Modern Mrs. Darcy has a fun post about making a to-do list for your to-do list, and I want to echo that I do this everyday.

My bullet journal is not realistic.  It contains everything that needs to get done; some of it immediately though some of it can wait a day or two.  (And then, separately, there is a monthly long-term project section.)

Looking at the list makes me anxious.

So before I close down for the night, I make two post-it notes and stick one on the front of my work bullet journal and the other on the front of my personal bullet journal.  (Yes, I keep two separate bullet journals.)  The work one contains meeting reminders and tasks that must be finished before the end of the day.  The personal one just contains things like “cook dinner” or “write blog post” or “clean Linus’s cage.”

That way I’m ready to go first thing in the morning.  I know before I go to bed what needs to get done.  And I cross off all the must-do tasks and sometimes a don’t-put-this-off-for-too-long task.

Then the whole thing starts over again.  Anything undone is transferred to the next post-it note, and all the new stuff is listed.

Looking at the whole to-do list is overwhelming and it’s hard to know what to do first.  So choosing three or four things that must get done while I’m feeling calm and ready to relax means that those three or four things will get done, even if everything else remains on the to-do list another day.

Ta-da!

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

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I read a super interesting New Yorker piece about a barbecue restaurant called Piggie Park, owned and operated by a white supremacist who decorated his restaurant in confederate flags.  Kathleen Purvis spoke for many when she said, “When I learned about Bessinger’s history, I stopped buying his products. I followed a simple policy on the Piggie Park: I didn’t go there. Ever.”

Then he died and his kids took over, removing the flags and their father’s political point-of-view.  Which brought about the question that drives the New Yorker piece: Is it now okay to go to Piggie Park?  Some felt the old man and his hate was gone, and it was okay to patron the place.  Others felt that the legacy of hate and the history of hurt should still be driving the decision to avoid the place.

I don’t eat barbecue — that whole vegetarian thing — so I had to think about this question in terms of a favourite space.  What if the owner of my favourite restaurant started to spew hate speech?  No brainer — I would stop patronizing the place.  What if she died and her kids took over, keeping the same recipes but changing the personality of the space?  Could I eat there?

I don’t think I could.  For me, the food is tied to the experience, and I don’t think I would have much of an appetite if I walked into the space, thinking about what had happened before that point.

What about you?  Would you eat at your own personal Piggie Park if that happened?

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I like to imagine that when the librarians take a coffee break, they sit around a table in the backroom saying things like, “That Melissa is a great library user” or “Thanks, I will have a doughnut, and can you believe how reliable Melissa is with library books?”

Maybe they whisper it so the other patrons don’t get jealous if their voices travel out of the room, or maybe the librarians get together at night and dance joyously around the stacks with flowers woven in their hair, chanting, “Mel, Mel, book borrower Mel.”

Lest you think I’m exaggerating, I have actual PROOF of my trustworthiness.

I went to check out a book at the library self-service machine — actually three books because I had the twins’ stuff in my stack — and the machine wouldn’t register the third book.  So I brought it up to the desk, and the new librarian couldn’t get the computer to recognize the bar code, either.  She turned to the other, longtime librarian and asked what she should do.

The longtime librarian looked me up and down (actually, I was standing against the desk, so she only looked from a little below my chest to the top of my head and back down to a little below my chest) and then she gave a nod.  “Just give it to her.  She’s responsible.  She’ll bring it back in three weeks.”  And then, directly to me, “I’m trusting you.”

DID YOU HEAR THAT?  She is trusting me.  That means I am trustworthy.

When I was growing up, my mother told me that all a person has is their reputation.  She may have been talking about S-E-X, but I like to think that she was also talking about good library habits.  Guess what, mum, I have a good library reputation and an uncheckedout book to prove it.

I decided not to write the Roundup this morning as a little birthday gift to myself, taking the time I would normally dedicate to rounding posts and describing why they resonated with me to drink coffee and bother Linus.  Happy birthday to me?

I love writing the Roundup, so I feel a little weird saying that I’m taking the week off as a gift to myself.  But I think y’all know what I mean.

This has been such a strange week of highs and lows.

43 is a prime number; a prime birthday.  You only get so many of those in a lifetime.  Let’s say you live until you’re 100 years old.  You’d only get 25 prime birthdays in there.  Prime birthday years feel solid.  They feel indivisible; like you can’t take the year into smaller chunks.  They scream out for people to start and complete a big project.

A prime birthday in my prime, right?

Yes, I’m still yammering on about Matthew Quick’s book, Every Exquisite Thing.  You don’t have to read the book to follow these posts and have an opinion because I’m using the book as a springboard to other mental spaces.  If you want to read the other posts I’ve written about this book, you can find them here, here, here, and here.

So there was a very interesting passage on page 147 about choice when it comes to stopping something.

Maybe you only quit when you were too exhausted to continue? Maybe you did what everyone else wanted you to do for so long by playing and scoring goals—you were so strong for others—that you finally just reached a breaking point and, well, you broke. And it was then—and only then—that you were able to quit. It wasn’t really a choice in the end, but like refusing to pay for your friends’ lunches only when you have run out of money.

Unpack this with me because it’s a really beautiful way of stating that not all stopping is equal.  There are people who have every choice in the world and they decide to stop.  There are others who have very limited choices and they decide to stop.  Finally, there are people who don’t really have any choice and they decide to stop.  If that last group didn’t decide to stop, then life would have told them, firmly, that they had to stop.

Because they were broke.

Not broke as in broken and damaged, but broke as in depleted.  Out of energy or cash or options.

I think we treat all stopping as equal.  People believe that because one person chose not to stop that means all people can choose that option, too.  But reading that passage above, it comes down to this: There are people who stop paying for a friend’s lunch even when they have money in their wallet because they’ve decided to use that money for something else.  And there are people who stop paying for a friend’s lunch because they have a dangerously low amount of money in their wallet and they won’t be able to get home if they spend it now.  And there are people who stop paying for a friend’s lunch because their wallet is empty.

Chew on that and tell me what you think.