As a group, we have well-covered our eternal pet peeve: variations on the “are you going to have children” question.  Either you are trying and the question is salt in the wound, or you have stopped family building and the question asker seems unable to accept your answer.  It is really really really annoying to get that question — I KNOW — but I still need to vent about this answer:

The celebrity who states that they don’t know because “they haven’t thought about it.”

Really?

You’re 42 years old, but the idea of children has never crossed your mind?  You know what has never crossed my mind until this moment while trying to think up an example?  biathlon.  No one has ever asked me whether or not I plan on taking up biathlon in this lifetime, so I’ve never thought about it.

(The answer, by the way, is no, since I have thought about it in writing out this question.)

But saying that it hadn’t even occurred to the person whether or not they want to have kids is disingenuous because EVERYONE ASKS THAT QUESTION.  And pretending they don’t makes people believe they’re posing an original thought.  Has Melissa ever considered children?  I’m sure she hasn’t.  Let’s ask her so she doesn’t forget to consider this enormous idea.

I encounter this “never thought about it” answer at least once in every issue of People magazine.  People asks the celebrity if they’re planning on having children, and the celebrity answers, “Oh… wow… I don’t know.  I’ve never thought about it.  I guess we’ll have to see if it happens because I have zero clue how one goes about building a family.  And now I need to forget you even asked this question in order to reset so I can state that I’ve never thought about it the next time an interviewer poses this question.”

It would be great if the celebrity said, “That question has nothing to do with my work on the screen, so I’m going to refrain from giving an answer.”  Or, “Yes, we’re trying but we’re having a really hard time with family building.”  Or, “You know, we thought about it and we decided we didn’t want to parent.”  Or, “We tried to build a family and it didn’t work out, so now we’re doing this project instead.”  Anything EXCEPT: “Huh… I haven’t thought about babies.  Ever.”

You’ve thought about it, liar.  You know how I know that you’ve thought about it?  Because everyone asks you that freakin’ questions ALL THE TIME.  And then it becomes like that thought experiment where you’re told not to think about the elephant.  All you can do is think about the elephant because other people keep bringing it up.

Everyone, please stop asking this question.  I promise you, no one has ever hit the end of their life and thought, “Oh crap, I wish someone had brought it up because I never considered the subject.”

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

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I’m on the mailing list for Oxford’s Story Museum, and I’m jealous of everyone who lives nearby and can participate in their Alice’s Day next week.  (Side note: Charles Dodgson started telling Alice the story on July 4, 1862.)

In my gaming club (like a book club, except for interactive fiction games), we were recently talking about the length of games.  I love Alice in Wonderland and could play in that world for an infinite amount of time.  Same with Middle Earth and Narnia.  (All Oxford connections!)  And Hogwarts.  (Close enough!)  Fillory.  (Finally, an American!)  Everything else, I probably need a cap of two hours.

Let’s say someone could take any fictional world and produce an infinite amount of quality work set in that world.  Which world would you spend an infinite amount of time exploring?

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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 am terrible with languages.  I know that sounds strange since I have a translation degree, but my brain moves like a seven-year-old computer; still functioning but annoyingly slow.

I am helping the twins prepare for their B’nai Mitzvah by translating their Torah portion with them, going through the etymology of each word and how they’re connected to other words.  We sit at the kitchen table with five dictionaries fanning out across the table.  It is painful watching me translate.  Once upon a time, I skipped through short stories, nimbly transforming them into English.  We now focus on maybe three words per day.

It’s their work, but because they’re still learning this, it’s also my work.

They’re starting French in the fall.  I’m also supposed to help them with that, so I downloaded a language app so I can review intro level French.  They’re also using the app, absorbing all the vocabulary and spitting it back out at me while I’m trying to chop lettuce for a salad.  My brain spins like the cursor on the computer, buffering buffering buffering, trying to remember conjugations so I don’t tell them the wrong thing.

I am dreading being the person linguistically in charge when we travel.  I’m mostly fine reading French.  But people expect you to speak it when you enter their country.  They don’t want to help you by writing out everything they’re saying so you can read it from a piece of paper, and then wait until you write back.  I’ve always been terrible with organizing my thoughts verbally, whether in English, Hebrew, or French.  It doesn’t help that I haven’t used two of those languages in the last 20 years.

It is hard to switch back and forth between three languages in one day when your brain has so little RAM.  My brain is like a computer that still has a slot for floppy discs.  That has a dusty modem on the side that sputters to life, tying up the phone line.  That is my brain.

Wish me luck.

I am not normally (1) a napper or (2) into crystals, but I want to take a nap on a $75/half hour crystal bed.  I want to awaken in a perfect state by lying down on what amounts to “a baby bouncer for adults.”  I could do without a pine-scented eye mask — I really don’t like the smell of pine needles — but if they had one that was the scent of sunscreen?  And the sounds were beach sounds?  And the cost wasn’t $75?  I would be all over that.

Maybe I just want a nap.  Period.  I am feeling really burned out and could use a few hours of down time.

Which makes it sound like that old commercial for Polly-o string cheese.  I want a nap on a crystal bed.  But hold the pine-scented mask.  And hold the vibrating crystals.  Hey, Jimmy, give this girl a nap with nothing.  Nuttin’?

Yeah, like just a nap.

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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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ has a post about Mother’s Day (and by extension, Father’s Day).  She writes, “There was, of course, the usual onslaught on social media, as there is today for Father’s Day, where the curse of social media is that people seem to place importance on being seen to recognise their parents or partners. I will admit that I was a bit fed up that my normal feeds this morning were clogged up with northern hemisphere people cheerfully wishing their fathers or husbands a good day, and even resented* those people who tagged on wishes for ‘those who find today hard,’ and wondered why, if they acknowledge that today is hard for some people, do they post about it at all?”  Additionally, in a world that marks the same idea on different days on the calendar, social media means you’re living it again and again and again.

My Path to Mommyhood writes about telling people that she’s not adopting.  She’s doing it slowly, and she’s doing it with a lot of justification, feeling like she needs to explain their decision to stop their family building plans.  In trying to protect her heart, she’s causing herself more stress.  The fact is, she shouldn’t have to protect her heart.  Her heart is already raw; it’s up to the rest of the world to just lean in and hug.

The Road Less Travelled is my Canadian twin.  She has a post about splurging for better seats on an airplane, and I nodded through the whole post.  It pains me to needlessly spend money, and I’m fairly bitter about air travel, but I agree wholeheartedly: “We didn’t get the child we wanted so much — but we CAN have some of those little luxuries that make life more fun and pleasant. So why not?  Life is short… pay for the preferred seat!”  Good advice.

Lastly, Non Sequitur Chica has a post about diversity that was a perfect parenting moment of kids not following the script.  I will probably spend the rest of the day humming, “Hi ho the deerio we all have different skin” to myself.  It’s hard work and it’s important work, but talking about big ideas doesn’t always go as smoothly as you hope.

The roundup to the Roundup: Give me a nap with nuttin’.  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 16th and 23rd) 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 am currently in a prime number birth year, and this space is in a prime number blogging year: eleven.  Eleven years ago, Josh set up my blog for me.  This place on the web has been his best gift.  (I mean, beyond always supporting my half-baked ideas and giving me space to be myself.)

Thank you, Josh.

I get a little teary when I talk about the Internet because — at least for me — it has done exactly what it was supposed to do.  It connected me.  I was over here, in this tiny bubble on the side of life, and it brought my bubble in contact with millions of other people’s bubbles.  We’ve knocked into each other and drifted apart from one another and stuck together and merged into bigger bubbles from time to time.

Thank you, everyone else.

I don’t have a lot of advice left to give about blogging; it’s really been the same thing year after year.

WAIT.

I have one last thing to say. (Until next year, when I will say another one last thing.)

Don’t look at your stats.  Platforms try to make those numbers easily accessible, but you should do everything in your power to NOT look at them.  At all.  Don’t peek at them from time to time.  Don’t think about them.  Don’t Google what is a good amount of page views.  Don’t think about numbers at all.

Because here’s the thing.  You will be happy if you never look at them.  If you write and assume that there are people quietly reading from their phone, not commenting but still thinking about your words all day.  You will be happy if you don’t know your stats AND you don’t know anyone else’s stats.

I really think Buddha had it right with the Four Noble Truths.  Expectations hinder us.  Expectations throw us off our game.  Expectations make us feel disappointment.

I once dated a guy who tried to teach me this.  We argued about it all the time because I didn’t think you could live without expectations.  I was an expectation-centric person, and the concept of going through life without facts and forecasts was unfathomable.

But I think I get it with this blogging thing.  Every once in a while I need to peek at my stats because someone else needs the number.  And it either makes me feel like shit if the stats are not where I thought they’d be, or the numbers inflate my ego and distract me if they’re higher than I thought they’d be.  So I don’t look at them.  I don’t think about them.  I just write.

And I hope you just write.  There are fewer and fewer of you out there, writing.  I wish you would open your blogs again and jot down a post.  It doesn’t need to be high art.  It doesn’t need to happen with regularity.  It just needs to happen enough that you feel that release of your words going out into the universe.  So that your bubble knocks up against everyone else’s bubble.

I’m floating out here.  I hope you are, too.