The Guardian recently had an article about the Scottish island of Eigg.  I am a sucker for all things island-related; the more remote and bleaker, the better.  I’m not against Bora Bora, but my heart starts pulsing like a homing beacon when I see pictures of underpopulated, craggy settings.  I love grey rocks and I cannot lie.

The article opens:

Small islands are like celebrities: they loom far larger than their actual size, they are pored over by visitor-fans and they become public possessions, laden with reputations and attributes they may or may not embody.

Yesssssssssss.

(And it feels pretty damn accurate when I think about my favourite celebrities.  They’re less of the Bora Bora variety; a little more off-the-beaten path and therefore remote, with dark, bleak hearts.)

But there is more:

Fredrik Sjöberg, an author I visited on the tiny Swedish island of Runmarö, believes small islands possess “a peculiar attraction for men with a need for control and security” because “nothing is so enclosed and concrete as an island”.

Ooooh, you had me at control. I loooooooooove being in control.

And:

The literary academic Peter Conrad offers a more Freudian interpretation, suggesting that an island is a “uterine shelter” surrounded, like the foetus, by fluid, and attracting men in search of a mother or a primal source of safety.

Oh. Yuck. You totally had me celebrity swooning and control and then lost me the second you brought fictive pregnancy into it.

Let’s brush that last one under the rug, shall we?

It’s actually a fantastic article about an island community that bought itself, about ownership and freedom.  Our fears about islands and the reality of those spaces.

I think there really are two kinds of people in this world: those drawn to small islands and those who prefer mainland.  In my heart, I’m an islander living on mainland.  What are you?

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

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If I really love a show, I’ll go and see it multiple times.  I know there are people who love theater because of its fleeting nature, but I am someone who likes to re-read books and re-watch movies.  The idea that something exists only for a short period of time and then disappears forever makes me anxious.

I combat that feeling by seeing the same play multiple times.  I recently did that with a play I liked — Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights — and I meant to see a third time before it was gone forever.  (Yes, I know they’re making it into a film, and there may be other productions in the future, but this particular one will be gone forever.)  But it’s totally sold out, and I have a busy week.  So no extra show for me.  It makes me really sad to think that once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Do you like fleeting things like theater or do you prefer more permanent mediums like movies?

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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 was trying to fill out a form in Hebrew recently, and it asked me for a bunch of names.  While you use a normal last name configuration for secular things like banking or mail, you use a lineage configuration in religious situations.  The formula: Name, daughter/son of Name and Name.  That name never changes, even if you change your last name with marriage.

While I clearly know all of my siblings’ names and a few other people’s names off the top of my head, I have to look up everyone else or ask them.  No problem: I had a ton of names written down in our wedding program.

Let’s start by saying that while I remember that the program was a little on the long side, I hadn’t seen it in 16 years.  Josh and I both fell over laughing when we pulled it out of the storage file.  First of all, it was BOUND.  It had so many pages — 22 in total — that our wedding program needed to be bound.  Next, it went into ridiculously minute detail on not only every aspect of the ceremony as well as our feelings and thoughts on every aspect of the ceremony BUT it also included ridiculously minute details about everything that happened OUTSIDE of the ceremony.  Like stuff we did the week before.

But the worst… the absolute worst… it was written so earnestly, so passionately, that we barely stopped short of rubbing each other verbally with goose fat.

Who were these assholes who used to inhabit our body? What made them think printing a 22-page program would be a good idea?

So we want to apologize to everyone who attended our wedding. And we promise: our next life-cycle event program will be brief. Definitely under 16 pages. We clearly learned our lesson.

You get to hear my annoyance because the store in this story requires you to create an account in order to leave them a message online.  And I’m not creating an account.

So.

I received an email from a bookstore telling me that best selling hardcovers were 30% off.  Click “see all” to see the list of books.  I think I will.

So I clicked “see all” and saw that — WHAT? — John Green’s new book was on the list and was 30% off.*

Awesome.  I’ll just run over to the bookstore and buy John Green’s new book.

So I go into the bookstore and pick up the book.  I take it to the counter to pay.  The cashier charges me the full amount.  No, I tell her, look at this email on this handy little smartphone I have in my pocket.  This is YOUR email stating that the book is 30% off.  She could see it, but she wouldn’t honour it because it was not coming up that way in her machine.

So I left the store without the new John Green book because there are other bookstores in town and while the errand was now a waste of my time and energy, there was the principle of the situation.  I’m not going to reward a store for falsely advertising a product.

I looked on my phone and saw a nearby store was selling it at 20% off the cover price.  I walked over to said store and — lo and behold — it was there at 20% off, just as they stated.  So I bought the book.  Errand redeemed.

What is the point of all of this?  That John Green has a new book out.  And if stores are going to advertise, they need to honour their advertisements.  And that it’s easier to be cranky about false advertising than everything truly awful happening in the world right now.

* Yes, I just took screenshots of the email and the website because I’m that cranky right now.  I am right.  They are wrong.

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It’s Friday the 13th.  I have this compulsive need to type that every time 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:

• “Strengthening the Ghosts” (My Path to Mommyhood)
• “What Adds Dimension to My Life” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “How Do You Say ‘Thank You’ to Someone You Never Met?” (Inconceivable!)
• “Roadtrip: Ottawa” (The Road Less Travelled)
• “#World Childless Week Day 4 Words that Hurt” (Infertilityhonesty)
• “The Consequence of Intimacy” (Stirrup Queens) — Thank you, Katherinea12!
• “The Snake Bite of Death” (Stirrup Queens)
• “What Will They Think of Me?” (Stirrup Queens)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Searching for Our Silver Lining has a post about the “I’ll nevers” we make when we are in crisis.  As she admits: “I made a lot of statements and promises about how life would be one day when I was no longer in the trenches.”  She recounts a particularly trying day and says, “A big part of it was the guilt I faced as I could literally see the 2012 Cristy, with all the ‘I’ll nevers’ that I swore up and down not to do staring me in the face.”  This post.  That’s all I’ll say: this post.  Read it.

My Path to Mommyhood has a post about the often-used phrase “as a mother.”  But it’s not what you think.  It’s about the one time… maybe ever?… a person has caught themselves and corrected themselves in the moment, realizing their feelings maybe came from something larger than this one role.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled has a post about buying diapers for her SIL’s niece.  What I thought was most interesting was the different feelings she and her husband experienced in the moment.  You’ll have to click over and read to the end to discover their reactions.

The roundup to the Roundup: Sharing my annoyance.  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 October 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.

I started re-reading the Magicians trilogy as a mind cleanser while I plow through a family-building-themed book (that, yes, I will need to discuss afterward because I have big feelings from it).  I keep thinking about a moment that occurs towards the end of the third book.  This is NOT a spoiler.

In The Magician’s Land, Quentin enters a library that contains a strange collection of books.  Each person has a book about their life.  On page 360  – 361, he learns:

These are the books of our lives.  Everyone has one.  See, here we are.  All together, as it happens, one book for each of us … Only people who are alive have them.  They come and go as people are born and die; this shelf goes on for miles in all directions.

They can take them down from the shelves, open them, read about the events of their lives.  If they want.

When Quentin hesitates, the librarian says to him,

Not as tempting as you’d think, is it?  I never opened mine.  There are those in the order who have looked, and I’ve seen their faces … You spend your whole life trying to understand yourself, what your story is about.  And then suddenly it’s all there.  All the answers, spelled out in black and white.

It’s a small moment of understanding, where Quentin responds that he is supposed to be writing his story, not reading it.  And then the scene is over; a choice made.

I’ve thought about this a lot; if I would read my book if I entered that library.  It’s different from a journal because it’s an objective, unemotional retelling of every moment from your life.  You can hover above the words, hover above your own existence, and see all the decisions you made, even the ones you no longer remember.  How strange would it be to read about events that have been erased from your own mind?  You’d have to believe it because it’s in the book, but it would feel like you were reading about a stranger during your early years.

Sometimes I think that I would re-shelve the book and let it go, and other times I think about how unlikely it would be to get the opportunity to read it twice, and the novelty of the experience would draw me to open the cover.  Would I have regrets?  Maybe.  But I think I’d still read the story of my life.

Would you?