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.

This is it.  The last post about Matthew Quick’s book, Every Exquisite Thing. You have to be impressed by a single book that has generated 8 blog posts. (You can find the other ones here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)  As always, 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.  But it makes a damn fine beach read.

There are times in your life when you feel like you’ve met everyone.  I rationally know that there are thousands of people around me — right here in this town — that I don’t know, but… it also feels like I rarely connect with new people.

The same goes with interests.  It feels like I’ve already established all of my interests, even though rationally I know that I can scroll back through the blog and see things like video game genres or guitar lessons — interests that were new at one point or another.

There is always a chance that a new friendship or interest or opportunity will pop up on any given day.  Which is why I appreciated this sentiment from the book, and it feels like a perfect end point to all the navel-gazing.

On page 253, Nanette asks, “Is there anyone worth admiring in the world? Or does everyone let you down eventually?”

She receives an answer on page 254 from her therapist:

There are seven billion people in the world, and you have only experienced twenty thousand at the most. And those twenty thousand were fairly homogenous. Your experiences with people have been largely dictated by your parents’ choices. The neighborhood in which they chose to purchase a house. Where they sent you to school. And maybe those choices weren’t the best for you. Maybe you don’t fit in where you are now. But you still managed to survive four years of high school and have a few meaningful experiences along the way. There are seven billion other people out there. Seven billion. Are you really pessimistic enough to believe that you wouldn’t get along with any of them?

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

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This article is about spring break (vs. summer break) AND it’s about millennials, but other than those two facts, it totally resonated with me: I have a problem taking off of work.

It isn’t shame.  Or guilt — I don’t feel guilt over saying that I need time off.  But I do have trouble figuring out how to take off so that no one else is inconvenienced and all the work gets done.  Sometimes I can work ahead or catch up after I’m back.  But I usually end up checking in at least twice a day while I’m away, answering questions so other people can complete tasks.

This isn’t a problem because I don’t mind doing it.  It’s me setting the expectation rather than having someone else tell me how things are going to be.  And I do it both because I appreciate it when other people check in while they’re away and answer my questions, plus it makes returning to work a little less stressful at the end of the vacation.

Do you fully check out when you’re on vacation, or do you still check in with work (if you work) while you’re away?

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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 was going to include this in the Roundup, but the post needed its own breathing space.  So think of this like the Roundup-lite: one really thought-provoking post on where sadness meets grief.

Inexplicably Missing has a post about invisible grief which brought up a thought-provoking idea that I’ve been chewing on all week.  She writes, “the grief may be unnecessary because I don’t even know if I am supposed to be grieving, because maybe our missing child will miraculously show up one day.”

As I asked in her comment section, is grief something we should wait to feel, separating it from sadness?

Like is grief something we only feel after we definitively know something, or can we feel grief before we know the “end point”?  For instance, it is grief when we know a person is dying, but it isn’t grief when we’re sad because someone is seriously ill.  Isn’t it partially sadness because we’re feeling the bad news but we also have hope?  When there is no hope — when we definitively know — isn’t that when it moves from sadness to grief?

You can certainly grieve points in a journey.  You can grieve that infertility diagnosis (but only after you have one in hand?  Is it grief when you start suspecting something is wrong?) or the end of a cycle.  But is everything else sadness?

Is there a difference?  I personally don’t use sadness and grief interchangeably; I apply them to two very different situations.  But there is this fade point between the two, where sadness passes into grief or grief moves into sadness.

What do you think?

Linus has learned a fun little trick.  Sometimes I need to use the phone’s speaker when I’m on a call so my hands can be free to take notes.  Several times I’ve given him an extra treat before these calls so he’ll be quiet in the background.

He has now learned to wheek whenever he sees my hand reach for the phone.  He stands at attention, watching my hand, and the moment my fingers close around the plastic, he happily wheeks as he runs back and forth.  “It’s time!” he cries as he kicks into the air, popcorning across the cage.  “She must talk over speaker phone!  She is my hostage!  I am going to keep doing this until she reinforces this terrible behaviour by giving me another treat to get me to be quiet.  I am so smaaaaaaart!”

But this is where you’re wrong, friend.  The twins are now home for summer and can take you out of the room when I need to make a call.  I hope you enjoyed that extra lettuce because the treat train is pulling into the station.  Or out of the station.  Whichever phrase makes more sense in cutting off my guinea pig from his piggish ways.

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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:

• “Giving Up” (The OCD Infertile)
• “Chapter Twenty-Three: Musings on Motherhood” (My Journey Creating Life)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Different Shores has a post about bringing children to the workplace (and the comment section is hopping — dive in there!).  I’m in the camp where it makes sense if you’re visiting an individual at the workplace and bring along the kids, but not for the sole reason of introducing your co-workers to the kids.  I gave the example of visiting Josh at work.  I brought the kids to his workplace to have lunch with him.  Other people swung into his office to see the kids, but the reason to bring them to the office wasn’t to have his co-workers meet them.  If the intent was introducing the kids, we did that outside the office.  If the people weren’t close enough to see outside of work hours, then they probably didn’t need to meet the kids.  Feel free to disagree with me — I want to hear the other side of this.

I love Anabegins post on feeling like something has changed and that she has become more herself.  I have felt this sensation before, too, and she describes it perfectly.  She begins, “Lately I feel like I’m a different, but vaguely familiar, person to who I have been for the past decade or so. I think I’m rediscovering the real me, buried under years of working too hard, sleeping too little, being too anxious and sad and exhausted, to really have much of any personality at all.”  Go read the whole thing.

Lastly, I love reflective blogoversary posts, and Kmina doesn’t disappoint with her musings at eight years.  It is about writing for eight years (and reading blogs for eight years) but it’s also about living eight years since the start of the blog.  She writes, “I am also kinder than I used to be and I hope I can hang on to this. I hope life allows me to remain kinder than I was before. This is not really a matter of choice, life can drive you to places you had no idea you could end up into, so I can only hope for the best and cross the bridge of worst if I get to it.”  A good reminder.  Here’s to eight more.

The roundup to the Roundup: Undoing Linus’s bad habits.  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 9th and 16th) 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.