And now, after a heavy week, something lighter.  Harry Potter!

Last weekend, we went out to Chestertown to their Harry Potter festival.  We’ve been going since the first year, and it’s something we look forward to every fall.  This year, the ride was extra sweet because we received a review copy of the new A History of Magic audio book (read by Natalie Dormer) a few days before the trip.  We queued it up on Audible and started driving towards the Bay Bridge.

First and foremost, Natalie Dormer has the most relaxing, melodious voice.  Listen:

So imagine having the history of magic and the Harry Potter books explained to you in THAT voice.

The book opens with backstories about the creation of the series, from the idea through querying through publication stunts, and then weaves its way through the voices on the audio books and the book art.

We own the paper version of A History of Magic, too, and I was really impressed with how they presented all the sidebars and images in the book.  It was always clear whether they were presenting the main point on the page, or whether they were exploring an aside.  Part of that is because they looped in the experts quoted or discussed in the book to talk through their section.  For instance, Jim Dale presents the information from Jim Dale, Stephen Fry presents the information from Stephen Fry.  Other times, the background music changed or the sound changed.  In any case, they took what could have been a very confusing book and made it an enjoyable listen.

The book takes you through a history of magic; all the backstories, beliefs, and beings that influenced and popped up in the text.  If you love magic, this is 11+ hours of bliss.

It was the perfect piece to listen to as we drove into a town entirely transformed into the world of Harry Potter.  Cannot recommend this audio book enough if you love Harry Potter, too.

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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.

My Perfect Breakdown writes about the upcoming visit they’re having with their son’s birth mother.  People are asking nosy questions, and she writes, “I know people are trying to ask if I’ll be jealous about their relationship and how I feel about it. But, my theory is I’ll answer the questions they ask, not the question they are actually trying to ask.”  Love that.  She points out that it is like any visit to extended family, with travel stress and a lot of love.  Safe travels.

Much Ado About Nothing has a heartbreaking and thought-provoking post about the loneliness of miscarriage.  It’s the opposite of pregnancy, when everyone is gathering around you, trying to share in your excitement.  With loss, you’re often alone in your pain, especially if other people didn’t know you were pregnant.  Pregnancy is excitement, a filling.  Miscarriage is despair, a drain.  She could use the circling of the wagons right now because she’s right, loss is lonely.

Lastly, Genuine Greavu about going back on birth control and closing the door on a spontaneous pregnancy.  She explains why they’re no longer leaving it up to fate: “But things have changed. I no longer feel the same open arms feeling of surrender. Instead I feel an itchy, anxious fear that keeps me up at night and makes me second guess intimacy with my husband. And I don’t want to live that way.  The reality is that our life is FULL with two kids… full in ways that are hard to explain.”  They’re finishing off their final FETs and then looking ahead — down the road — to adoption again.  Following their hearts and what feels right, right now.

The roundup to the Roundup: Audio book of A History of Magic 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 5th and October 12th) 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.

Thank you for sticking with the first part of this post yesterday.  Did I need that much space to explain the difference between hearing and Hearing?  Probably not.  If you’ve experience not being Heard, you get it.  I guess I wasn’t writing that for people who get it.  I was writing it to explain it to people who don’t.

Yesterday, I gave you the only time in the book (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing) that I believed the narrator was female.  She was letting you know she had a story and she wanted to be understood.  THAT is something I think we all think about — male or female — but if you are accustomed to being Heard, you may not be compelled to use your precious time on earth working to get your story out there.  In the same way that if you normally have food aplenty, you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how you’re going to get food.  You trust that food will be there when you need it, simply because it always is.  If you are accustomed to being Heard, you’ll get your words out there when you have something you really need to say.  You don’t need to tell people to “listen up” because you trust that they’re already listening.

Anyway, I wanted to highlight the flip side, where I didn’t believe she was female and how this book helped get me through the Kavanaugh vote by understanding the nomination conversation.

A few pages later, the narrator states that she didn’t see the point of her white, male friend’s podcast and now does:

They would stream themselves playing video games to tiny audiences, and they had a podcast about the best TV death scenes that they also filmed and uploaded to YouTube.  To me it just seemed like that incurable ailment so many well-off dudes have, believing despite mountains of evidence that what the world truly needs is another white-guy comedy podcast.  This sounds harsh, but that’s what it seemed like to me back then.  Now, of course, I know how easy it is to feel like you don’t matter if no one’s watching (p. 7 – 8).

She is referring to something a lot of writers/artists/videographers (et al) feel: Attention is limited and when you’re not getting it, it sucks.  You write a blog post, write a book, record a song, film a movie, and you want people to consume your creation.  You don’t even need them to love it; you just want it to be given someone’s time.  No one wants their effort ignored.

But here’s the thing: women already know how it feels not to matter.  We don’t have an epiphany; we know this based on experience.

Let’s say I enter a very diverse room and ask people to write down all the times they are shown through other people’s actions that their life/thoughts/opinions matter.  Not on an individual, moment-to-moment basis, but overall as they move through society.  Do they think they benefit from existing laws?  Do they see what matters to them reflected in the world around them?  Is it easy enough to get products they need in order to be themselves?  Do they see advertisements that are aimed at them, making it clear the product creators want them to know that they matter as a customer?

How long would your list be?  What if you were an African-American woman?  An immigrant?  A gay, Latino man?  Someone wealthy?  Someone uneducated?  Someone Jewish?  Someone healthy?

A woman?

A man?

I think our lists would be very different lengths.  There are places where I have privilege, and I know I matter.  But I’m a woman.  I KNOW I don’t matter to society as much as a man — and that’s not America; that’s the world.  I am my womb.  A man is his brain and his muscles, and I am a single organ located in my pelvis.

We get our rights and protections slowly, and once we have them, we still have people fighting to take them away.  We had to fight for the right to vote.  In fact, the 19th amendment wasn’t ratified here until 1920.  That upcoming 2020 election will be the 100 year anniversary of women having the right to vote.  We are still fighting for abortion rights, sexual assault laws, equal representation in office or the board room.

If you want to know whether or not we matter, all you have to do is look at the Kavanaugh conversation and the people who said his life shouldn’t be ruined just because he sexually assaulted someone in his youth.  HIS life ruined?  What about HER life, the woman he chose to harm?  Assault isn’t an accident.

We get it.  Women don’t matter.

So the idea that Green’s narrator would ONLY understand how good it feels to be heard and how awful it feels to be ignored due to the fickleness of attention on social media doesn’t ring true.  That feeling of not mattering is something little girls pick up and carry with them their whole life, even if it’s just background noise in their brain as they push forward.

But moreover, I didn’t believe that a woman — even a woman who individually adores her male friend — would take precious moments of telling her story to point out how she understands now that white boys need attention, too.  Unless she’s part of the Patriarchy.  Or written by a white male.

So what is your list?  Do you feel heard?  Do you get the sense that you matter?

On a side note, it feels incredibly unfair to use Hank Green’s book to make this point; it’s an enjoyable story and I hate the idea that anyone may not read it because I’m pointing out the problems in the narration.  So, please, read it and come to your own opinion because… it has robots and robots are awesome.  But really, this embodies why we need diverse books.

I was reading the perfect book at the perfect time through the whole Kavanaugh vote: An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green.  It is an easy, enjoyable read AND it’s an embodiment of how little men can imagine the lives of women.  It was how white males think about their voice vs. how the rest of society sometimes (or always) thinks about their voice.  I know… probably not the most generous read or, frankly, orthodox read of a book about robots, but there it is.

And really, before this post goes any deeper, I want to pause and say that I liked this book.  At the same time, I was disappointed by this book, but disappointed in the same way that I’m disappointed with JK Rowling for what she has done with Nagini.  I’m still going to watch the next Fantastic Beasts — this isn’t baby with the bathwater — but it feels false to not point out how issues with this book (or that movie) reflect issues in society today.  And even with all that, I still think people will enjoy it, and I apologize in advance to Hank Green for using his book to make a point.

So Green goes with a female narrator — a bisexual, female narrator no less — and weaves this story where she finds fame as a YouTuber because she happens to be the first to make a video about these giant robots who show up on earth.  She builds an enormous following and she is being HEARD in a way that women are rarely Heard.  I mean, yes, people hear sound coming out of our mouths, but after the vote last week, I think we can all agree that we’re not Heard (with a capital H to connote important, close listening).  But she was Heard and was actually creating change.

It made me think about why I started this blog in the first place, over 12 years ago.  I wanted to find other people going through the same experience.  I wanted a place to set down my story.  And, if I’m being honest, I wanted to be Heard in a way that infertile women aren’t Heard in today’s society.  A case in point, it is well-documented and reported in face-to-face interactions and the media, from infertile people to psychologists to doctors, how hurtful it is to be asked when you’re going to have children.  And yet… has anything changed in 12 years?  What was asked then is still being asked now will still be being asked 120 years from now because some voices are Heard and other voices are not.

Our voices, a lot of the time, are not.

Oh, I’m sure you’re Heard in small circles.  You’re Heard by people who already love you and are preconditioned to listen.  You’re Heard at work because they know you well and know you’re an expert.  That’s not the type of hearing I’m speaking about.

I’m speaking about the idea that lawmakers listen to you.  White men get to experience that… a lot.  Not always, but a lot.  I’m speaking about the idea that culture listens to you.  We wouldn’t have hashtags like #OscarsSoWhite if we didn’t have ample proof that only some voices are Heard.  I’m speaking about the idea that people who don’t know you consider your words.  When you speak up, when you vote, when you have an idea, it’s Heard.

I think what we saw last week, even more than the hurt that male lawmakers weren’t listening, weren’t Hearing us, is the idea that female lawmakers weren’t Hearing us, either.  When people called Susan Collins a traitor to women, they weren’t saying that because of the way she was voting.  They were saying that because of the way she wasn’t listening.  She wasn’t Hearing.  She was putting politics before people; party before situation.  She had thousands of silenced women trying to open her ears, and she chose not to Hear them.  Yes, she can recite what they said to her about sexual abuse because she heard in the literal, physical sense of incoming sound.  But she didn’t Hear.

I have more thoughts that I’ll finish tomorrow, but I’ll leave you with this opening from Green’s book.  It’s the reason I read the book in the first place, and the reason I was disappointed that his experience as a white male limited him from truly understanding how it feels to not be Heard as a woman and/or as a bisexual (and therefore, he misses so many opportunities to weave this feeling through the book rather than focus solely on the emotions of fame).

It could have been a deeper book.  I thought it was going to be a deeper book.  I’m not saying you must be exactly like your narrator to write a compelling story, but depth of understanding is key in jumping that chasm.  I never believed that the narrator was female except for this paragraph on page 1:

I am in the wonderful position of having you by the short hairs. I have the story, and so I get to tell it to you the way I want. That means you get to understand me, not just my story, so don’t be surprised if there’s some drama. I’m going to attempt to come at this account honestly, but I’ll also admit to a significant pro-me bias. If you get anything out of this, ideally it won’t be you being more or less on one side or the other, but simply understanding that I am (or at least was) human.

That’s where I leave you.  That we each have a story to tell, and we hope that other people will listen to it.  Not for the story itself but for the understanding that comes from being Heard.  More tomorrow.

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 still mentally regrouping after the Kavanaugh vote.  Analysts are stating that things are calming down, but… I’m not feeling that.  I don’t feel like I’m settling.  I feel like I’m sinking.

(You too?)

There was a Carolyn Hax column this weekend.  Hax was trying to give pregnancy after infertility advice without definitively understanding the situation (the asker was extremely vague with her pronouns), and she coins/uses the term “alpha feeler” to describe the only person’s emotions who matter.  Meaning the alpha feeler feels something and everyone else around her needs to feel it, too.  In this case, the alpha feeler is not asking this, but the mother is asking one child to treat the other child as the alpha feeler.  Anyway.

The point is that considering another person’s feelings is complicated business, and yet, we still have to do it.  It’s a key piece of being a family member/friend/community member.  Trying to honour the feelings of a country is even more complicated, and yet, lawmakers still have to do it.  The public offered their feelings through polls.  The majority consistently did not support the confirmation of Kavanaugh.  The lawmakers chose to ignore feelings.

And this is where we are.

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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 used to believe that we had a base standard, a low bar that people had to clear.  We would, of course, disagree on the best way to run the country, but there would be a few things that we’d all agree on and if anyone didn’t accept and honour those few things, they would never be voted into a position of power.

I know, silly me.

So we can argue until the end of the day whether capitalism works, or whether we should give more assistance to individuals, but I always believed that our leaders would agree that they would represent and give guidance to all people in their district.  Not just the people who elected the leader, but they would represent and care for all the people who were in their city or state or country.

I thought we lived in a world where lawmakers were elected solely to listen to the people, to represent the people.  Not to impose their own opinions but to be collective voice.  If that is true, there is no place for Mitch McConnell to say: “I don’t care how many members they chase, how many people they harass here in the halls, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: we will not be intimidated by these people.”  These people?  These people are the people you are elected to represent.  Your job is to listen to “these people.”

I thought we lived in a world where opinions of experts mattered.  Where headlines such as “‘Unfathomable’: More than 2,400 law professors sign letter opposing Kavanaugh’s confirmation” would make our lawmakers pause and say, “We need to slow this down and carefully consider what we’re doing.”

I thought we all agreed that if someone engaged in criminal activity before or during their time in elected office, they were not fit to lead.  And in the case of grey matters, where it wasn’t clear that the act was truly criminal or just an abuse of a loophole in a system, we’d employ something akin to the Golden Rule.  If we placed ourselves as the person harmed by that individual’s actions, would we still want them in office regardless of other reasons why we may want the person in power?  If the answer was no, we would ask someone else to step into the leadership position.  Though, of course, lying under oath is criminal.

There are many more people who would like a leadership role than there are leadership roles.  It is usually pretty easy to find reasonable people who fit this simple criteria: Treat all individuals as equal individuals regardless of their race, sex, gender, sexual identity, culture, political leanings.  And keep criminals or loophole abusers out of office.

And yet, on the eve of this vote, we can’t seem to accomplish that; that very simple task.  We have people in office who are more obsessed with staying in power and representing their political party than following those two simple criteria.  How else would we be considering allowing a lying sexual abuser onto the highest court in the country?

I’ve lost faith in the system because we’re no longer arguing about the best way to help all the people in our nation.  We’re no longer talking about whether it’s more important to direct money towards a strong military or education.  This isn’t about whether we should have more social programs in place or whether communities should step in to help vulnerable people.

This is about not clearing that lowest bar.