Modern Mrs. Darcy linked to an article that linked to another article all about the act of forgetting after reading.  Isn’t this the best of the Web?  You are reading this, and if you link to this post, then you are linking to a post that is linked to a post that is linked to a post that is, finally, linked to a post.

Can we just pause for a moment and comment on this tangled, interconnected structure?

Anyway, she linked to a post about why it’s okay to forget what you read because you don’t actually forget.  Or maybe you forget the details, but your brain retains what it wants to retain.  That information gets added to the personal lens that you use to read all future material.

It makes sense; why certain paragraphs immediately jump out at me, and how I mark up books, usually leaving notes in the margin like, “Oh!  Write a blog post about this.” So even if I don’t remember the details — and sometimes I don’t even on books I’ve read numerous times — I do sort of remember the details and use them to decide whether something else resonates with me in the future.

Moreover, the post contains a great quote: “Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading” (Nassim Taleb).  While I can point towards plenty of books that I’m glad I’ve read even through I don’t believe they’re worth re-reading, the quote made me smile because it is a good barometer; when you’re partway through a story and thinking, “I am definitely going to read this again.”

Are you okay with forgetting books, or does looking at the book spine and not remembering anything about the book fill you with dread?

By the way — despite this article, forgetting books still fills me with dread.

I would really love to know how Facebook decides who to drop into the “People You May Know” slide show.  I do know a bunch of them — but anyone could deduce that once they see that we have 20 people in common.  A bunch I definitely don’t know, though I may have once liked a comment they left on a mutual friend’s wall.  And the vast majority are people I don’t know.  At all.

Interestingly, there are two people I’ve been waiting for Facebook to offer me; people from childhood that I know are on Facebook.  Why not just get it over with and friend them?  Because I’m more interested in seeing whether Facebook finds the connection than I have with re-connecting with them in the first place.  Your move, Facebook.

Anyway, Gizmodo had a strange story about the algorithm surfacing an unknown relative (a great aunt) for the author.  Unknown is truly the best way to describe it.  They had no one in common on Facebook, and the great aunt had married into the family.  But when the author reached out to the person because of the woman’s last name, it turned out that they were (somewhat) closely related.

The author writes,

Now, when I look at my friend recommendations, I’m unnerved not just by seeing the names of the people I know offline, but by all the seeming strangers on the list. How many of them are truly strangers, I wonder—and how many are connected to me in ways I’m unaware of. They are not people I know, but are they people I should know?

That’s how I feel looking at the list.  The ones I know?  I totally know why they’re there.  The ones where we have something in common like we once worked in the same place or we have mutual friends or we live in the same town?  They don’t make me wonder.  It’s the ones where we have nothing in common, no mutual friends, no shared spaces…

…What does Facebook know that I don’t know?

Have you ever gotten a creepy connection like the one in the article?

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

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There was a cute story in the news this past weekend about a little girl who wrote the Queen because she wanted a pet swan and she thought the Queen owned all the swans.

I showed it to the ChickieNob because she writes a blog about royal news, but she was royally miffed.  I think it secretly had something to do with the fact that she never got her pet clam, but the rest of it was because the ChickieNob sent a letter to the queen and got no response.  She did not want to hear about a little girl who got a letter from Buckingham Palace when she had been checking the mailbox for weeks since sending her own at the beginning of the summer.

When she first wrote the letter, we explained to her that it was highly unlikely that she would receive a letter back, though the ChickieNob couldn’t fathom how the Queen wouldn’t respond once she saw the evidence of the ChickieNob’s deep and abiding love.  We told her it was worth writing, but you need to send these sorts of things without any expectation of an answer.

Have you ever received a response from a public figure?

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The ChickieNob and I went for back-to-school haircuts yesterday, pretty much our least favourite thing to do so we always leave it until last minute.  This is it: the end of summer suck.  I hate it when the kids go back to school, and I feel like I have been tottering on the edge of tears all week.

This year is even worse because we’re starting after Labour Day but ending at the same time.  In order to do that, they needed to shave all the professional days and holidays off the calendar.  So we have very few breaks between now and next June.  Just a few scattered days and the threat that the county will cancel parts of spring break if we need to use snow days.

I love routine; I am such a creature of habit.  So it makes no sense why I get so down in these last few days before life returns to “normal.”  But I do.  I’m down.  I am really sad that school is starting.  I’ll be fine by the end of the week.  Once it’s done, it’s done.  But these last few days of summer make me feel like curling up into a ball.

No Roundup today because we’re on Platform 9 3/4, waiting for the Hogwarts Express.  Yes, the books and life have finally aligned: the epilogue for book 7 is set on September 1, 2017.

I was emotional reading that epilogue ( and not just because the series was over) because if my kids had gotten their owls, we would have been standing on the platform in our robes, waiting to enter our third year at Hogwarts.  There was something about knowing that fixed point in time, having a date in hand, that made that book magic feel solid, like something you could actually visit and witness.

So that’s where I am today.  I’m mentally on that Platform, hanging out with all the other Potter-lovers.  Hoping that magic is real, and not really willing to consider that it isn’t.