This is how I saw the information first: Trying to maintain too many friendships can affect your fertility according to a study out of Oxford University.  Robin Dunbar conducted the research, as in the Dunbar of Dunbar’s number fame that I’ve written about before.

But we haven’t gotten to the really interesting part.  There was one study that followed 30 teenagers, but publications presented the study in two very different ways.

The Guardian, for example, focused on the ways men and women maintain friendships:

Men need to meet up face-to-face and bond over activities, according to the study of students leaving home for the first time, while for female friendships, long phone conversations can bridge the physical distance.

Whereas the Mirror focused on a very different finding from the study: your fertility.  They even used the title to promise fertility to anyone who has five close friends (Women Can Boost Their Fertility “By Having a Core of Five Best Friends”).

Same study.  Same 30 teenager participants.  Same presentation of the research at a conference.  Two vastly different articles.

I only found one other article about the presentation that straddled both facets of the study: The Telegraph.  That publication started with the focus on how men and women maintain friendships and then continued with Dunbar’s statements on infertility.

(Yes, I’m aware that it sounds like he is emphatically blaming stress for all infertility, but let’s ignore that for a moment since I can’t find a transcript of the actual presentation.)

The idea of different outlets presenting the facts differently is nothing new; one only needs to turn on MSNBC and Fox News’s coverage of the same event to experience that.  But what I found interesting is that instead of assigning meaning to a single quote or action, the news sources chose to focus on two very different aspects of the same study, basically leaving out the other side’s point in their coverage.  In the Guardian’s world, infertility isn’t part of the study, and in the Mirror’s world, Dunbar wasn’t focusing on how men and women experience friendship.

The mainstream news sources solely presented or led with the information about friendships, and the tabloids clearly appealed to our fears by focusing on fertility.  At this point, the media coverage is infinitely more interesting than the study itself, but if anyone tracks down a copy of the transcript from the presentation, I’d love to read it.

File this under Take Everything with a Grain of Salt.

I bought myself Jackie so I could show it to the kids.  I really can’t put into words how much I loved this movie.  I cried through the whole thing, and I knew I wanted to own it the moment it came out on video.  Moreover, I wanted it as a digital copy so I could carry it with me wherever I went.

Some of it is the writing and the acting, but a lot of it is the space.  The West Wing gets some of the layout of the White House very wrong, and it annoys me whenever they walk through a door that doesn’t exist.  But this movie not only got the layout correct, but it makes me feel like I’m there.  Yes, we could watch a documentary on the White House and it would have the same effect, but this feels… different.  More emotional.

So I’m now carrying around Jackie in my pocket.  And four Harry Potter movies.  Because… you know… Potter.

*******

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:

• “Of Love and Rolling a Dosa” (Happiness and Food)
• “The Parents Who ‘Regret Having Children’” (Different Shores)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Riding the IVF Roller Coaster has a post that makes a great point: there is no formal declaration of best friendship in the way that you clearly know where you stand when it comes to marriage.  This means that I can consider someone my best friend, but maybe I’m not their best friend.  She writes: “However, why aren’t there rules about this? What about a ceremony to acknowledge who the best friend couples are? Why aren’t there rules to say if X is Y’s best friend, then it must be mutual and Y must be X’s best friend. I feel like a teenager who doesn’t know if she should refer to someone as her girlfriend.”  A really great question.

Bent Not Broken recalls a painful moment of someone springing an ultrasound video on her.  She thought she was going to get puppies doing cute tricks.  Instead she saw a baby wiggling around on the screen.  It’s a great post of how one person’s pleasure can be another person’s pain, and a good reminder to tread carefully, thinking through things before you click send or call someone over to see the “cutest thing ever.”

Anabegins has a post viewing your life in monthly (vs. daily) chunks.  She explains, “This past week I haven’t read or spent one on one time with anyone in my family. I may think I’m failing at my explicitly stated goals. But take a step back and look wider and the perspective is much different — this MONTH I’ve mediated 90% of days, had 3 one-on-one dates with each kid AND my husband, read 2 amazing books, and exercised 12 times.”  It’s a great reminder of looking at life goals in different ways to see the real story.

Lastly, No Baby Ruth is pregnant before IVF round 2, and I love her post because it captures the ups and downs of an early pregnancy.  Clearly someone out there has the early pregnancy experience that involves marveling over a positive pee stick and then running down the beach with the wind blowing in her hair and then happily shopping for baby clothes at six weeks (in other words, every pregnancy montage in a made-for-tv movie), but I do not know these people.  Pregnancy after infertility is hard, and because you know things so early, you go through the ups and downs of fear and reassurance.  Sending her good thoughts for smooth sailing from here on out.

The roundup to the Roundup: I now have Jackie in my hot little hands.  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 17th and February 24th) 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 am still enjoying American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld.  I don’t have any brilliant insights into how one goes about keeping someone close who holds divergent views from your own, but there have been a few moments where I’ve grabbed my notebook and jotted down something because it resonated with me.

One of these moments is early on in the book when she confronts someone who swindled a family member.  She slips between two houses to cry in private and have a conversation with herself.  Within moments, she is calm and collected, and she states: “Long ago, I had become my own confidante” (p. 138).

When she calls herself her own confidante, she’s not being facetious.  She talks to herself — in her head, but still addressing her feelings, answering questions, and giving comfort.  She is the advice giver she wishes she had outside her own brain, but she doesn’t stress the fact that some of her relationships are strained.  She is, after all, her own confidante.

I sat thinking about this idea for a long time because I am someone who likes to spend time with myself.  Sometimes I will joke about it when I’m going out with myself and sing a throaty version of “My Own Best Friend” from Chicago.  But while I’m out, am I really talking to myself?

The act of telling yourself something, as I often do on this blog, creates clarity.  It leads you to action or puts things in perspective.  Writing it down, putting it into words, matters.  And maybe THAT is the biggest loss of people not writing on their own blogs.  Yes, they are still throwing up small bon mots on Facebook or Twitter, but they’re not delving deep, telling themselves their own story.  In stepping away from that conversation with yourself, do you lose that role as trusted confidante of your own mind?

Do you tell yourself things, or do you just assume your brain already knows everything happening in your life?

I want to loop back to something that happened about a week ago.  The twins and I did Note to Self’s Privacy Paradox together.  It was pretty good.  I wish they had spent more time covering the pros and cons of some of the suggestions — it’s fine to point out an add-on, but the listener should also know how that add-on may affect their Internet experience — but, overall, it was a good reminder of how we are tracked every single second of the day.

One of the activities included a site where you could plug in a sample of your writing and it would analyze you in the same way trackers analyze and categorize you as you surf the web.  Not every “fact” that data gathererers like Facebook have about you are correct.  Some of them have been inferred by what you like or how long you spend on a site or how you word things.

This site, Apply Magic Sauce, states that it “accurately predicts psychological traits from digital footprints of human behaviour.”  I used the cut-and-paste feature to feed it a bunch of random blog posts.  The magic sauce is fairly certain that I sound like I’m in my mid-twenties and my psychological gender is masculine.

I’m more liberal (yes), more impulsive than organized (no), more contemplative (yes), more competitive (no), and more laid back (no).

Though it gave a deeper description that felt a little more accurate later on the page.

Lastly, it told me my leadership potential.

I’ve never taken that personality test, so I’m not sure whether I actually am an INTP, though it sounded pretty accurate reading the description.

What made me so amused was that each post I fed into the site came back with a high probability of being male.  Other facets of my personality changed.  I wasn’t always an INTP.  I wasn’t always in my twenties.  But I always male.  The lowest rating I got was 75% (“your probability of being male is 75%”), but most of the time it was in the high 90s.  Even my Valentine’s Day post yielded a 94% chance of identifying as male.

It made me wonder how I am categorized by various sites.  Do they know I’m a woman?  Do they know I’m introverted?  That I prefer solids to prints, paint to wallpaper, indoors to outdoors?  Do they know I always eat yogurt for breakfast?  That I care about environmental issues?

By the way, this post stating above that I am a woman still yielded an 82% chance of being male.  And it tells me I sound like I’m 22 years old.  But I’m still an INTP, so there’s that.

Go feed one of your posts into the site and tell me how it categorized you.

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

*******

I love the idea of a book club, but I hate the actuality of a book club because every one I have ever been in goes the same way.  I read a book that I don’t really enjoy because it’s the selection, foregoing something I really do want to read, and then arrive at the meeting and discover that over half the group hasn’t read it at all, and no one really moves to discuss it.

But I thought this book club for two is a brilliant idea.  Rather than reading the book ahead of time, they read it over the phone to one another.  They can discuss it in real time or just relax and listen to the story.

I do this with the twins — we’re currently reading Sleeping Giants together, though the ChickieNob and I are also reading Twilight without the Wolvog — but I never thought to do it with someone my age.  I guess you would have to find someone who shares the same reading taste so you don’t run into the problem above — spending time with books that annoy you at the expense of spending time with a story you want to read.

What do you think about reading a book aloud with another person as a book club for two?

*******

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.