Last week we took a Mitzvahmoon.  It’s okay if you don’t know what a Mitzvahmoon is.  I Googled it and couldn’t find it, but the ChickieNob informed me that just because no one else has done it yet, it didn’t mean that it wasn’t a very good idea.

I’ll attest to that: It turned out to be a very good idea.

We have been knee-deep in prepping for their B’nai Mitzvah, and we had a bunch of things we needed to write.  They both needed to work on their d’var Torah (a speech about their Torah portion), Josh and I needed to work on our speeches, and we had a bunch of quatrains to write for a candle lighting ceremony.  The ChickieNob suggested that we all go to the beach and take the weekend away from home to write without distraction and relax at the same time.  Sort of like a honeymoon or a babymoon but with an emphasis on the productivity side with the relaxation mixed in.

So we drove to the beach.

It was exactly what we needed.  We ended up doing a lot of the writing beforehand at home because we wanted to do more relaxing, so we got the work accomplished.  The beach was mostly empty because the waves were rough and it was the off-season.  But that just made us love it more.  It was sunny and quiet; and we all read and took breaks to write the quatrains while on the sand.  We ate ice cream at night and watched Guardians of the Galaxy 2 back in our hotel room.  I think we all left recharged so we could power through the rest of what needs to get done.

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But there was a moment in the weekend.  We drove into town after 8 o’clock, and it was dark as we made our way down the main street.  When we got near the pharmacy, we saw an elderly man had somehow driven his car over the six-inch high barrier that lined the parking lot.  His front wheels where over the barrier, but his back wheels were still in the lot, and he was stuck, revving his engine as he tried to go forward and get free.

Our car, stopped at the traffic light, was perpendicular to the front of his car.  If he went forward, he would smash into my door.

The man was clearly panicked and confused.  His windshield wipers were moving at high speed even though there was no rain.  We light changed and we crossed the intersection to get to the pizza place so we could call the non-emergency police from the counter and they could come and help him.  We never found out what happened to him, though his car was gone by the time we drove past the area again a half hour later.

I don’t know why this story is noteworthy except that, at the time, I saw it as a portentous sign that our Mitzvahmoon was a doomed idea.  That we got over the first hump but would ultimately get stuck.

It’s nice to be proven wrong by the universe.  Sometimes an elderly man driving over a barrier is just an elderly man driving over a barrier.

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

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Kelly Wickham Hurst recently said something that stuck with me: “People are magic.” She was talking about that human impulse to insert yourself into someone else’s life, somehow at the right time, and help. But, of course, it could go the other way, too. Magic is often used to trick the senses, misdirect your attention.

That is the thought that came to mind as I read this story about the start of the BRCA1 research. It is incredible that this project, which had an inauspicious start, led to knowledge that has potentially saved life. It’s not a long piece, but it is the best example of people are magic — both in the good and bad sense — in a single story.

Read it, but don’t ruin the twist for anyone else in your comment.

And tell us about a moment of magic that someone brought into your life.

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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 clicked on this Science of Us article because I also feel exhausted after sitting in front of the computer all day.  Like disproportionately tired considering I haven’t done much more than think and type.

The article outlines how your brain uses up enormous quantities of oxygen; how it requires 20% of the energy in your body as a baseline and then thinking hard uses even more energy.  It totally makes sense, until it doesn’t make sense.

Because here is the thing: if thinking hard makes you tired, then why am I up all night, unable to sleep because I am THINKING?  Shouldn’t the thinking be wearing me out and making me sleepy?  Shouldn’t it be using up all of my energy and tiring me instead of making me feel more awake?  Surely worrying burns through energy faster than, let’s say, writing a blog post.  Bedtime is when I am doing my best, anticipatory stress work, much more so than when I’m in the zone and think that I will accomplish everything on my to-do list.

I need to poke around through some of the links in the article.

I thought the world was going to end, but it turns out that it probably isn’t.  Wheeew.  Though I was so certain that tomorrow was it for mankind that I stopped rounding up posts.  Didn’t make a lot of sense to highlight great blogs no one would have time to read.

Okay, maybe I just heard about the world ending thing today from the Washington Post, but it sounded like a better excuse than saying Rosh Hashanah derailed my week.  Between the cooking and the cleaning and the services, I didn’t have time to write up the stuff I bookmarked.  So you’re getting a non-post, and we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program next week.

Provided the world doesn’t end before that.

So… when is the next world ending prediction?

I told you that I had four thoughts that came out of reading Elan Mastai’s All Our Wrong Todays.  You can go backwards to the first thought, even if you haven’t read the book because these thoughts aren’t tied to the text but rather float above the page.  In other words, reading these posts will not ruin the book, and at the same time, they’re not (I think) confusing.

Next thought.

As I said, at its heart, this book is about Mastai processing the loss of his mother at an early age.  It’s science fiction, but it’s really about how we live and the meaning of our relationships and the impact we have on one another.  At least, that was my take-away.

On page 301, the narrator is talking about the aftermath of a death, when you reach a moment where the pain of the loss can turn you in a multitude of directions:

You love someone for fifty years and then they die. People talk about grief as emptiness, but it’s not empty. It’s full. Heavy. Not an absence to fill. A weight to pull. Your skin caught on hooks chained to rough boulders made of all the futures you thought you would have. How do you keep five decades of love from souring into a snakebite that makes your own heart the threat, drawing the poison up and down the length of you?

How?  I’m asking this literally.  How do you keep from drowning in anger at the world after you lose someone whom you have loved for fifty years?  Or, really, five years or five months or five days?  We’re a community steeped in loss.  We know how much loss can change a person.  That loss hurts because it stems from love; whether it is a cluster of cells or an unborn fetus or a person walking around on earth.

There is a lot of anger in this community that bubbles up from time to time, more so years ago when everyone knew everyone else and less so now that the ALI community has become scattered over time.  It’s not anger at each other but more anger at the situation.  You have love.  You want to give it to another human being.  The universe is working against you, thwarting you from giving that love to another human being.  It hurts.  It can become an internal snakebite just as easily as it can fuel your passion in another direction.

Even outside of family building; everyone has people that they love that they ultimately lose.  How do you keep your anger at the situation — at being furious with the world for taking someone you love from you — from poisoning you?  Will everyone get to the point where they’re not sad it’s over but smiling because it happened?  Because I don’t think that’s true; I don’t think we all get there, every time.

Your thoughts?