I don’t have a lot of secrets.  By “secrets,” I mean things I tell no one.  Josh will attest that I like to tell him everything I’m thinking and feeling (usually beginning around 11 pm).  If he is out, I will tell my parents, siblings, or friends.  The things I don’t tell are pretty boring, and I wouldn’t call them secrets.

And this article about brain hacking still gave me pause.

There is a difference between choosing to tell Josh my thoughts or choosing to write about events here, and having someone else pluck those opinions or beliefs out of my brain.  Like the technological equivalent to a steaming mug of veritaserum (“Three drops of this and even You-Know-Who himself would spill out his darkest secrets.” –Snape)

The article explains how it could happen… now:

At the Enigma security conference here on Tuesday, University of Washington researcher Tamara Bonaci described an experiment that demonstrated how a simple video game could be used to covertly harvest neural responses to periodically displayed subliminal images. While her game, dubbed Flappy Whale, measured subjects’ reactions to relatively innocuous things, such as logos of fast food restaurants and cars, she said the same setup could be used to extract much more sensitive information, including a person’s religious beliefs, political leanings, medical conditions, and prejudices.

Okay, so not exactly the same thing as knowing that I purchased a chocolate bar this week (by the way, Josh, I purchased a chocolate bar and didn’t share it), but still.  This is especially true if that data was mined unknowingly: if companies or organizations used signals from wearable technology, timing the images with information from the device.

Except… it’s not as if they have to do anything that drastic.  At any given moment, Facebook can look down my wall, see what I’ve posted or liked or read or lingered on, and deduce my political leanings, future purchases, or medical conditions.  And I’ve knowingly given those secrets away, if we can call them secrets.

We give away our thought privacy every time we interact with Facebook content, so why did this article give me pause? 

It was a bit of perfect timing because I just signed up for Note to Self’s Privacy Paradox with the kids.  I’m a Believer.  Take the quiz and find out your privacy personality.

Linus and I have been having a good time curling up on the sofa and reading the Washington Post.  He likes to face the iPad screen as if he is reading, too.  He’s just a really smart pig.

Reading the Washington Post is the way I’m going to quiet down the noise online.  I decided this week that I am only going to get my news from five sources: Washington Post, New York Times (less so, since I only have a certain number of free articles per month), NPR, BBC, and CNN (more news than commentator opinion).

If something is actually news, it will show up in one of those five sources above.  Not every story will hit all five spaces, but important information will hit one of those five spaces.  And if it doesn’t appear in any of those five spaces, I’m going to mark it down as somewhere between not true and too soon to tell.

The rest of my time online, I’m reading personal stories or emotional reactions to the news.  In other words, I’m reading your blogs.  I don’t mind reading about current events in a space where I already connect with the writer; in fact, I enjoy that.  But the constant barrage of opinion pieces of Medium and Huffington Post, not to mention the countless memes and tweets, have me burned out.  As I said earlier this week, it’s like one, on-going scream.  And I need things to be a little quieter if I want to think.

Where are you getting your news?

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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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

In Search of Motherhood has a post about making a hard choice.  She turns down an academic position despite wanting it badly due to how much it will take her away from her kids: “But it is so incredibly frustrating.  I am forced to choose between a satisfying professional life and dedicating time to my children.  It shouldn’t have to be this way.”  It shouldn’t, and that’s a fight worth having: making the workplace a healthy part of a life vs. the workplace overshadowing a life.  Everyone needs a work-life balance, whether parenting or not.

Riding the IVF Roller Coaster has a post about immigration that contains an important reminder getting lost in the global conversation: “I think that people forget that people don’t want to NEED to leave home. They were proud not of what it had become but of its heart. They were proud of their language; my friend tried taught me some Vietnamese because I was interested. They were proud of their food and shared it with me. They had a large flag in the dining room. They also felt an obligation to the country that took them in.”  It is hard enough to leave what you know.  It is harder still to feel unwelcome where you land.

Lastly, Pages, Stages, and Rages has a post about how Broadway songs are keeping her sane.  She admits: “I then thought of what I used to do when I was uncomfortable and I thought of Man of La Mancha. Got the CD and listened to it. And today, today, it is helping me go on. Helping me say that I can follow the quest. No matter how hopeless, no matter how far.”  I love this, from one musical theater geek to another.

The roundup to the Roundup: Where I’m getting my news.  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 January 27th and February 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.

A long time ago (at least, it feels like a long time ago), every once in a while, something would happen and we would all react to it.  Sometimes it was something good — Princess Kate’s wedding — and sometimes it was something horrible — a mass shooting — but in all cases, we were hungry for connection; we were hungry to read each other’s words and feel comfort or collective joy.

But now the issues come fast and furious, every single day.

There is something new to write about every day; a new fear, a new outrageous action, a new protest.  It feels like this administration is strangling out everything else in the world, smothering out the day-to-day moments until the online world feels like one, enormous, on-going scream.

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When we first brought Linus home, ChickieNob whisked him away to her room and closed the door.  When I came up a little while later to check what was happening, I found them curled up together, watching an episode of Buffy.  Linus was attentively listening to her explain the basic plotline for the show, and the names and relationships of the various characters.

I don’t want that memory smothered out by someone else’s hate.  But it’s hard to remember to write about it when I peruse the news sites prior to opening an empty blog post.  Every sweet moment flies out of my head, replaced by the enormous, on-going scream.

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I finished Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld (so good — it made me think back to my own, albeit-non-boarding-school high school experience) and started American Wife.  I borrowed the book from the library, and it smells like someone kept the copy in a nest of old pantyhose for several years.

I wanted to read it because my understanding of the book is that it’s a fictionalized account of Laura and George Bush, or a more liberal first lady speaking about her husband, a Republican President.

I know very little about Laura Bush.  My only Laura Bush story involves a wedding registry at a Crate and Barrel.  We had just come from the doctor’s office — this was before we started treatments — and we were trying to get a referral for the RE.  I was miserable, but we had to take care of a wedding gift.  It took about twenty minutes to get the registry up on their ancient computer, and we were just about to scroll down and see what they wanted when the Secret Service came in and said we had to leave because they had to sweep the store so Laura Bush could shop.

This is a pretty common occurrence in DC, like traffic stopping for the motorcade, but it’s annoying when you have one errand to run and you can’t complete it.  She browsed for all of five minutes, and then left without buying anything.  In the meantime, while we were standing outside for the sweep, the computer reset and we had to start from scratch bringing up the registry.  We gave up after a few minutes and our friends got a crepe pan — out go-to gift at the time.  So, sorry friends who got a crepe pan that wasn’t on your registry.

Anyway, I got this book because I was hoping that it would give insight into how we can live in this world for the next few years.  How we can get along with family and friends who have different views.  Maybe it’s only fiction and I’ll be disappointed to learn the answer is just suck it up.  Or maybe there will be a kernel of something useful in the pages.  Because right now, my instinct is to join that enormous, on-going scream every single day.

What other sound can you make right now?

There are so many stories out there that tell you how to vanquish hate.  You throw the ring into the fires of Mount Doom or you destroy all the horcruxes.  But fewer stories that tell you how to keep someone close that stands on the other side of a deep divide.

Right now, that divide is so wide, I fear that not only will our hands never stretch and reach over that space, but that divide will remain for generations to come; the echoes of it repeating long after the original scream is gone.

I once dated a guy who had served in the army.  He said that whenever they were returning to base from a break, they would get to the central meeting point and then toss their bag on the floor and lie down, using it as a pillow for their head.  Even if they only had five minutes before they needed to get on the bus, everyone would grab the chance to zone out.  They would say in Hebrew “sea of time,” poking fun at the idea that five minutes off in the army is like hours in a spa in the day-to-day world.  Who was going to turn up their nose at five minutes?  Give up 300 whole seconds to relax?

I don’t think I’d do very well in the army.

I’m currently in the second week of taking a lunch break.  I set the timer for 20 minutes and read a book while I eat my cereal.  On one hand, I love it.  On the other, it makes it that much harder to return to work when the timer sounds.

Rather than appreciate my small sea of time, it feels harder to drag myself back to creating books rather than consuming books.

The break means a loss of momentum.  Sure, I “recharge” but at the expense of interrupted energy.  If I imagine my work energy sans break, it’s sort of like traveling through sections of Ohio.  It’s flat road without a lot of excitement, but it’s relatively easy to move forward.  My work energy with a break is like navigating a city… a hilly city like San Francisco.  There’s a lot of stopping and starting.  There are steep hills to climb but also big drops where my car can coast.  Which option helps me cover more ground?  I can’t decide.  I only know that there are days when I need to talk myself back in the desk chair, and I never had to do that back when I never left the desk chair.

The bulk of my work day is a seven hour stretch.  I also return to work an hour or so at night, and often put in time over the weekend.  At different jobs, I have needed the break more than others.  But in this line of work — thinking and writing — it feels like the break is both a welcome oasis in the day and a real energy disrupter.

Are you more productive with or without breaks?

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

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On the day we brought home Linus, a few miles away at the airport, a family with two kids were being detained.  Not for anything they did or intended to do but because of their country of origin.

That imbalance: One family can afford to keep a rodent as a pet, another doesn’t have a safe home.

It’s not as if you only have a single refugee family to choose from if you want to note the imbalance in this country.  We are a nation that entertains itself by wasting food.  We have television shows where contestants make creative dishes with expensive ingredients so judges can critique them, and those shows are filmed in cities where there are children dreading snow days because staying home from school also means a lack of access to food provided through the FARMs program.

That is privilege.  That is advantage.

That is what is giving me pause today.  What is giving you pause?

Actually, pause is the wrong term, since that pause means taking action: Make calls.  Join a protest.  Write a post.  Get out there and change things.

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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.