I recently read Amy Poeppel’s Small Admissions, and I really loved this sentiment towards the end of the book (on page 356). It’s about a group of friends and family trying to help one of their own through a difficult life change, and this thought comes after the storm, when the crisis has passed for the main character:

Happiness is not a zero-sum game. It’s the only case in which the resources are limitless, and in which the rich can get richer at no expense to anyone else. That day in the park, I found it remarkably easy to own my happiness and celebrate Kate’s as well.

It’s a strange thing, though, how rare, maybe impossible, it is to have everyone you care about thriving at the same time. For a short spell, life seems certain and stable, until something shifts and redistributes, randomly, unpredictably, and when you look around at the new landscape, you see that it’s someone else’s turn now. You redirect your attention to focus on the friend in need. You hope — you know — they will do the same for you, when your turn comes.

It’s incredibly fitting for our particular community; where people are simultaneously navigating their own happiness/unhappiness at the same time as other people’s opposite happiness/unhappiness.  Which, in the end, is maybe the universe’s way of making sure everyone potentially has their emotional needs met.

If we were all sad at the same time, no one would have the emotional reserves to dedicate their energy to others.  We need this imbalance, then, even if it’s hard to navigate in the moment; to have the happiness have to stand next to the sadness and vice versa.

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

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We had the most incredible passionfruit vinaigrette on our honeymoon.  The waiter went back into the kitchen and returned with the recipe, minus amounts.  I tried to recreate the salad dressing a few times, but it never came close to that vinaigrette.  I still think about it as one of the best things I’ve ever tasted.

Apparently, that’s science.

There is a reason why you think food tastes better on vacation, and why so many of the tastes you “chase” (as in, try to recreate or wish you could have them again) come from vacations.  New York magazine explains:

The obvious answer is context: new place, new things. But context also works in other, more surprising ways to make our sense of taste into the fluid, location-dependent thing that it is.

Think about the foods you still think about long after the meal and remove all the emotionally-based ones such as your mother’s chicken.  How many of the ones that are left came from a local restaurant or friend’s house, and how many came from your travels or a vacation?

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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 twins are renewing their passports, so we swung by a chain pharmacy with a photo center in order to get their passport pictures taken.  The passport center consisted of a white, pull-down screen and a person who stood in front of the person, taking a picture with a handheld point-and-shoot camera.  Like the kind I have at the bottom of my purse.  At $14 per person, I expected a tripod.  Maybe an SLR.  But if a point-and-shoot gets the job done, fine.

The guy takes a bunch of photos, most of them terrible, as in the child was at a diagonal angle.  But he finally got a decent one of each kid and went to print them out.  When he handed them to me, he had cropped one of the photos so the child was far to the right.  Not centered.

When I commented on this, he refused to retake the photo and promised it would be fine.  I kept telling him that this was a time sensitive situation — we could not afford, timewise, to send in the passport application a second time if the first photo was rejected.  But he told me it was “good enough” and he was “pretty sure it was okay.”  He took the photo to a person he told me was the manager for a second opinion, and we watched that person shrug.

We ended up going back and forth about this for about ten minutes — ten minutes! — but he wouldn’t budge.  He thought his crappy work should be his final work.

The twins and I left and went to Josh’s office.  And then Josh took the kid back to have the picture retaken.  When he walked in, they were happy to make this better.  The manager (a different person from the woman he told me was the manager) agreed with Josh that the picture would have never been accepted because it clearly doesn’t fit passport guidelines.  The manager was willing to retake the photos when Josh asked.

This is partly a story about male privilege.  When Josh walked in, the employee got the real manager.  The manager immediately agreed the work was sub-par and fixed it.  Josh was in there for under ten minutes, the same amount of time I spent arguing with the same employee and trying to get him to re-do his work.  We’ve seen that story again and again.

But the part I’m focused on is that I cannot handle when people don’t put forth their best work as their final work.  No one gets it right the first time 100% of the time, but part of interacting with other humans is owning your mistakes and working to make them better.  That includes taking pride in your work — whatever your job may be — and always attempting to not only put forth your best effort in the first place, but to also correct any mistakes that occur in that first (or second, third, or fourth) attempt.

I used my ire as a teaching experience for the twins.  They got to see first hand how annoying it is to be on the receiving end of someone not making their work better.  I made them promise to never put someone else on that receiving end by not pulling their own weight in whatever task is on their plate, whether it’s a paper for school or following the customer’s instructions for bagging groceries.  And if they don’t do it right the first time, that’s okay.  Just do it again.

Grrrrrrr.  (That was an annoyed sound.)

Skip this section if you get queasy easily.

We were at dinner before heading to a carnival and somehow the topic of people vomiting on rides came up.  “I’m sure it’s very rare,” I reassured the twins.  “I’ve never seen someone vomit on a ride.”

Well, friends, I needed to take back that statement because about a half hour later, at the carnival, I watched a man vomit from the paratrooper ride.  Again and again and again.

We did not go on the paratrooper ride after that.  (Well, I wasn’t going to go on at all, so it’s more accurate to say that everyone else didn’t go on the paratrooper ride.)

I love amusement parks, but I realized that I don’t really love carnivals.  Isn’t that odd?  I mean, they’re sort of the same thing: rides, games, entertainment.  But while I love it when it is permanently cemented into the earth, I’m not quite as fond of it when it can be packed up and carted away to the next fairground.

Does your brain make a difference between carnivals and amusement parks?

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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:

• “And Another” (Bent Not Broken)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Inconceivable! has a post about storks (like the actual bird) and omens.  It is a gorgeous post that contains this thought: “When I was first diagnosed with infertility, the one thing I wanted to know was whether or not the acute distress of not knowing and the horrible limbo of waiting would ever end.”  It’s about not being resolved but seeing the possible paths forward.

A Woman My Age has a post about adoptive parenting.  Her son’s birthmother wants her address because she wants to send a gift, and it opens up confused feelings because the longstanding relationship is changing and they’re navigating other situations.  She states: “I knew I could not fully control things and I think that was bit of an issue for me. It reminded me of opening up my life to infertility doctors and social workers.”  It’s about trying to figure out parenting after adoption when there are not clear, concrete, perfect answers.  It’s about writing your own parenting manual; being your own guide.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ has a post about acceptance that stems from a very cool idea.  She writes, “I think I’m going to go through my blog here, from the very beginning, and reblog, or update, some posts.”  So we write things in the moment, but how many of us go back and update or blog again about the situation with the gift of retrospection?  I, for one, am really excited to read what she writes.

The roundup to the Roundup: Carnivals vs. amusement parks.  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 July 7th and 14th) 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.

Curbed has pulled together a guide of the best places to openly cry in New York.  They suggest gently sobbing on the Staten Island Ferry or grabbing a bench at Chelsea Piers for a quick wail.  They’re not snobs — they have at least three acceptable crying spaces in Brooklyn.  Of course, if you need more locations, you can turn to the NYC Crying Guide, a blog recording the best places to cry in the city since 2014.

It made me wonder if there are people who are okay with crying in public and people who would never cry in public.  (And then what do those people do if they feel as if they’re close to tears while they’re out and about?)

I am okay with crying in public.  I figure that if people are okay with me laughing in public or sighing in public, that they can handle me crying in public.  It’s all just physical manifestations of emotions.  As long as the physical manifestations don’t affect other people, I’m fine expressing any or seeing any expressed.  Shouting, for instance, may scare people so I would count that as affecting other people.  But laughing, sighing, crying, all fine.

I don’t look for a particular place to cry just as I don’t look for a particular place to laugh.  So if I feel like crying in the food store as I walk down the aisle, that’s where I’ll cry.  Maybe people think I’m just really sad about ketchup.  Though that doesn’t happen very often.  I mean, crying in the ketchup aisle.  But if I have to cry, I just cry.

Do you cry in public?  Or do you try to never cry in public?  And if you’re in that second group, what do you do if you feel a need to cry coming on while you’re out in public?