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

*******

Linus’s breeder announced that she has a few new guinea pig babies that will be ready for homes in the next month.  There is something about hearing this news coupled with Easter and the onslaught of baby animal pictures that is making me open up an email to her and then close it without sending.

I want another guinea pig.  I don’t want another guinea pig.

Maybe I just want a Cadbury egg.  The ice cream shop at the beach posted a picture of sweet cream ice cream with chunks of Cadbury egg, drizzled with caramel.

Are you off for Easter?  Are you doing anything good with your day off?

*******

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.

Some people have a normal love of magic.  I have an unusual love of magic.  That’s like… 12 notches higher than normal love.

Every time I get a new bullet journal, I transfer my list of things I love and the top two items are

1. Magic (real)
2. Magic (illusions)

I’m just setting the scene so you can understand why I almost passed out when I got to go up on stage during a tech rehearsal for The Magic Play.

*******

What is The Magic Play?  The way I described it after seeing it is that it’s the turducken of theater.  It’s a magic show inside a play inside a much larger question: how do we trust one another?

(Side note: I am really trying to get someone to fall in love with calling this the “turducken of theater.”  So far, every time I’ve said it, people have stared at me blankly and then treated the moment as if I blurted out that I love streaking.)

It’s a new play having a rolling world premiere, and DC was picked as one of the cities (specifically the Olney Theatre).  The magician in the show is also an actor, and as he performs the various tricks, he’s telling the story of how he broke up with his boyfriend.  So you’re seeing real magic tricks (and they’re amazing — more on that in a second) while hearing a story and then considering this larger philosophical question.  There are three actors in the play — the magician, his ex-boyfriend, and the magician’s father.

After we saw the show, I learned that Jim Steinmeyer consulted on it.  THE Jim Steinmeyer, the guy who created David Copperfield’s disappearing Statue of Liberty trick.  The guy who adds magic to Disney shows.  Magical historian and magical inventor extraordinaire.  If you have an unusual love of magic, you know Steinmeyer.

Anyway, the magician pulls members of the audience up on the stage a few times, and I got chosen for the first trick in the play.  I don’t want to ruin it for anyone in case you get a chance to see the play, but it is such an emotional moment in the show — a mind-blowing trick coupled with a story about how the magician’s ex-boyfriend left him — that I started getting teary.  And I forgot there was anyone else in the theater in that moment because I was holding onto a pack of cards (oh!  And he let me keep the cards at the end of the trick so they have entered prize possession land) and staring into the magician’s eyes.  Chills, people.

Brett Schneider is incredible. Jon Hudson Odom dives from a 9-foot diving board on the stage. I spent the whole night gasping.

It has been to Chicago and it’s in DC for the next few weeks, and I have no clue where it is going next.  But if you get a chance to see it, run, don’t walk to the theater.  Beyond seeing Josh’s plays, which are the best written plays I’ve ever seen (and I’m not just saying that because I once inspired a line in one of his plays), this was my second most emotional, favourite theater moment.

I love real magic.  I love illusionary magic.  I love The Magic Play.  That is a lot of love.

Images by Stan Barouh (used with permission)

The Guardian had a really good story about two Lisa Davises born on the same day and living in the same city that New York cannot seem to tell apart.  It’s not identity theft because they’re not trying to fool anyone, but this fact leads to some very annoying situations.  It has also led to a very eye-opening look into how black and white women are treated in the city.  Let’s just say that what happens to one Lisa Davis doesn’t happen to the other Lisa Davis.

Definitely worth a read if you’re looking for something extra to devour this weekend.

*******

It’s Pesach.  It’s hard to know that there is so much pasta in the world, and none of it can go into my body right now.  A fine layer of matzah crumb covers every surface.  Linus decided that he LOVES matzah, just loves it so damn much.  He stands on his hind legs and begs every time someone eats a piece in front of him.  He looks back and forth between the piece of matzah and the person’s mouth, wheeking pathetically.  “Please,” he says.  “Give me one tiny bite of that matzah goodness.”

*******

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:

• “A Beautiful Mess of Motherhood” (My Path to Mommyhood)
• “The Gift of Acceptance” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “Ten Ways I’m Rocking Motherhood” (Torthúil)

Okay, now my choices this week.

While not as eloquent as Ariel Levy speaking about loss, I was grateful that Nancy Kerrigan stepped forward this week to speak about her six miscarriages.  Secondary infertility rarely gets coverage, and it goes a long way in cluing in the general public to the fact that you can experience infertility even after having a child.

Terppsicore has a post about how easy it was to connect with another person when we were kids compared to how difficult it can be as an adult.  I won’t ruin the story by saying much more, so you’ll have to click over to read the brief piece.

Lastly, Bereaved and Blessed is celebrating her tenth blogoversary.  She sums up her blogging experience over the course of the year with a single word, but the interesting thing is that she doesn’t set the word before the year has happened.  She states it at the end to summarize how the year has actually gone.  Which means it goes hand-in-hand with a lot of reflection on your old posts.  It’s a fantastic idea, one I may steal in June when I come up to my blogoversary.

The roundup to the Roundup: A tale of two Lisas.  Linus wants matzah.  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 7th and April 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.

We accidentally wake up the kids in the middle of the night on a regular basis, putting laundry back in their drawers or checking on them.  Usually they roll over and go back to sleep, but every once in a while, we hit their sleep cycle at the wrong moment and they sit up in bed, wide awake.  This happened last week to the ChickieNob, and she informed us in the morning that she needed to snap at us because she was overtired.

We apologized and she forgave us, but she kept bringing up the fact that she was overtired and it was our fault.  When Josh pointed out that she had already accepted the apology, she said, “I accepted the apology.  That doesn’t mean it de-faults you from what you did.  You still woke me up in the middle of the night.  I’m still tired in the morning.  And it’s still your fault.”

I don’t know why, but I thought about this all day because granting forgiveness doesn’t really let the other person off the hook.  Forgiveness is just acknowledging that you heard them and believe them when they express their regret.  It doesn’t mean, as the ChickieNob stated, they are absolved of blame.  They still committed the action, the end result is exactly the same.  Apologies don’t erase; they just move things forward.

Plus apologies may come before the other person is ready to stop discussing their feelings.  Clearly she was willing to accept our quickly given apology, but she still wanted to vent the rest of her frustrations over the situation.  Just because we were ready to apologize and she was ready to accept that apology didn’t mean that she was also ready to stop feeling whatever she needed to feel about having her sleep interrupted.

I don’t know — it just was sort of a brilliant revelation for me.  Both the fact that apology does not equal absolution on all fronts, just some, and that the timing of an apology doesn’t knock the possibility of more discussion on the subject.  If not, after all, a person could apologize quickly just to get past the discussion part where the real work of acceptance is done.

Plus I liked the word “de-faulted.”  You can’t un-fault yourself, can you?

The topic of DC restaurants banning kids came up at a meeting last week.  Josh and I personally don’t patron restaurants that ban kids any more than we would patron a restaurant that banned Jews.  (Well, technically, if they banned Jews, we wouldn’t be allowed to patron the restaurant.  But you get the point.)  Ban a behaviour — such as screaming and crying — fine.  Ban a group of people — no.

But I’m also of the ideology that the moment I leave my home, I am no longer an individual in my individual space, but I’m now an individual who is operating as part of a greater community.  There are plenty of benefits of being part of a community but there are also drawbacks.  Leaving my home means that I don’t get everything my way.  I don’t get everyone to stop talking on their mobile on the train.  I don’t get people to stop wearing perfume.  I don’t get people to walk faster on the sidewalk.

When I can’t handle the fact that other people are going to impede on my world with their sounds and smells and space-grabbing measures, I get carryout.  But when I can handle the fact that I can’t shape the world around me to my personal liking, I end up having interesting experiences when my own existence bumps up against the people around me.

*******

I think the reason we discriminate against kids is because we have no chance of ever becoming a kid again.  Whereas we don’t discriminate against the elderly (even though, as a society, we treat them like crap) because we know that we will one day become the elderly.

Esquire recently had a piece on Mr. Rogers, a series of connected stories about the man.  He was asked to write a chapter in a book for ophthalmologists about how to interact with kids in their office.  His chapter started with this sentence: “You were a child once, too.”

I think if we all start from that space, remembering that we were once children, it would not only help us to not be frustrated with them but would also give us the door to reach them.

I’m going to guess that you interact with kids on a somewhat daily basis.  Either you are a parent or an aunt or a teacher or a member of a community who encounters kids when you exit your house.

Spend one week saying to yourself before every interaction, “I was a child once, too.”  When you come from that mindset, you realize that just as you never purposefully tried to annoy the people around you when you were a child, the kids you’re interacting with are not trying to negatively impact you.  Their crying is not personal to you.  While it may be affecting you, it’s not about you at all.

Your child or your niece or your student or the kid in the grocery store may be annoying you.  But this isn’t their intention and if they were guided toward a different way to act and if they had the ability to choose that different way to act as their default state, they would act in a different way.

The only way that can happen — that crying, screaming kids turn into functioning members of society — is to keep them around and teach them a better way to act.  They won’t learn it by being kept out of spaces.  They’ll learn it by the adults around them silently saying to themselves, “I was a child once, too.”

*******

People think that because I’m a parent, I must enjoy being around babies.  I don’t.  I like the babies who belong somewhat to me — nieces or nephews or cousins or close friends’ children — but all the others are just tangible reminders of what my body can’t produce.  My family is not the size I want it to be, and while I accept that and am at peace with it, I don’t want to be around babies and think about it.

So I understand all the arguments about wanting a baby-free space.  But I still can’t get behind discriminating against kids any more than I can get behind discriminating against a person for their sex, race, or sexuality.

Image: Lars Plougmann via Flickr via Creative Commons license