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.

I rarely get sick but I had something this week.  The doctor agrees that it was either food poisoning or a GI bug.  Either way, I was in intense pain all day Tuesday to the point where I couldn’t talk.  I considered going to the emergency room, but Josh was at a work event an hour away, and it felt dramatic to call for an ambulance if I could call for an ambulance.  I know, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it was totally reasonable in my altered state.  If I could moan “help” into a phone, it meant I was okay enough to stay home.

We spoke to an urgent care nurse later in the evening, and I panted that the pain ranged from a 7 to a 9.  9 is that point where you fear you will go into cardiac arrest because the pain is crashing over you in waves and you can’t catch your breath.  But I stopped at 9 because there is only one thing I have ever experienced that warranted a 10: my HSG.  That sucker will forever be the pain I measure all other pain by.

The next day, I spoke to the doctor’s assistant who also wanted me to describe the pain.  I once again explained it was between a 7 and a 9, but I felt shy explaining that my HSG was my 10.  But you guys get that pain scale, even if you were lucky enough to have your ink pass through the tube.  There’s something about pain that comes with being raw and emotional on the table that makes it stick in your brain forever.

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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:

• “Female Fatigue” (Family Building with a Twist)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I also had Family Building with a Twist’s post for this week.  She writes about listening to Dr. Ford’s testimony and sums up what so many of us are thinking: “I’m tired of being thought of as nothing more than a uterus with legs whose only worthwhile job is having babies.  I’m tired of being dismissed as inconsequential.  I’m tired of the burden of proof being extraordinary and always on the female victim.”  Yes, yes, and yes.

Life Without Baby applies the concept of Ring Theory to living child-free after infertility.  Though I’d argue that if there’s a partner, they’re also in the center of the ring, she explains the idea: “The rule is that that if people have something mean or insensitive or opinionated to say, they say it to someone on a bigger ring. When speaking to someone on a smaller ring, they can only listen or—if they must say something—offer help, support, or comfort.”  It’s good life advice in general, and it works particularly well here.

Lastly, My Path to Mommyhood laughs at the idea that getting a mortgage is invasive after going through the adoption process.  She outlines all the additional things she needed to produce in order to be eligible to be considered for adoption, and it’s a long list.  Perspective is everything.

The roundup to the Roundup: Still not feeling great.  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 September 28th and October 5th) 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.

First and foremost, even if you don’t plan to click over to read the article itself, click over just to see one of the coolest uses of special effects on a webpage.  I know.  I’m totally distracted by shiny tricks.  And this story is about the shiniest trick of all.

So what if you were given a score — a number like a credit score — but instead of it measuring how responsible you are in paying off purchases, it measured your behaviour.  So you get points for the times you hold open the door for someone and you lose points for the times you cut off someone in traffic.  And the world works exactly as we always claim we want the world to work: the good get rewarded and the bad get punished.

Except, unlike a credit score, which is black-and-white (you’re either on-time with payments or you’re not), behaviour is in the eye of the beholder.  Who decides that holding open the door is a mark of good manners rather than a way of demonstrating control?  Who decides what is polite and what is rude and what is the right thing to do and what is clearly in the wrong?

The article reports:

What may sound like a dystopian vision of the future is already happening in China. And it’s making and breaking lives.  The Communist Party calls it “social credit” and says it will be fully operational by 2020.  Within years, an official Party outline claims, it will “allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”

The system is already in place and it’s mandatory, though it won’t be fully operational for a few more years.  Your score updates in real-time, so there is clear cause and effect — you can trace what you just did to the drop or rise in your social credit score.  Live a decent life and you’re rewarded.  Be a bad citizen and you’re punished.  Again, exactly as we hope life will work.  We want good things to happen to good people and bad things to happen to bad people.  Don’t we?

Except: “Who your friends and family are will affect your score. If your best friend or your dad says something negative about the government, you’ll lose points too. Who you date and ultimately partner with will also affect social credit.”

Of course, as the article points out, I’m seeing this system through American eyes.  And that does carry weight because I have a feeling we may not understand this system in the same way an insider understands the system:

For many in China, privacy doesn’t have the same premium as it does in the West.  The Chinese place a higher value on community good versus individual rights, so most feel that, if social credit will bring a safer, more secure, more stable society, then bring it on.

I already give up my privacy when I participate in social media or walk around outside where there are cameras, so I can’t say that we have the privacy we crave here.

I don’t know how this will unfold when it’s fully implemented.  If other countries will follow suit.

What do you think?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I want to be a librarian when I grow up.  (1) I want to work the scanner.  I volunteered at a library and got to do that, and it was AMAZING.  (2) I want to choose the books.  (3) I want to talk to people about books.  (4) And now, I want to be a library detective.

It started with a thread where people were listing books they sort of remembered but couldn’t name (and clearly wanted to find again) or books they had heard about but hadn’t read yet, and these librarians tracked down the books based on whatever details you could give them.  The thread is still going, and it’s now in the thousands.

This sounds like my ideal job.  It’s like solving a murderless, crimeless mystery; the best sort of mystery for someone squeamish like me.

What do you want to be when you grow up?