I worry.  A lot.  I like to share those worries with Josh.  A lot.  John Mulaney has a joke about why he married a Jewish woman.  “With Jewish women, you do not have to guess what they are thinking
They will tell you.”  I like to tell Josh things; the things inside my head.

But I really do like this idea from Forbes about creating a “to worry about” list throughout the day, and then setting aside time for the worrying when it’s convenient.  It’s pretty simple:

Make an ongoing list of things that you need to worry about … Designate a time to sit down and review the list. When you do, you’ll realize most of it was nonsense. However, there will be a few points on there that require your attention. Instead of ruminating, make an action plan to address or resolve what’s bothering you.

I have this on-going “happy” list that I started because Mo Gawdat told me to start this list when I was reading Solve for Happy.  Putting things on my happy list makes me happy.  I like lists, and getting to write down pleasurable things is really pleasurable.  I am very specific: “I am happy when I’m eating a good cucumber (not the sour, yellow, malafafonny types)” — malafafon is Hebrew for cucumber, and I associate a certain type of disappointing cucumber that I once purchased at a shuk with that word — or “I am happy when I find something that was missing” or “I am happy when I think about the possibility of one day having my very own puffin!” or “I am happy when I am 100% certain that a space is cricket-free.”

It feels good when I put a new item on that list.  I wonder if it will feel equally good to write out my worries on a daily basis and then reflect on them during a set time.

I guess I’m going to find out.  Come with me on an adventure where I write out all of my concerns in a single space and then read the list over and over again…

Do you keep a happy list?  Do you keep a worry list?

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

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“The instinct to gossip has been with us ever since there were more human beings than Adam and Eve. Once you went beyond the first two, there was gossip.”

I normally love gossip — at least in the form of People magazine — though I’ve gotten more sensitive to it in this past year.  There’s something about unnamed sources coupled with the age of manipulated news that sours me even to the most innocuous stories.  But it is so hard to tear myself away from celebrity stories.  Plus… it’s sort of sociology if you look at it the same way as this WashPo article:

Lui, 44, is a gossip evangelist. She believes in its value and its power: As a communication tool, a collective finger on the pulse of our culture, a means of sussing out our morals, our insecurities, our aspirations, our fears. She’s part investigative reporter, part breaking-news ethicist, part social anthropologist.

What do you think our gossip scene is saying about us as a people right now?

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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.

“The architecture of social media exploits our sense of right and wrong, reaping profit from the pleasure we feel in expressing righteous outrage.”

–“How Social Media Exploits Our Moral Emotions”

That was going to be the whole post, full stop.  But I suppose I should unpack the fact that if someone is deriving pleasure in expressing their righteous outrage, someone else is feeling drained from that very same exchange.  It’s not that I want people to stop.  I think the outrage, many times, is justified and necessary.  But it affects us.  Sometimes the emotional cost is the equivalent to a nickel and other times it’s equivalent to a dollar, but there are always emotional costs.  Twitter may be free to access, but it still costs you something.

But.

I don’t feel that way about blogs.  I go on blogs and read opinions, and I don’t walk away drained.  I walk away sometimes Googling for more information or disagreeing or nodding my head.  Posts stay with me for hours, but they don’t gnaw at me.

I wonder if I’d feel the same way if Facebook just let everything flow past me.  If I didn’t feel like my feed was being manipulated to see more (and more and more) of one thing.  If it didn’t feel so curated.  Blogs, at least the ones I read, still feel raw, like they did at the beginning.  We may have gotten a little fancier with our layouts, but the general content still veers towards understanding how someone is processing the world as opposed to absorbing the world.

I miss my feed reader being as full as my Facebook feed.

My cousin talked me into my second audio book.  I don’t normally do audio books because I have a terrible attention span.  I get through about five minutes of concentrating on the story.  Then I start daydreaming, and a few minutes pass and I realize I haven’t been listening at all.  Books — unlike news podcasts — require you to listen closely and keep details in your head.  The only audio book I’ve ever gotten through was Barrel Fever by David Sedaris, and Josh and I listened to it as we drove through Canada.  That was 18 years ago.

But she told me that I would love Alan Cumming’s book as an audio book, and she’s totally correct.  He’s a great storyteller, and hearing the book aloud is similar to hearing a Spaulding Gray monologue.  Plus it’s a great story; a heartbreaking one, but I’m riveted listening to him talk about his father.

Especially close to Father’s Day.

It has made me reconsider audio books.  Not all the time, but I think I’ll check out another one when I finish this one.

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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:

• “What I Learned — Microblog Monday” (Pages, Stages, and Rages)

Okay, now my choices this week.

NotMyLinesYet has a moving post containing a letter to her children who aren’t here.  She writes, “When we cremated the girls, DH and I wrote each one a letter that was cremated with her. I realized today while I was taking a walk that I wanted to do the same for the six babies we didn’t even get to cremate.”  It’s a beautiful letter and a moving way of honouring those lives.

Much Ado About Nothing has a post about friendships told in tiny vignettes.  The friends who slip out of our lives and realizing that she has been living with her best friend all along… It’s just a really good post.

Lastly, Dubliner in Deutschland has a post about her transversary (her transfer anniversary).  It’s a great post because we rarely know at the time that we’re living the most monumental moments of our lives.  And this ordinary transfer plus the row over where to eat and the emotion of the day resulted in her daughter.  I smiled through the whole post knowing the end of the story.

The roundup to the Roundup: Trying audio books.  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 June 8th and 15th) 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.

We went to the beach.  The first day was perfect.  Blue skies, no clouds despite a weather report that promised rain, constant breeze to keep the beach from getting too warm.  We read books and napped in the sun.  It was really perfect.

The second day was grey and overcast.  It drizzled on and off, drops here and there that made you wonder if you should continue to sit or make a run for the car.  But we were trying to stick it out and end on a high note when a group set up next to us.

As in, right next to us.  On an enormous, semi-empty beach, they set up a few feet away.  There were seven people, all in their mid-twenties.  The first thing I noticed were the Trump bumper stickers covering their cooler.  Then I saw the speaker they brought for blasting music on the quiet beach.  Then the stockpile of alcohol they brought to the alcohol-free beach.  The anti-gun control t-shirts.  And finally, when one took off his t-shirt, the neo-Nazi tattoo.

Josh and I looked at each other, and then I stood up and started packing our things, telling the kids that we were getting going.  It was an hour before we were planning on leaving, but it’s almost as if our minds all arrived in the same place at the same time.  We didn’t talk about it until we got in the car.

We did the right thing for ourselves in the moment, though we talked through the rest of the options in the car.  We could have ignored the group.  We could have confronted the group.  We could have moved down the beach.  But something told us to get out of there.  Call it Gavin de Becker’s “gift of fear,” but something in our subconscious told us to take our kids and go.  So I have zero regrets over leaving the beach.

But I’m curious over what others would have done.  You?