There is a word in Japanese for the act of buying books that you don’t read: tsundoku.  I love that this word exists because buying books I don’t read is the one wasteful thing I do without an ounce of guilt.  I wring by hands over a leaf of uneaten lettuce, but I buy e-books willy nilly.  I buy paper books without a care in the world.  I like words, even the ones I don’t consume.  I’m okay with the books that go unread.

And I like that the article points out that “while this might sound like tsundoku is being used as an insult, Prof Gerstle said the word does not carry any stigma in Japan.”

Because it shouldn’t.

I always have the intention of reading the book when I make the purchase.  It’s usually a very immediate need with the thought that I will start the book after I complete the one I’m reading.

Patrick Melrose is a case in point.  I purchased it in Edinburgh, marveling that the Edward St. Aubyn books cost a lot less in the UK than they do in America.  I am ravenous to read these books.  BUT.  They are still sitting unread on my side table because two books I was waiting for at the library came available, so I had to read those first.  And I still need to read the third book in the trilogy I was reading before I left for Scotland.  So Patrick Melrose is still unread, though I have high hopes that I’ll get to him soon.  Though sometimes the whim to read something never comes back even though it was strong when I made the purchase.

Still, I’ll never regret owning a very inexpensive copy of Patrick Melrose.  Even if I never learn the ins and outs of his heroin addiction.

I’ve never counted the unread books, but I assume they number close to 100 at this point.  Maybe more?  We have a lot of bookcases.

Do you engage in tsundoku?  What is one of your current unreads?

I’m currently lamenting the fact that I do not live in London because the people who make the BBC Sherlock Homes show made an escape game.  (Wait, does this mean there may be a fifth season?)  It sounds like more than one room — like you run around the city, going to various locations from the show, to solve the crime.  I am jeaaaaaaaaaloooooooous.

Londeners, please go on this for me and let me live vicariously through you.

The UK gets everything good.  You get Sherlock games.  You get better chocolate, better television shows, AND the Jasper Fforde book I want to read is coming out in the UK in August but won’t be published in the US until February.  These are all tempting reasons to move across the pond.

*******

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:

• “Guest Post: My Cathartic Moment Captured” (The Childless Life)
• “The Life I Thought I’d Have” (My Path to Mommyhood)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Yes, you see it above, but I read it this week because it was posted on Friday… My Path to Mommyhood has a bittersweet post about the life she thought she would have.  A woman from her tap class was talking about house hunting and outlines the way she thinks her life will play out.  She writes, “But it has put me in a bit of a funk hearing that on replay in my mind since last night, because once upon a time I felt that way too — so sure of how things would work out.”  You hope it does for your friends (or even acquaintances), but at the same time, it stings knowing that you didn’t get the life you thought you’d have.  Jess brilliantly captures the tiny ways that plays out in her world.  And I had chills reading these lines: “I wept for the mother trapped inside me who will only ever parent indirectly, sideways. I wept for the life I thought I’d have.”

Bereaved and Blessed has a post about the theme of missed opportunities that runs through her grief.  This week, it looped through the death of an old friend, one that happened four years ago, but she only discovered it recently.  She is stunned to learn about it via social media when she clicked on his wall to find out how he was.  She explains: “That said, how did I manage to not visit his timeline or notice he wasn’t showing up in my news feed for over 4 years?  It happens, especially when we connect/reconnect with a lot of people online, both old friends and family, as well as develop new relationships with those we meet in person or find we have shared interests.”  It’s about the flaws of social media — that curated feed that doesn’t always let you know as much as you think it’s letting you know — but it’s also the story of an old friend.

One Step at a Time has a moving post about the good and the bad while she processes her husband’s stroke.  The good people who cross her path, making things a little bit easier.  The bad that happens because you’re making quick choices with your mind somewhere else.  It’s a very powerful post about your world being blown apart and the people (and objects) who help you hold it together.

Lastly, Searching for Our Silver Lining has a happy post that she could have never imagined when she was in the throes of infertility.  She captures a very sweet moment between two sets of twins: the ones who triggered her own desire for parenthood and the ones who made her a mother.

The roundup to the Roundup: The UK gets everything good.  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 July 27th and August 3rd) 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 am a huge fan of bullet journals.  I keep two of them.  People asked last week how I set up mine.  Here is how I organize my two bullet journals.

Work

One is for work.  It has a very simple set up.  The first page is information I need to know quickly, such as the optimal image dimensions for a Facebook ad or the conference line number for a bi-weekly call.

The next page starts the actual journal.  If I have something to say — and only if I have something to say — I write the date and the event:

7/29/18  Call with Jane

Then, underneath that, I take notes during my call with Jane.  If Jane asks me to do anything, I put an empty box on the left side of a new line and write the task:

When I take care of that task, I check the box.

If I have another meeting, I write the date again (even if it’s the same day), any details about the meeting (“weekly meeting with IAC”), and then any notes during the meeting or any tasks.  If it’s a task that I want to take care of at some point but isn’t something I’m tackling any time soon, I’ll use a circle instead of a square.

I take care of work tasks quickly, so the most I need to do is flip back a day or two and see if there are any open squares (tasks) to tackle.  I always carry the notebook with me — even when I leave the house.

Personal

But the bullet journal that is more of a traditional bullet journal is my normal, personal bullet journal that I call Charlotte.  I love Charlotte.  The twins know that if I write down a task in Charlotte, it is as good as done.  If I don’t write it down in Charlotte, well… you’re taking your chances.

Charlotte begins with a few special pages:

1. 1. Carried Over: this is similar to the first page in the work journal except the information is stuff that I always forget.  For instance, I always forget the name of the poet Simon Armitage.  So I have Simon Armitage written on that first page.  When I invariably forget his name and it’s bothering me, I turn to that first page and say, “Oh!  Simon Armitage!  Right.”  That section is currently five pages long.  It has stuff that I always want to be able to access quickly and remember, either because I forget it constantly or it’s just good info to know.  It’s called “Carried Over” because I carry it over to each new journal, recopying it and adding anything important from the last journal.  I will not add to it again until the next time I start a journal, so however many pages it ends up being is how much room it needs to be.
   2. To Be Read: this is a two-page spread for books I hear about that I want to read.  I sometimes download a sample from the book into iBooks so I can try it out before buying or borrowing it.  But these pages are for times when the book isn’t out yet and I don’t want to miss it when it’s released.  All I write down is the title and last name of author.
   3. Reading List: these are books I’ve read during the duration of the journal, and I leave three pages.  I am usually starting a new journal during a random month of the year, so I just begin this list by saying how many books I’ve read that year to date and then the names of the last two or three so the lists fit together if I flip through old journals.  So the new page looks like this: I’ve read 15 books so far in 2018 plus these two…
      
   4. Names I Like: a list of names I like.  I only give myself one page, but I make it a double column.
   5. Key: a place to jot down what every symbol means.  Do I really need this page?  No.  But I leave it there in case I need an extra space to jot down something important in the future.  I use three symbols:
      
      The box means that it’s a task.  The dot means that it’s a thought or idea or comment about my day.  The worried face means it’s something I’m worried about so I can take it out of my head.  I’ll use these symbols later when we get to the daily entries.
   6. Things I Want: I don’t really need this page.  But I keep writing down things that I would like to purchase one day but don’t need urgently.  Like a song that I hear and like.  I almost never purchase anything off this list.

Okay, now this is where the real bullet journal begins…

Each month begins with a miscellaneous page:

It’s a place to put stuff that I’ll need to find again quickly, but not things that I need to find forever.  So… examples would be blood test results.  I want to find them again quickly, but they’re only important until the next blood test.  So I put things like that on there, and these are the only page I look at when I create the “Carried Over” pages in the next journal.  I grab anything important and evergreen from these pages and move them to the Carried Over list.

Next, I line the page with the date and day of the week:

Each day, I write one sentence about my day.  Whatever I can fit on that line.  It may be profound.  It may be boring.  But it’s a memory from that day, so I usually write it before I go to bed.

At the bottom of that diary spread (because it usually runs a line or two onto the next page), I add any long-term projects.  Tasks that don’t have a due date, but whenever I can get around to them, I’ll get around to them.  There are usually eight or so things on that list.  Some remain on there month after month.

So after those pages, I start my general journaling on a new page.  (Remember, each month gets a miscellaneous page, a two page diary spread, and then however many pages are needed for general journaling.)

There is only an entry if I have something to jot down: a task (with a box to the left), a thought (with a dot to the left), or a worry (with a worried face to the left).  So an entry may look like this:

So tasks, reminders, notes, great quotes — anything I want to remember.  Sometimes days will go by without an entry (though I always write something in the one-sentence, diary spread section).

At the end of the month, I make a new miscellaneous page for the next month, a new one-sentence calendar spread (two pages) for the next month, and then recopy all outstanding checkboxes from the last month so I can see a critical mass of tasks that still need to be done and assign them to the first day of the month in the general journaling section.

And that’s how I bullet journal.

We’re watching Sherlock with the twins, and we’ve moved into the fourth (and final?) season.  Before we started the first episode, the Wolvog asked me a question about it, and I shrugged saying, “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” he asked, looking back at the screen.  “But you’ve already seen this.”

I have but I don’t remember any of it, so it feels like I’m seeing it for the first time.  Or… it’s actually more enjoyable, like seeing a puzzle come together again.  As each piece moves into place, you see the picture emerge that you remember liking once upon a time.  I only re-watch shows and re-read books that I enjoyed the first time around.

In the explore/exploit continuum, I am far on the exploit side.  It doesn’t feel like a waste of time because I’ll always find things I missed the first time encountering the show or book, AND I know I’ll like it because I liked it before.  I just don’t remember it.

There was an Atlantic piece last week on how the way we consume television or books or movies actually leads us to forget more of it.  Knowing you can see it again (or read it again) makes our brain less likely to hold onto it:

Research has shown that the internet functions as a sort of externalized memory. “When people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself,” as one study puts it … You don’t need to remember a quote from a book if you can just look it up. Once videotapes came along, you could review a movie or TV show fairly easily.

So my brain doesn’t retain the facts of Sherlock (or even basic stuff like who is still alive in the fourth season) because it knows it can rewatch Sherlock as many times as I wish.  Even stuff that is a one-time-only viewing (such as a Fathom Event) isn’t retained because we’ve told our brains that they don’t have to remember the details, it just needs to remember where to find it again.

It’s a really cool article on memory and what you can do if you want to retain more facts about Sherlock.  Which, clearly, I don’t because it makes for a more enjoyable second (or third or fourth) viewing experience.

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

*******

There was a statement made in one of the Second Helpings on the last Roundup that I can’t stop thinking about.  The person said that they always order what they want in a restaurant and never look at the cost.  They go to restaurants within their price range, and once they’re there, they allow themselves whatever they want to eat, even if it’s the most expensive item they’re considering getting.

This isn’t how I order at all.

I only look at menu prices after I’ve narrowed down what I want to eat.  I’m a vegetarian so my meal is rarely expensive in comparison to the other things on the menu, but if one pasta option costs $11 and another costs $16, I’ll go with the $11 one.  Even if I sort of wanted the $16 one more.  Mostly because once I put it in terms of “do I want this enough to warrant the extra $5?” the answer is usually no.

If it was yes, I would get it.  But it rarely is.

Do you look at prices in restaurants that you can generally afford?

*******

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.