It’s Chanukkah this week.  I am not a fan of Chanukkah, though I’ll never say no to my mother’s latkes or the sufganiyot my cousin brings me.  Other than light the menorah, we don’t really do anything else to mark the holiday.

I wrote this several years ago for BlogHer, but that site is gone, so I’ll post it here:

So this is what Chanukkah is about: it’s a somewhat insignificant holiday meant to commemorate the time that King Antiochus instated laws not allowing Jews to practice their religion and the Maccabees fought back. It’s a story about guerrilla warfare and a revolution. About not waiting for G-d to intercede on your behalf, but fighting back against injustice. It is about a time when life sucked hardcore for the Jews and instead of putting down their heads and crying, they rolled up their sleeves and restored the Temple.

In other words, it’s a pretty cool holiday on its own, but where gifts and sweetness have a place in a birthday celebration for Christ, presents and candy don’t really commemorate a war. Jews don’t celebrate war victories — recognizing that death is a large part of war — so this holiday is more about relief than outright joy. It would make more sense to use Chanukkah to go into the community and right a few wrongs. Or do a habitat for humanity-like project to fix up a home in need of repair. See, it’s not really a holiday that can be celebrated like Christmas.

…

Chanukkah is a holiday about fighting assimilation, so it’s sort of weird that a holiday about fighting assimilation has become assimilated in order to be more like the majority holiday close on the calendar. Jews should be proud of the holiday — it’s essentially a story of thanksgiving — and pump up the parts that matter: family, friends, and fried foods.

So, yes to the family, friends, and fried foods.  No to the rest of it.  Which means a really quiet week, holiday-wise.

*******

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.

*******

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.

No Kidding in NZ has done it.  If you’ve read her blog, you know that she always has sound advice up her sleeve.  She pulled together an e-book of thoughts from the blog and quotations and beautiful images.  It’s comfort in paper form.  I especially love the quote about remembering without pain.  You can order the book from that link.

In Quest of a Binky Moongee is looking for a preschool for her twins when she encounters a very strange wording on the application.  The application asks if she is the “natural” parent, and she doesn’t know what to answer after their experience with surrogacy.  “What do we circle? I mean technically I am not my twins’ ‘natural’ parent. And we did need to get step-parent adoption in order for me to be legally their mother. But do we circle Parent/Step-parent? What if they ask us about the ‘natural’ mother?”  It’s a strange wording that people who conceive without difficulty probably don’t think twice about, but it sticks out for anyone who has built their family with assistance.

HopefullyMyLinesNow (old blog, new name) has a post about how pregnancy is different due to so many losses.  She points out all the ways she wanted things to go with pregnancy and the delivery, and how she has had to adapt.  She writes, “Why do I feel compelled not to grieve over all the hopes that won’t be met simply because I’ve known worse grief? I realize that loss has taken so much away from me, and now I’m letting my knowledge and associated guilt force me to adapt in ways I don’t want to adapt.”  It is about the endless act of letting go of (or adjusting) hopes and dreams.

Lastly, Life Without Baby has a post about being sideswiped by sadness when grief comes out of nowhere.  She writes, “The point is that sometimes, even when we’re sure we have it together, even when we’ve done the grief work, even when we’ve cried an ocean and think there’s nothing left to resolve, sometimes we just get sideswiped.”  Go over and join the conversation about your experience.

The roundup to the Roundup: A very quiet Chanukkah.  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 November 30th and December 7th) 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.

I just read about the concept of centireading, reading the same book 100 times.  It’s worth clicking over to that article to understand why a person would read the same book 100 times and what is gained from the experience.  The author gives two examples of centireading, both started for very different reasons and, therefore, the experience is very different for each; implying that there are dozens of reasons for undertaking the endeavour and numerous benefits that can gained depending upon your initial reason.

But I really loved this line: “You can be acquaintances with many books, and friends with a few, but family with only one or two.”

I have one book that is family: The Phantom Tollbooth.  I own about 30 copies, and I have the e-book with me at all times.  I started reading that book when I was six, and I’ve never stopped.  It is the single most important book in my life.

I have books that are between friends and family.  They’re fictive kin.  I haven’t read them 100 times, so they aren’t in the family category, but I’ve read them… a lot.  Like 20, 30, 40 times… a lot.  The Handmaid’s Tale (I like to read it yearly.  No, I’m not sure I’ll read the sequel next fall), Harry Potter (all of them), Candide, The Visit, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

And then there are the good friends, such as The Magicians trilogy, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Narnia books.  And the acquaintances I’d like to be closer with, such as All Our Wrong Todays.  And the acquaintances I’m just happy have come into my life, but I’m probably not going to invest too much in the relationship now that our time together has passed.

But hearing about centireading made me wonder if it’s time to choose a new family member to join The Phantom Tollbooth.  Which book would be worth reading 100 times?

What do you think of this idea?  Is there a book you could read 100 times and be happy you’re doing it each time?

I read this and immediately wanted to do it: take a midlife gap year.  I never took a gap year, going straight from high school to college to grad school to working full-time.  I traveled a lot during that time, but it three-week-long trips; not a gap year.

I sometimes ask Josh if there’s any chance that we’ll live in Oxford for a year.  For a half-year?  A few months?

But then reality kicks in because my life is very different from Caroline Harper’s life.  I have a career, and I love my career.  While I can work from almost anywhere since I work remotely, I still need to have my bum planted in a seat or be available for meetings for the bulk of east coast daytime hours.  There is no natural break in that timeline to slide in a gap year.

There is Josh’s career, the twins’ education, loved ones I want to see on a regular basis.  There is the question of money, the house, the pet.  The friendships, the committees, the communities.  There are a thousand reasons why this isn’t practical or responsible.  Why doing it would bring bigger drawbacks than any lessons gained.

And yet I still see myself hanging out in Oxford, reading a book on a grassy space.

I like the idea of a gap year.  I don’t know if I’d like the consequences of a gap year.  But if I could take one, I’d definitely head to Oxford.

What about you?  Where would you go?

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

*******

I can’t find the blog post right now, but I once wrote that I wanted my eulogy to be, “she was nice.”  I thought that if I could live a life where people walked away saying, “she was nice,” it would have been a life well-lived.  I’m not aiming for brilliant or world-changing or important.  Just nice.

Which is why I was taken aback by Psychology Today’s piece about the dangers of being nice.  Dangers?  How can there be dangers to niceness?  There are dangers to being a pushover or a martyr.  But niceness, in and of itself, doesn’t have dangers, or as Psychology Today puts it: “There are often psychological dangers lurking below that friendly surface, a downside that can take its toll.”

Gulp.

At the end of the long list of problems and advice, the writer asks: “So, are you ready to give up some of your niceness?”  But the answer is no.  I still strive to have people say, “she was nice.”  We can use more nice in the world.

Do you aim to be nice?

*******

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 am going to blow your mind.  At least, my mind was blown when I read this piece on how to make better big decisions.  Like life-changing decisions.  Like family building decisions.

The idea is that when most people sit down to make a decision, they give themselves two choices and then list the pros and cons of each choice.  They go with the option that has the most pros.  THIS is the problem because sometimes things don’t work out as planned.  And then you’re left feeling like you should have made the other choice.  You think that it comes down to the cons you didn’t consider; that there were two roads and you took the wrong one.

But researchers found that the way to make the best decision is to give yourself more alternatives.  More options.  Not just column A or column B, but columns C, D, and E as well.  That if the decision is down to this or that, you’re not being creative enough or thinking deeply through all the possibilities out there.  If you want to be happier with your decision, come up with more options.

According to the New York Times article,

Over the years, Professor Nutt and other researchers have demonstrated a strong correlation between the number of alternatives deliberated and the ultimate success of the decision itself. In one of his studies, Professor Nutt found that participants who considered only one alternative ultimately judged their decision a failure more than 50 percent of the time, while decisions that involved contemplating at least two alternatives were felt to be successes two-thirds of the time.

So how do you come up with the options?  This is a place where three (or more) brains are better than one.  To get more possibilities, ask other people to help you come up with the options.  This is why everyone needs to start a blog; so you have a place to gather these kinds of thoughts.

And then once you have all the options, you make three scenarios for each option: (1) things working out, (2) things not working out, and then (3) things going sideways.  So it’s not pros and cons: it’s stories.

The article continues with other ideas on decision making, and they’re all brilliant.  But that first point?  That first one blew my mind.

P.S. I put his book (Farsighted by Steven Johnson) on my TBR list.  It sounds so good.