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

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I didn’t hear about hygge until hygge was everywhere, so I am especially excited that I heard about ikigai before it jumped the shark.  What is ikigai, you ask?

It’s the newest addition to our trend of borrowing ideas from other cultures without paying an iota of attention to other elements of the culture that support and nurture the idea.  Fun!

Your ikigai is your “reason to jump out of bed each morning.”  Or “the intersection of what you are good at and what you love doing.”  You find your ikigai by doing four things: (1) making a list of everything you love doing, (2) making a list of everything you are good at doing, (3) making a list of profitable skills — things you know how to do that you can get paid to do, and (4) making a list of what the world needs.  Where do all of those lists overlap?

At first I thought my ikigai was going to be writing, but I think it’s actually somewhere between disseminating ideas and pollinating thoughts.

What is your ikigai?  And are you in the correct profession for your ikigai?

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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.

There was a Carolyn Hax column this week that resonated so deeply that I left it starred in my inbox so I could keep thinking about it everyday.  The situation didn’t fit my life, but the advice was spot-on… well… for everyone.

The question was about a person who sabotaged his/her brother’s relationship because he/she was jealous.  Things weren’t going well in the asker’s life, so he/she made up a story that the brother’s girlfriend was cheating on him.  It was quickly apparent that it was a lie, and now everything was awkward between them.  The question asker wanted to know how to make things okay between the asker and his/her sibling again.

She explains the root cause of jealousy using a line from Silence of the Lambs — “We covet what we see.”  She explains: “We see people right next to us and interpret their lives as basically the same as ours except better.”  I added the italics because that was the line that made me think all week.  “Basically the same as ours except better.”  Meaning, the other person has no problems, no shortcomings, no struggle.

They’re Melissa without all of Melissa’s challenges.  Except… of course… they’re not.

As Carolyn points out later in the column: “If you hadn’t met her to use for comparison, your eyes might well have rested on another life to covet, someone else to resent as a handy vessel for your general, harder-to-resolve anger at life.”

It’s such an interesting way of looking at jealousy, to know that if it wasn’t this person, it would be someone else.  They are just the vessel, and like other inanimate vessels, we don’t really consider its back story beyond thinking about its usage.  The other person is reduced to the situation or object you covet, their personal story stripped away until they are no different than the drinking glasses in a kitchen cabinet.  Merely vessels to hold water… or our feelings.

It’s a baby-filled world, which is a good thing.  The alternative is the destruction of the human race, so I’ll take my dose of infancy for the good of society as a whole.  But sometimes I need to take that jealousy and pour it into looking at puppies on Petfinder.  Whatever gets you through coveting what you see.

Hey.  Maybe you’ve been thinking that you want to learn programming basics; things like conditionals, variables, or arrays.  Or maybe you have a kid, and you want them to learn how to program.  Or maybe you’re staring down summer, wondering how you are going to fill the brains in your household.  Or maybe you’re a teacher looking for something to recommend students.  Let’s just leave it at that there are a lot of scenarios where you will be happy with the following news.

The twins’ book is the deal of the day over on the Manning site beginning at midnight tonight and running all day Saturday.  Ta da!  If you click on that link right now, you are going to see other books.  But if you click Saturday morning, you will see their happy little programming-for-beginners book on sale.

Please help them pass along word via your social channels.  Post it on Facebook, email it to a friend, post it on your school listserv.

They will answer any questions that pop up as you (or the person you recommended it to) reads the book.  Just send them my way, and I’ll make sure they answer.  So it’s like ordering a book AND getting your own, personal programming tutor.  You can’t beat that, right?

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It’s Friday the 13th.  I don’t know why I have a compulsive need to always point that out when the Roundup falls on the 13th.

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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:

• “Squawk Box: Infertility was the Easy Part” (Unpregnant Chicken)
• “An Easter Note to Self” (Infertilityhonesty)
• “Sitting and Thinking” (The Barrenness)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Torthúil is writing a series of posts for her five year blogoversary, and the first looks at the last five years through the lens of her fertility clinic.  It’s not a happy place, though she lists a good memory or two.  “I was trying to think the other day if I have any happy memories whatsoever of The Fertility Clinic. There’s really only one, and that was when I picked up my drugs for IVF.”  It’s precious, as she says at the end, to have a blog and all of the memories from the past five years contained in one place.

A Dozen Years has a post about the prenatal depression.  She is currently pregnant after infertility, and she writes about her struggle with depression during the first trimester.  She explains that she was already prone for depression and coming into pregnancy from a stressful period.  “That combination of traits makes me a pretty likely candidate for something called Prenatal Depression. An obvious diagnosis with a pretty unmistakable meaning. And I had crashed head-on into it.”  This post should be required reading, and I’m so glad she’s doing better.

Lastly, Anabegins writes about the realization that she has changed over the years, despite thinking at first that it was just appearances that were different.  She’s not the same person that she was six years ago.  I love the moment that it dawns on her: “But even being able to articulate what I am working on is a huge HUGE step forward from the constant chaos of anxiety and overwhelm I was dealing with back then.”  It’s a great post about pausing and reflecting on the ways you have changed over the years.

The roundup to the Roundup: The twins’ book is the deal of the day on the Manning site.  It’s Friday the 13th.  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 April 6th and 13th) 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.

When we went to Montreal, we packed two suitcases.  We checked the larger one and took the smaller one as a carry-on.  The small suitcase contained our toothbrushes and toothpaste, one complete outfit for each person, and our pyjamas.  If the main suitcase got lost, we bought ourselves at least 24 hours without losing anything from our trip.  Hopefully enough time to be reunited with the main case.

I thought I was brilliant for doing that.

I’m probably not, but we’ve been compiling travel hacks like that because we have a bunch of big trips coming up.  My favourite so far has been tips from the CIA.  95% of the statements in the article make me feel as if I am going to be attacked anywhere I go at any moment.  But one idea is brilliant: “What does a CIA agent always pack for a trip? A doorstop. When you lock yourself into your hotel room at night, slip the doorstop under the door to keep intruders from being able to force the door open. The doorstop is effective even when the chain or other external locks give way.”

Isn’t that brilliant?  And scary?  But also brilliant?

On a less scary note, I’ve been collecting disposable shower caps to place shoes inside (so the dirty bottoms aren’t touching the clothes in the suitcase).  And I’m totally mesmerized by videos like the one below.  Who does this?

Do all of your clothes come out wrinkled?  I can’t imagine that they aren’t wrinkled or creased when you unroll them.  If you promise me that they look okay after being rolled up like that for a week, I’ll do it.

And what are your best travel hacks?

There was a great article about adult resilience recently in the Washington Post; namely, “whole-life resilience, that ability to bounce back when upsetting or stressful things happen.”  The author was talking about ways he tried to wrap his brain around normal, everyday stress, though once he dipped into the Pain Olympics, my brain instantly turned to infertility and loss.

He tells the story of a person who goes to a hospital waiting room when she needs to gain some perspective on her own problems.  She looks at the people waiting and realizes that whatever she’s dealing with isn’t as bad.

The author points out that we can’t minimize our own emotional suffering just by pointing out that we would be feeling worse if we were in that person’s position.  We have no clue how we would deal with their pain because it’s their pain.  And, frankly, we have no clue what other factors are at play with their stress or situation.

He writes, “Who gets to judge another person’s suffering? Aren’t there degrees of it that are relative to an individual’s own experience? Does someone really suffer less just because his life has been less fraught, say, with poverty or extreme trauma? ”

He goes on to dissect one of Viktor Frankl’s ideas, stating: “Even small-scale suffering shouldn’t be dismissed outright: It may look like nothing to an outsider, but to someone who is hurting, it can fill all their emotional space.”

Fill all their emotional space.

Isn’t that a perfect description of it?  Regardless of your infertility situation, it’s filling your emotional space.  It coats each one of us evenly inside, even if the amount may be different if poured into another vessel.

But that’s sort of the point.  It can’t be poured into another vessel.  You get your own liquid filling your own emotional space when the stressors pour inside.

An interesting take on the Pain Olympics.