Josh decided that Linus needed a new cage.  He has been using Truman’s old cage, which fit Truman’s personality.  Truman was a pig that liked to know where I was at all times and not move very much.

Linus, on the other hand, likes to run.  He likes to run and jump.  He likes to land in his food dish and toss all the pieces of kale in the air.  He likes to jump over the food dish and kick his little legs to the side like he’s in the ensemble of Newsies.  Everything is exciting in his world, and he likes to make life a full body experience.

Josh was at work when the new cage arrived, but I opened it and let him check out the base.  He looks so little in the vast space.

He licked the bottom and sniffed the sides.

He thought about it long and hard…

…and peeked out the top.

And finally he backed himself into a corner and peed to mark his territory.  He was home.

Allison told me about the Yayoi Kusama’s exhibit at the Hirshhorn, and now I’m trying to get tickets.  The timed tickets are free, but I read that they’re snatched up in seconds whenever they go up for grabs.  Aren’t the rooms gorgeous?  NPR posted a video for the exhibit this week:

It reminds me of the mirrored room children’s memorial at Yad Vashem.  That space makes me feel so tiny; like I’m floating in space.

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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:

• “Infertility Is” (North of Wrigley)
• “In Response” (Not a Wasted Word)
• “I Do Not Miss TTC” (Infertile Phoenix)
• “Innen und Aussen” (Elaine Ohne Kind)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Great minds think alike.  Kmina’s Blog also posted about dealing with the world when it feels out of control.  She writes: “Seriously, can you blame me for wanting to retreat in my own bubble and not.leave.it.until.it.gets.better? Yet, I can’t. Now more than ever, normal people need to be heard. So I read the news, and comment, and disseminate information and articles that are SANE and point out to the TRUTH.”  It is a wonderful post, and I love the dream at the end.

Ms. Infertile has a great post about an art exhibit that bubbles up questions about infertility.  She explains, “I decided, after a couple glasses of wine, to sit and take part of a performance piece called ‘Negative Data: Questions’  – you ask a question via writing and the artist answers back with another questions, the dialogue as a series of questions until we run out of paper.”  She has a picture up of the back and forth.

Infertile Phoenix recounts a frustrating exchange with her mother.  Her mother points out that she still spends time with people who have parents despite her own mother being gone and asks why her daughter can’t build a relationship with her cousins now that they have children.  This post is so important because it highlights the depth of misunderstanding in the general public about the absence inherent to infertility.

Lastly, Res Cogitatae has a post that asks an important question: Is it always good to delve back into memories?  As she reflects on old entries in a journal, she writes, “The entries are nothing special. I didn’t know, of course, that those visits would turn out to be the last visits. I thought we had years left.”  It is painful for her to read them now, knowing what she knows.  Go over and participate in the discussion about returning to memories.

The roundup to the Roundup: Seeing Yayoi Kusama’s exhibit (maybe?).  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 February 24th and March 3rd) 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 listened to a podcast and read a piece in Slate on the same phenomenon: Tilt.  Tilt is a poker term for “when players become overwhelmed by bad news and it starts clouding their decision-making.”  It comes from pinball — when you tilt the machine, it stops working — and Annie Duke, the poker player, explained why it’s so prevalent in cards.

Poker is a place where you make a decision and see results from that decision pretty quickly.  If things stop going your way, you start blaming the decision itself vs. the fact that you made a guess based on the information you had on-hand in the moment (and remembering that sometimes those guesses will yield good results and sometimes they won’t).  You get emotional, and the worrying starts clouding your judgment.

Infertility has more in common with cards than it does with other decisions in life.  While you may not find out the results instantly, you find them out comparatively quickly (within a few weeks or a few months), and then the next set of decisions steps up to the plate.  This is true regardless of how you’re resolving your infertility — each path demands that you make decision after decision and experience the results.

Compare this to making a decision about what you’re going to eat for breakfast.  You’re unlikely to see the results of that decision for decades, whether it buys you better health or clogs your arteries and gives you a heart attack.  Whether to transfer two embryos or whether to have an omelette for breakfast are both decisions; only one reveals the outcome early on and the other one hides it for many years.

Annie Duke gives a simple thing you can do to break the sensation of tilt and return to the same mindset you had when you made the first decision — before everything started to go to shit.  You ask yourself how you would feel about the moment if it had happened a year ago.  Would you still remember the decision, or would it have become a forgotten disappointment in a larger sea of disappointments?

Reflecting on this, I can see how some of my negatives affected me differently than other negatives, even though I treated all the negatives the same way in the moment.  I gambled in my cycle and I lost, so I was devastated.  But looking back, I can see plenty of those negatives were actually still pretty good decisions even if they didn’t yield the ultimate desired result.

I made a decision with the information I knew in the moment, and remembered that is the best a person can do.  They can’t have foresight and know definitively how things will turn out.  They acknowledge their emotional capital and spend it accordingly.  Doesn’t that make sense if you think about your emotional energy as a stack of poker chips and spend it depending on the hand you’re looking at in the moment?  Because that’s all you have — the information in-hand.  You can’t know the next card that will turn over except in terms of its probability.

So play the cards in your hand.  Accept that you may win and you may lose.  Don’t tilt.

There were two back-to-back ideas that popped up for me in SuperBetter that both applied (at least, for me) directly to infertility.

Too Statements

The first was an exploration of “too” statements on page 189 – 190: “I’m too sad to go to dinner with my friends,” or “I’m too overwhelmed to figure out this insurance stuff,” or “I’m too scared to explore a different path out of infertility.”  It would be an interesting exercise to go through the journal I kept before the twins and count how many times the word “too” appears in the pages.

I still make a lot of “too” statements, and I like Jane McGonigal’s advice because she isn’t telling me not to make them.  Saying or thinking “too” statements is okay as long as you say the rest of her sentence.

All you have to do is say the first part and then tack on an “and” statement, pointing out that you have every personal reason not to do X but you’re going to do it anyway.

So it would become, “I’m too sad to go to dinner with my friends, and I’m going to go anyway and try not to look at Sarah’s enormous belly.”  Or “I’m too overwhelmed to figure out this insurance stuff, and I’m going to call the company and write everything down so I can figure out what is covered.”  Or “I’m too scared to explore a different path out of infertility and I’m going to get over that fear by spending time reading about a different option and seeing if it’s right for me.”

See, you still get to feel whatever you need to feel, but it doesn’t stop you from continuing to move forward through life.  Just a small tweak in how you phrase something to yourself, but it makes a big difference.  Try it.

Celebrating Your Friends

The second was something that is a sensitive topic in this community: being happy for someone else.  It is easy to be happy for others when you feel happy for yourself, but it is also a skill to help another person celebrate their “win.”

The book assumes that someone’s ally is in a mental space to celebrate and support another person, though what isn’t covered is when you are someone else’s support system because you are both trying to attain your goals, and someone reaches their goal first.  How do you engage in the active constructive responding on page 251 when one person has good news and the other person doesn’t?

I think active constructive responding — “taking someone’s good news or success and helping them really savour and celebrate it” — is difficult for a lot of people to do.  As this site, Go Strength, states, “When people share good news, they want you to share in their joy. And this goes far beyond just a pat on the back. Conveying authentic interest, pride, and even curiosity in someone’s good news are all hallmarks of ACR.”

So how do you shriek with happiness and get excited to see ultrasound photos?  Is this impossible to do when you’re in the throes of your own crisis?

Again, McGonigal has sound advice: ask three questions.  While she doesn’t address this particular situation — your ally is still drowning while you have reached shore — she does give a concrete way you can practice ACR without having to fake joy.  Ask three questions, any three questions.  Asking question shows interest.  It gives attention.  And it gives you a chance to repeat their answer, which shows that you’re listening AND lets them hear their own good news again, which is enjoyable.

And you?  You can make a “too” statement to yourself and add the “and” statement to get through the moment.  Maybe in getting through the moment, you feel real happiness for your friend, too, even if that happiness comes with an “and.”

What do you think of McGonigal’s advice?

I’m writing about SuperBetter the app as well as SuperBetter the book because… well… I learned about them via a podcast and now I want to talk about everything I’m learning on them. If you want to talk about them, too, join along. If not, skip the posts marked SuperBetter.

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

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There is a town in England that has a box of prophecies, kept in a secret location near the Panacea Museum.  That fact is just a small portion of a larger article about a ritual held at the museum last December, but I kept scrolling back and forth, trying to digest every morsel of information about this box.

How could they not open it?

Regardless of how you feel about the contents inside, whether you think they’re true or random blatherings, how could people continue to let time pass without reading the predictions?  What if we never declare the bishops in crisis and the box gets lost?  Or the box is opened hundreds of years from now and the contents have disintegrated?

Who is hiding the box?  And is there a contingency plan if something ever happens to that person?

Aren’t you curious about the contents of the box?  Would you want to know the prophecies?

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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.