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

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ChickieNob was telling Josh about WellieWishers, and he said they sounded horrifying.  So she drew him his very own WellieWisher and slipped it under his blankets so he saw it when he got into bed that night.

Well played, little girl.

He transferred the picture to her room, and the creepy doll picture traveled back and forth between them until I somehow got roped into this when I found it in my underwear drawer.  The only person who refuses to play is the Wolvog, who respectfully removed the WellieWisher from the bathroom so he could brush his teeth in peace.

A simple prank.  Not as good as the ultimate prank.  That was a long joke, considering the set up was in 2013.

Tell me another good prank.

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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.

We went to see The Post and then stopped at a diner to get fries afterward.  While we were driving to the diner, I checked my email on my phone and saw that VOTY (Voices of the Year, in case you haven’t been to the BlogHer conference) winners had been announced.  I’m not going to BlogHer this year, but I usually have a few friends on the VOTY list.  I wanted to send them congratulations in the morning.

But the list description was confusing.  Gwyneth Paltrow and Chelsea Clinton?  Were they having multiple presenters this year?  (For those who haven’t been to BlogHer, a few years ago, they started having a celebrity presenter at VOTY vs having one of us* present.) I clicked on the list and became even more confused.  The honourees were… celebrities for lack of a better word.

They were organizers of the Women’s March like Linda Sarsour.  Or the founder of #metoo, Tarana Burke.  They were Gwyneth and Chelsea and Jodi Kantor from the New York Times.

They weren’t us*.

I keep using that word — *us — and maybe it’s because it gets to the heart of VOTY.  Voices of the Year was the community keynote.  It was a time in the conference when we didn’t have a celebrity or expert tell us how to live or think or feel.  I mean, those main keynotes were great, but this was OUR keynote, the regular blogger’s keynote, and 20 or so women would get up and read a piece that had been chosen by the judges for inclusion.

It was democratic, and I’ve been on both ends of the process.  I had a piece chosen for the second VOTY.  What you can’t see from the video is that I wore the merry widow-like contraption on the stage, and I hiked up the skirt on the other side of the podium when I got to that point in the story.  I was TERRIFIED, but I knew that every single woman in that room would get it.  So I did it.  I was sharing a funny story, but it was also a very emotional story for me because… it was about not feeling like a woman.  Not being able to do this thing that women do.  And trying to take back one tiny piece of control in that situation.  Hearing the reaction from the audience as I read my story made me feel like I was being cushioned by thousands of other women’s hands.  Held up.

And I was a judge for two other VOTYs.  It was an honour that you sometimes got when you were chosen for VOTY — you turned around and got to invite other people into the community keynote.  I read hundreds of posts and marked my favourites, and then got to attend and listen to them aloud.

The community keynote was always the highlight of BlogHer, a true reflection of my daily work at the BlogHer site.  For nine years, I read every post that came into my section and chose the ones to push to the front page.  Most of the time I didn’t know the woman.  They were chosen because they wrote something great and we wanted more people to read it.  But I got to know them because once they were chosen once, they kept coming back and writing other great things.  I met so many people through BlogHer.

BlogHer was — for women — the site where regular people (us) wrote their reaction to the daily news or life events.  It was honest and raw and confessional and conversational.  And then the Internet flooded with similar sites and everything changed.  But I got to be there for nine years, part of this incredible community of women.

There’s this line in The Post where the men are discussing Katharine Graham, and one of them points out that if a person is told they’re incompetent and their voice doesn’t matter enough times, they’ll believe it and it will inform their actions.  Or something like that.  And when we were watching that part of the movie, I was thinking about how Katharine Graham’s story is really every woman’s story.  Girls receive an outsider message over and over again, and it sometimes becomes the way we view our work and our voice and our words.

But BlogHer was a hugely successful space that took back that narrative and said EVERY WOMAN’S WORDS MATTER.  Not just the ones that bubble up to the top and break the surface, becoming newsworthy.  That every single woman, famous or not, has something to say.  And we should all listen.

So if I cried reading the VOTY news, it was because I was thinking about what was lost.  Those women like Gwyneth Paltrow and Chelsea Clinton will continue to have their voices heard, even if they’re not in VOTY.  They’ve broken the surface and become newsworthy.  If SheKnows, who now owns BlogHer, had called it something else, it wouldn’t have bothered me.  But VOTY was the community keynote, a time to celebrate voices that weren’t heard otherwise.

The same night, I read the Washington Post article about how women’s blogs have become a glossy magazine of perfection and sponsored content.  And, yes, there is some truth in that statement when you think about the early days of the Internet when we wrote just because we wanted to write without any understanding of what blogging could be.  But that article missed the fact that the old style of blogging still exists.  Every day I read blogs that are confessional and conversational, with nary a product placement in site.

At the same time, I don’t blame those women who do write sponsored content.  I celebrate them.  Blogging has been a way to make a living, and I am glad they have found a way to be financially compensated for their work.  Some people write because they want to write.  And some people write because they get paid to write.  And both are valid paths to putting words into the universe.  And sometimes they are one and the same; confessional, conversational, and compensated.

I miss the old community.  I also know that a large chunk of the old community is still alive and well because I see them in my blog feed every day.  And I see new people join us, all the time.  I read stories every day that are confessional and conversational, the same as the early days of blogging.

Thank you for keeping it real.  Thank you for continuing to write.  Getting your voice out there is important.  I promise.

I was really proud of myself this week, and since no one in my family is being effusive enough in their praise, I’m turning this over to the Internet.

I had a very clever idea, if I do say so myself, for a book display in the local library.  I asked Josh to tell the librarian my brilliant idea, but he suggested that I go there myself and TALK TO THE LIBRARIAN.  That needs to be in all caps because it is so completely scary that it’s as if he asked me to have a threesome with the clown from It.

I am not good at having conversations with strangers.

But I put on my big girl panties and marched (well, drove) myself to the library, bringing the twins with me for moral support.  I found the librarian and started telling her my plan (which sounded so much better before I had to describe it to someone), and at first she was nodding, confused, but by the end, she was nodding AND smiling AND agreed that my idea was clever.  (If you want to know, it involves tying Korean cookbooks to a play about Korean cooking… it’s a long story.  Trust me, it was clever.)  She is considering it, and promised that she would let us know if she decided to do it.

And then, yes, I am going to take a picture of the book display because I consider it more a paper monument to my bravery.

I spoke to a stranger, and I lived to tell the tale.  My nervous system was only buzzing for… oh… three hours afterward.  A win!

P.S. This is the part where you say, “Wow, Melissa, that was really brave.  That sounds just as scary as that video of the snake swimming around with the decapitated fish head.”

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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:

• “#MicroblogMondays: Heinz 57” (The Road Less Travelled)
• “How Time Moves Differently When You Don’t Have Children” (Life Without Baby)
• “Violet” (Travelcraft Journal)
• “Hiding Out” (Searching for Our Silver Lining)
• “Grieving My Dog & Questioning Fertility Clinics” (Infertile Phoenix)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Countingpinklines has a post about a lesson learned from infertility.  She begins musing on the acceptance you get from other people in the community who just get it (vs. stuff she was reading on STFU, Parents) and she writes, “I’d like to think that this is one positive thing that I’ve gotten from the last several years – there is not really one sole path to happiness or fulfillment. That and life throws a lot of stuff at you and sometimes all you can do is just grit your teeth and survive.”  Love it.

Unpregnant Chicken is celebrating her book launch; a children’s book explaining assisted conception.  That sounded very clinical, so I’ll let her speak instead: “Lucas wonders what it takes to make a baby. Mommy tells him that babies are made with a sperm and an egg but that some babies, like him, take extra. But what does it mean to be ‘extra’? This question launches Lucas into a day full of discovery.”  It sounds (and looks) very cute AND helpful.

The OCD Infertile had a bleeding scare, that luckily turns out to be okay, but I love the way she describes her state of pregnancy after infertility: “I longed to be a part of this ‘pregnant’ club but now that I am here I still don’t feel like I fit in because of the baggage I carry in with me. Like the Campetts moving to Beverly Hills. Here I come, with my rusted truck and rocking chair on the roof and lots of non-designer labeled baggage filled with all of my pain, fear, and past heartbreak.”  This is it — she captures it perfectly.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ writes about the New Zealand Prime Minister, who didn’t have children but has since announced her pregnancy.  I love this post for her response at the end.  Her SIL is complaining that the PM kept her pregnancy a secret during the election, and Mali responds: “Well, isn’t it good that you’re not a New Zealander!”  It may need to be tweaked when I encounter whining in the future from those outside a community, but I’m totally borrowing a version of that.

The roundup to the Roundup: Super brave, right?  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 January 19th and 26th) 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.

Not to get self-helpy — except that I am going to get self-helpy — but so many of the thoughts in this article resonated with me.  I didn’t agree with all of the advice, but there was enough here to highlight that I started pulling out my favourite quotes.  They all seemed like good guides for 2018; moreover because the article was this random piece that popped into my feed — not something I’d normally read — as if the Internet was trying to send me a message.

• “Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.”  Um, yes, a thousand times, yes.  What else could drive action beyond desire?  Certainly not hope that feels like someone giving you a hug when you’re down, telling you to hang in there because things might go your way.  Desire makes you lace up the proverbial sneakers, right?
• “Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”  The idea of directing your sleeping brain is really really really enticing.
• “Once you get process-oriented, as opposed to results-oriented, you realize you too can achieve amazing results. The process, or your behavior, is completely within your control.”  The results, of course, are not.  But the process is, and that’s important to remember.
• “Quantity is the most likely path to quality. The more you produce, the more ideas you will have — some of which will be innovative and original. And you never know which ones will click. You just keep creating.”  Enough said.

So, figuring out your desire, telling your brain to imagine achieving that desire, focusing on the process instead of the result, and trying a lot with the understanding that each try is a chance to get to that desire.  Hello, 2018.  I really am going to be become a mermaid this year.  Success will be miiiiiiiiiiine…

In all seriousness, what is the best advice you’ve gotten in the last year?

We were talking about toys that could give you nightmares, and suddenly an image of a Koosa popped into my brain.  I’m not talking about the stuffed zucchini dish.  I’m talking about the Cabbage Patch Kid/animal hybrids that haunted the 80s.

Up until this week, I had completely forgotten about the existence of Koosas.  I apologize if YOU also had cleared your mind of Koosas and I’m now stuffing them back in your brain by writing about them.

Anyway, we had one that was like… half wolf, half boy… It’s like South Park’s Man Bear Pig, only with less blood and more loops of yarn hair.

I don’t remember how Koosas fit into the larger Cabbage Patch Kid universe. I kept it on the shelf across from my bed, but I needed to tuck it behind other toys so its unblinking eyes didn’t stare at me while I tried to fall asleep.

What was your scariest toy from childhood?