embryos who look great. I know I’m having a newish test that can help up my chances of having another baby, but I still feel like I’m here all over again wondering if it’s going to happen for me. I got really lucky once—will I get another shot?”  It is, like she says, one day at a time.  And that is all you can do when you don’t know the future.

Much Ado About Nothing removed the crib from their room and is thinking about the empty space.  The crib hadn’t been used since last summer; it was time to reclaim that area of their room.  But she admits, “I came home to that empty space and it took my breath away, I think my heart stopped beating for a moment before it resumed aching in my chest.”  It is so hard to look into a space that you wish was filled.

Lastly, Life Without Baby has started a discussion on when people knew it was time to stop pursuing parenthood.  Sometimes there is a clear stopping point.  Other times, you need to create the stopping point.  The post is interesting, but the comments are great, too.

The roundup to the Roundup: Rent is on television on Sunday.  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 January 18th and 25th) 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.

We just discovered that Josh’s co-worker’s mother is younger than he is.  She had her child in her twenties, and her child just passed into her twenties herself a few years ago.  The math makes sense.  It just makes me feel old.

My co-workers are mostly my age.  I think.  Sometimes it’s hard to tell.  I guess I could point in their face and say, “Where were you when you heard about the Challenger?”  I know that someday I will have a co-worker who answers, “I was an infant.”

I am also aware that YOU may be reading this and thinking, “Where were you when Nixon resigned?”  Um… I was an infant.

I recently read a piece on how art and culture gets lost as generations age, and how little remains in the collective consciousness over the years.  It made me sad to think that, one day, people may not know John Lennon.  That, right now, there are groups of people who cannot identify the song “Imagine” much less something like “Starting Over.”

Popular pieces have a lifespan of 5 – 30 years and then start to pass out of the collective consciousness, remembered by fewer and fewer people over time until very little remains.  Take a look down this list of books published in 1919.  How many do you actually know (vs. recognize the author’s name)?  How many have you read?

Three — I’ve read three on the fiction list.

And yet back in 1919 or 1924, people would have been familiar with these works.  They would have read Winesburg, Ohio.

Can you imagine people in 2119 reading John Green books?  Or Twilight?  Perhaps Harry Potter will survive the next 100 years, but I can’t imagine most people still knowing Rainbow Rowell even though there will always been a small sub-set of people who remember books the general public has forgotten.

I’m sad about that future world where people don’t know about John Green books.

They’re probably sad about our world and how we didn’t live to see their greatest AI author, AlphaZ.

What items (books, movies, television shows) that are popular today do you think we’ll still remember in 100 years?

I probably should go directly to Battlefish, my resource for all things Scandinavian, but this was too delicious to just go in an email.  I just read about Finland’s National Jealousy Day (likely a media-created name), which falls every year in November.  This is the day that the tax administration gives access to every citizen’s taxable income for that year.  In the interest of absolute transparency, you can look up any person in the country and find out how much money they made.

I sort of love it.  On one hand, employers are pushed to pay fairly because they know they’ll be called out for providing some people with a lower salary.  On the other hand, Finland has a 16.5% gender pay gap.  America has an 18.2% gap, so clearly worse, but you’d think that the pay gap would be much lower with that transparency.  Regardless, the transparency means that people pay their taxes.  Imagine how different our elections would be if everyone needed to make their tax information public.

Yet it also sort of makes me uncomfortable in the sense that it encourages assumptions.  How many hurt feelings arise out of people judging generosity since they know the other person’s salary, even if they don’t know the person’s financial needs or the plans they have for their future?  Or how many people resent their co-workers when they discover they’re being paid more, even though maybe they should be paid more for their expertise or exceptional output?

Would you look up people in the database?

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

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I am trying not to eat the Girl Scout cookies in the kitchen.  (I really really really want the Thin Mints in the kitchen.)  I had to buy them.  My niece is so adorable that my heart started shrieking, “You must buy them all!” the second she started her sales pitch.  I was limited to two boxes because I won’t donate them.  I will eat them.  And I will tell myself only one more, but I will really eat four more.  Because.  Thin Mints.

The man who invented the Marshmallow Test recommended replacement as a method of self-control.  You distract yourself with something else so you don’t think about the thing you want to eat/smoke/do/etc.  So if you don’t want to eat Thin Mints (but I do want to eat Thin Mints), you do a crossword puzzle.  Or you go for a walk.  Or you scroll through photos.  Anything so your brain is occupied instead of thinking about the Thin Mints.

It didn’t work for me because, last night, I replaced thinking about Thin Mints with thinking about Pepperidge Farm Brussels.  But we don’t have Brussels.  So I ate a Thin Mint because those were in the kitchen.  Okay, I ate two.  Really, that was it.  I ate two.  For now.

What do you use to distract yourself?

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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.