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

*******

Atlas Obscura had a post about wind phones: disconnected phones set up in Japan so people could call their lost loved ones.  The article begins:

When Itaru Sasaki lost his cousin in 2010, he decided to build a glass-paneled phone booth in his hilltop garden with a disconnected rotary phone inside for communicating with his lost relative, to help him deal with his grief.

I clearly found the idea touching, but I also found it strangely comforting.  Yes, I know it’s a disconnected phone and that I could just speak my words into thin air, but there is something about holding a tangible object as you speak.  I would do anything to get to speak to my grandmother again, to feel like I’m communicating with her even if I don’t get an answer.

Who would you call on the wind phone?

*******

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.

Okay, here’s a question: If we (and by “we,” I mean people in general and not you and I) hadn’t invented the smartphone, would we have social media addiction?  Meaning, if social media and email and searches and blogs — if all of that was only accessible via the computer — would we still have people shelling out $150/hour for digital addiction therapy?

Because I don’t remember caring all that much about who was trying to reach me before my smartphone.  My assumption was that their email would wait until I sat down at the computer.  I had the same feeling about Facebook or Twitter.  I would intake whatever I could intake and leave the rest to drift past me unseen.  My RSS reader ensured that I wouldn’t miss blog posts, but again, I read them on my own time.

Most articles reference the addictive nature of social media or apps; how they are designed to be addictive. While that adds to the problem, isn’t part of it a function of portability?  Sort of like hookahs vs. cigarettes?  Sure, cigarettes are designed to be addictive due to added chemicals, but isn’t the real power of the cigarette its portability?  You can slip them into your pocket, take them anywhere.  It’s the intake system more than the product itself, right?

At least that is what I thought about as I read the BBC’s article about social media addiction while on my smartphone.

It’s a weird addiction because an alcoholic either is drinking or not drinking; a gambler either betting or not betting.  But if your job involves social media, you cannot avoid interactive with the object of your addiction.  You can only restrict your access to it by limiting your intake system; going the social media hookah route vs. the social media cigarette route.

In other words, sitting down at the computer to access it, and then stepping away and going offline because you’ve deleted those social media apps on your phone.

Just something to think about as you move through your day.

We signed up for Hulu for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  The show went off Netflix, and we went through several days of the ChickieNob’s mourning before we gave in and said she could visit her vampire-stabbing gang on Hulu for two months.

This was before I discovered they would be releasing The Handmaid’s Tale over the course of 10 weeks.  (I mean, if we have Hulu, I might as well use it, too, right?)  So… maybe she can visit Buffy for three months?

I am so excited to see this.

It’s one of my favourite books; one I carry with me at all times.  I didn’t love the movie they made in the early 90s, but it looks like Hulu nailed it.  At least on the surface.  I guess we’ll know more next Wednesday.

Who else is watching next week?

*******

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.

*******

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:

• “The Facts of Life They Don’t Teach You at School” (Different Shores)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Torthúil has a post about emotional sinkholes, those moments where you suddenly don’t feel like your whole self or know what you really believe.  She explains, “I’m going about my day, doing things I ordinarily do, and it suddenly feels like… a piece of my identity, my self, isn’t there. I feel vaguely like a liar, when I try to talk about myself to someone, because I don’t know if what I’m saying is true.”  It’s such an interesting way of explaining the phenomenon.  Go over and read the whole post.

Countingpinklines wonders why it’s easy to play with some babies and others push her to the brink of tears.  Is it tied to where she is in her process?  The difficulty the person had in building their family?  Older vs. younger kids?  It’s a familiar situation; one I think will resonate with a lot of people.

Raven Rambling has a post about how she thought life would look at 30 vs. actuality.  She writes, “I am trying to focus on saying good bye to things I am not, and focusing on the things that I am. If any of those things from the ‘not’ side are able to come over to the ‘am’ side, then I’ll be happy as a peach – but right now, they’re not on the am side and I need to make peace with that.”  Yes to all of this, a thousand times over.  Brilliant post.

Lastly, Ms. Infertile has a post about being in a chronic state of adjustment.  The perfect line: “And you wish someone would ask you how you’re doing and mean it.”  It is a beautiful and moving post.  Read it.

The roundup to the Roundup: Handmaid’s Tale!  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 April 14th and 21st) 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 have started this post three times now because each thing I wrote strayed from “the script” as Nathan Bransford would say.  It strayed from my personal script, which is guided by internal discomfort when I think about how my words might offend another person.  (Especially when my need to say those words is less than the weight of the words.)  It strayed from the more general, societal script of “everything is a-okay.”

Everything is a-okay.

See, I just stuck to the script.

Nathan’s post is about how we have loose scripts we use when speaking with one another.  I say X and you say Y.  I say that I’m tired, and you offer sympathy.  You say that you’re going on vacation, and I express excitement as I ask you for details.

We expect to hear back certain words, especially if we say certain words.  For instance, if I ask you how you are, even if you just had a loss, you’ll probably give me some version of fine.

But if I ask you, “How are you doing with everything today since I know that answer probably changes from day-to-day?”, it opens up the script to go in a different direction.  I’m not asking out of politeness.  I’m asking because I want a real answer, and changing the script does that.  It signals a different response should occur.

Of course, that’s still a script.  But it’s not the script.

I loved his post because he points out how people fight back when you don’t say what they want you to say.  When you don’t express happiness when they think you should be expressing happiness.  Or when you’re not feeling sad despite the fact that they think you should be home, in mourning.

Seek out these good people who will let you complain when you’re “supposed” to be happy and let you be happy when you’re “supposed” to be sad.

But most importantly, ignore the rigid people out there who try to make you feel badly because you’re flipping their script. They’re not seeing you as a human being, they’re seeing you as a faulty computer program.

It’s a good reminder that we all need to change the script — in our writing and in our everyday life.  Whatever your characters say first, erase it and have them say something better.  Whatever you think to say first, pause for a moment and ask yourself, “how can I change a few words and change the whole script?”

His post is about publishing, but it’s applicable to every facet of life.  It gave me a new aim: To stop trying to come up with the perfect words and instead just come up with different words; anything that strays from the script and takes the well-worn conversations in an entirely new direction.

We have emergency rooms for physical injuries, but where are the emergency rooms for battered souls?

*******

I clicked on the headline because it promised me refuge from mentally looping through the news about North Korea for a 3000th time.  A Jordan Bookseller’s 24-Hour ‘Emergency Room for the Mind’.

The article gave me so much more than that — even from afar; even without visiting the actual space — because it is about a bookstore that is battling the hate the bookseller witnesses around him with positive manuscripts that spread sound ideas.

The bookseller never closes his store.  He sleeps in his shop, and if you need a volume — if you need emergency literature, the right story to reset your mind — you enter and he’ll guide you to the right text.  It’s a safe space for words.  A safe space for ideas.  The bookstore “is a haven, one of the few places on earth where nothing matters more than a love of books.”

I spend a lot of time feeling anxious, beginning in the morning when I scan the headlines, moving into the day when I’m bombarded by news due to my job, and ending at night when I lie in bed and think about all of the things that happened that day.  How tenuous the world feels.  I cannot stop reading the news unless I change my job, and I know tuning out the news doesn’t make the reported events stop.

Maybe the way to battle that anxiety is not by retreating from words but instead find different words.  They don’t undo what you know is outside your door, but at least you’re giving yourself a break on what you invite inside your mind.

I bought a bunch of books recently and checked out others from the library.  Too many to possibly read at the moment, but I’d rather have books overflowing than no new ones to begin.