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.

Every time I’ve tried Google Cardboard, I’ve ended up feeling queasy for hours afterward.  So I’ve been avoiding all other VR headsets, believing that I’m just not built for virtual reality.  I almost turned down a chance to try an Oculus while at Mom 2.0.

But I had a few minutes before I needed to be at a meeting, so I shrugged and said okay.

The guy said that he would give me a general VR experience so I could see everything the headset could do.  I visited a planet, watched a fox play by a campfire, and examined an abandoned tea party set-up in a castle.  All of it was cool, but right before one of the segments, I heard the guy say, “You’re going to want to take a step back.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.  Honestly, I had forgotten the guy was even there.

But then suddenly the scene changed and I was standing on the ledge of a building in a futuristic cityscape, staring down 50 stories to the ground while spires loomed above me.  And I burst into tears.  I knew I was in a room; I knew I was safe.  But I was so overwhelmed by the sensation of feeling as if I was about to fly.  I could barely see the last few segments because I was so weepy.

I thought about it all night, and I went back to the display in the morning.  “You can get addicted,” he warned me as he adjusted the headset.  Maybe I am.  I mean, I haven’t had a VR experience since I’ve been home, and I haven’t rushed out to the store to purchase one (though I have poked around about it online to judge the cost).  But I think about it a lot.  I talk about it incessantly.  It was one of the coolest things I’ve ever experienced.

Because it feels so real and the images are so gorgeous, it’s easy to spend time there and forget there is anyone else in the room.  There is a part of me that understands the very thin line that divides reality from Ready Player One.

Have you ever tried a VR headset?  What was your experience?

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I’m in my last few days of being 42.  I am always bummed out about my birthday and getting older, but in this case, I waited my whole life to be 42, and now it’s almost over.

I was really excited to celebrate my Douglas Adams birthday.

But can I tell you the worst story?  When I was younger, I couldn’t wait to be 19 because it’s a number that is fun to say in Hebrew.  It has a “T” sound in the beginning of the word, but because of the other letters around it, it almost sounds like the word chai (as in “chai tea”) said with a T.  I know, sort of hard to imagine if you don’t know Hebrew, so here is a video of a guy saying the numbers 11 to 19.

Anyway I forgot that I was 19 until a few days before my 20th birthday.  I was washing my hair at my friend’s apartment in Oslo when it dawned on me that I had been 19 the whole year and had never said aloud how old I was.  My diary is entry after entry about how I was finally 19 and blew it.

Remembering that, I sucked the marrow out of being 42.  Thanks, Mr. Adams.

Is there a certain age you always wanted to be?  Why?

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I just celebrated the 30 year anniversary of my Bat Mitzvah.  By “celebrated,” I mean that I texted my friend who shares the same Bat Mitzvah date and said to her, “Happy Bat Mitzvahversary!”  I intended to get myself a treat, but the day got away from me and then it was time to go to a meeting for the twins’ B’nai Mitzvah.

Because they were born when I was 30, we always celebrate milestone moments 30 years apart.  They started Kindergarten 30 years after I started Kindergarten.  They will graduate 30 years after I graduated.  And they will have their B’nai Mitzvah 30 years after mine.

We’ve had the date for years, but it has always felt remote, like visiting the island of Sark.  It’s one of those places that doesn’t feel that far away (at least it’s not as far as Tibet) and should be accessible, yet I don’t fully believe I’ll ever get to visit.

But here is their B’nai Mitzvah, racing toward us.  Exactly 30 years after I stood on the bimah, pretty much to the hour, I sat at a round table, jotting down notes about assigning honours and ordering cookies for after their service.

It is this weird thing because I still remember sitting on the swing set in my backyard, teaching myself my Torah portion.

I’ve been working with the twins on theirs.  Because I have a translation degree, we’re coming at it from a translation angle.  We sit at the kitchen table, translating their portion together, from Hebrew to English using five dictionaries spread out around us.  We break apart words and look up their etymology and play with form so they can see how different words relate to one another.  As we translate the passage, we keep saying the words in Hebrew.  And that’s how we’re learning it; a few words at a time crawling under their skin, into their bones so that when their day on the bimah finally arrives, it will be like spending time with an old friend.

I still remember chunks of my Torah portion 30 years later.  I can sing the first few sentences without looking at the page.  I wonder if it will be that way for the twins, too, 30 years from now.