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

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Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day (usually called MLK Day) in America.  It feels particularly poignant this year because we’re moving between two very different types of leaders.  Obama guided by pointing out the positive.  And Trump… well… I can’t say that we are being guided anywhere good.  Insurance companies will benefit greatly from his administration.  Individuals, not so much.

King wasn’t a perfect leader or a perfect person, but he showed up and he cared and he tried his best to guide the nation towards a better place where one group of people didn’t need to be down for another group of people to be up.

I think I miss him a little extra this year because we need leaders like that — leaders who can speak eloquently to express our hearts and energize us to keep fighting for equality.  There are strong leaders out there (Elizabeth Warren comes to mind).  We need them to get a lot louder now that Trump is leading us backwards instead of forwards.

To me, King is a great reminder that it’s not about perfection.  It’s about humanness; looking for the good in others and understanding that we’re all in this together.

What do you think makes a great leader?

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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.

Bleak.  That is the word that pops into my head when I listen to the news or read the paper or peruse Facebook.  Every new development about the incoming administration makes me want to step away from everything and everyone; huddle on the floor with Truman, count down the 1,460 days until the next term.  Except.  I know that the damage inflicted on the next four years will have repercussion well into the future.

See?  Bleak.*

When deep breaths don’t work — and I’ll be frank, I’m past the point of deep breaths — there are Jane McGonigal’s SuperBetter power-ups.  Power-ups are items in video games that give the player more energy or extra powers or additional time.  For instance, you may catch a bouncing star on the screen and suddenly be able to run through enemies without being affected or eat a flower and be able to spit fireballs.

McGonigal defines a power-up as any “positive action you can take, easily, that creates a quick moment of pleasure.”  So going to Disney World would definitely make me happy, but it isn’t easy.  And listening to music is easy, but it doesn’t make me happy.  This list is personal — it’s what brings YOU pleasure that is easy to access or do.

I’ve been struggling to come up with my power-ups in the face of this bleakness; things that bring me as much (if not more) happiness than the news brings me sadness.  Like I put a few apps on the list because they always make me happy: Shuffle Cats, Hay Day, Solitaire, Backgammon, Desert Golfing, Mini Metro.  They all make me happy, but do they make me happy enough?  If I’m being honest, they make me feel a little shallow, which brings down the pleasure factor.

[It doesn’t help that McGonigal’s are so virtuous.  Singing loud?  Dancing in the living room?  Eating a handful of almonds?  It’s hard to say, “Making a fake metro system on an app makes me happy for five minutes” when you notice other people are talking about getting out into the sunshine and going for a walk with their dog.  I don’t like sunshine, and I don’t have a dog.]

I’ve always kept a “like” list at the front of my bullet journal, so I mined it for my power-ups.  I like magic, so I thought about watching magic tricks on YouTube.  There are a lot of books I love, and I could read a chapter in one of them.  Coffee.  I am a big fan of coffee, and it would make me feel happy to have a cup of iced decaf in the middle of the day.  And I am a fan of chess.  I could play a game of chess.

The book helps you to think up power-ups with a list of questions on page 176.  What’s a song that makes me feel powerful?  “Forgotten Years” by Midnight Oil.  (Maybe?  I don’t know if powerful is the right word.  But it feels like we’re currently living the history that the next generation will claim as “these should not be forgotten years.”) Almost anything They Might Be Giants makes me feel happy, but that’s not the same as powerful.

Who makes me feel calm?  Josh.  What physical activity energizes you?  Nothing.  I’m an indoor kid who prefers to read and not run.  Is there a place that I can get to easily that makes me happy?  My bed.

This is sounding like a real downer of a power-up post.  But here’s the thing she points out: Happiness begets happiness.  When you are feeling bleak, you use a power-up and it barely does anything.  But you use a power-up and another power-up and another power-up, and at some point, you start to actually feel happy rather than using bits of forced happiness, and that real happiness begets more real happiness until you’re using the power-ups as a little burst from time to time instead of a way to get through the day.

I decided to put one power-up into effect every day: I am going to read for 20 minutes during lunch.  For 10 years, I’ve eaten lunch at my desk and worked through the meal.  I’m going to take two weeks to read mid-day and see if that changes the way I approach the news knowing I have that break to look forward to and energize me for the second part of the day.

What are five things that consistently make you happy or feel good?

* In my defense, if I had written this post when I originally wanted to write this post, I would probably have felt more energy for power-ups.  But I made the note to write about this on October 14th, back when I foolishly believed we’d spend the next four years moving things forward instead of backward.

I just discovered Curtis Sittenfeld.  People, why didn’t you tell me about her books?  Okay, you probably did tell me about her books because she has been on my TBR pile for a long time.  I wanted American Wife because… well… it feels fitting at the moment, and I’ll get it from the library this weekend, but I ended up starting with Prep.

It is so good that I tried to hold it open with the edge of the microwave while I made popcorn on the stovetop, desperate to sneak in a single page.

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I haven’t gotten a chance to listen to this episode of Terrible, Thanks for Asking yet, but the sixth episode is about miscarriage and secondary IF.  You can download the MP3 from the site, though I can’t figure out how to embed the episode on the blog.

If you don’t know this podcast, the explanation on the front page of their site says it all: “You know how every day someone asks “how are you?” And even if you’re totally dying inside, you just say “fine,” so everyone can go about their day? This show is the opposite of that.”

A much needed conversation.

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It’s Friday the 13th.  Why do I have a compulsive need to mention that in the Roundup whenever Friday and the 13th collide?  I have no clue.

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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 Doesn’t Just ‘Go Away’” (Our Misconception)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Inconceivable has an update about her absence, musing about the hidden stories we contain.  How you can carry infertility and loss with you every day, and no one around you has a clue what is happening in your heart.  It’s really a nod to all of our silent stories; everyone carries something.

River Run Dry has a post about the feeling of Not Enough that came to me at the perfect moment (so thank you for your words).  She captures crying in the car: “I feel Not Enough right now, and it’s only Tuesday, and all the days I need to get through are stretched in front of me, weeks and months and years and decades full of tasks and To Dos, and I’m so scared I’m always going to be To Doing and my heart will never feel full… I looked up and saw this gorgeous sunrise.”  I love this post.

Different Shores had to endure coffee with a woman who moaned on and on about her daughter who wasn’t producing grandchildren.  She had to sit across from her while she announced that she couldn’t think of anything worse, nor could she hear the possibility that there was nothing empty about living without children.  She writes, “Fear illness, fear poverty, fear dangerous presidents, but please don’t fear a life like mine.”  That is a rallying cry if I ever heard one.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ takes the idea of people crossing cultures and applies it to different types of families.  In the same way that we go into other people’s cultures and enjoy them through travel or restaurants or celebrations, we can also visit each other’s lives and celebrate all that is good in our choices.  If you can see the benefit of getting to eat food from various cultures, surely you can also see the benefit from sitting and listening to someone tell you about a life different from your own.

The roundup to the Roundup: Just started reading Curtis Sittenfeld.  Podcast you may want to hear.  Friday the 13th.  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 6th and January 13th) 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 encountered two interesting (albeit morbid) thoughts in the same week.  The first was an essay on Kokatu.  The author lost his father last spring and is currently musing on what he should do with all of his father’s game save files.  It made me think about my own game save files and what I would want to happen after I’m gone.

I mean, I’ve worked hard on my Hay Day farm and solving the puzzles in LEGO Dimensions.  I hope someone would come around and keep those games going for me, or at least enjoy playing inside all of my hard work once or twice, despite the fact that I would break everyone’s fingers if they touched those game save files while I was still alive.

The essay is really about what we leave behind and the stories those files tell.  His dad played hours of Civilization, which begs the question “why?”  Because it was fun?  Because it was a place where he felt in control?  I know my love of Hay Day is tied to the low-stakes organizational nature of the game.  Cleaning my house is big and unruly: Do I want to save or toss this paper?  Taking care of my fields in Hay Day takes a swipe of the finger.  The game behaves in the same way, day after day after day.  In an unpredictable and often-times scary world, Hay Day is a sunny place where it never rains, crops never die, and the townspeople live in friendly harmony.  The exact opposite of watching the news.

I hope someone keeps these save files as well as all of the maps and notes I have stored in a box that go with hundreds of interactive fiction games.  But those are my wishes; once I’m gone, I don’t know if those things will matter to anyone else.

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The second thought came in a podcast.  In “Messages From the Beyond” on Note to Self, Manoush and her team speak to a mother who is using Safe Beyond, a service that allows you to record emails, voice notes, and videos and will deliver them certain dates or on set events in the future after you’re gone.

The woman in the episode is recording messages for her children as she battles cancer, though she changes course towards the end of the episode when her kids let her know that they will not be able to handle receiving an email from her on their wedding day if she is not at their wedding.

The podcast producer asks the hard question, one that inadvertently comes up in the essay above, too: Are the messages for the creator or the receiver?  If the creator wants to make them, should the receiver have to read them?  Or if the receiver says they don’t want them, should the creator stop even though she has a need to leave her words behind?

I don’t like the idea of surprising people and having a message pop into their inbox when they least expect it, but I do like both the idea of leaving messages behind as well as receiving messages after someone is gone.  Of course, I don’t trust other websites and their machines, so I could see myself only doing something like this via paper or digital files on my computer with many backups.  And then marking the envelopes with messages such as “to be read on your graduation day” or “to be read whenever you miss me.”

It would make me feel better to know I left behind those notes and that people will still get to connect with me after I’m gone.  But I’m not sure if the people I would leave them for would want them.  Maybe it would make it harder to let someone go.

I think it helps if it’s a natural extension of what you already do while you’re living.  For instance, when the kids went on a camping trip this year, I filled their bag with little notes marked “to be read on the first night” or “to be read when you’re missing home.”  One of the kids had a hard first night, and I had to drop off a new handful of notes to be read because they opened up all the remaining notes to get through that first night.  So maybe they would want notes after I’m gone.

But maybe those camping notes only worked because the kids knew they were a paper bridge between seeing each other again.  Words to hoist them over the divide until we’re on the other side of the trip.  And, clearly, death would not be like a camping trip at all.

Unlike the save files, which were made solely for myself, these notes would be reaching outward, speaking directly with people I love.  They would tell people information, much in the same way those save files tell a story, but those words would be meant for them vs. ideas that they inadvertently stumble across when boxing up a life.

It was food for thought during a long drive.

Would you want to receive notes after someone was gone?  Would you be okay if they came to you on random days and you never knew when you’d receive one?  Would you want to leave other people notes this way?

I first heard about Universal Basic Income from a childhood friend who touts it as the best! idea! ever!  It’s not a bad idea, but it’s an idea that works best in its natural environment as part of the overall economic and political system.  If not, it’s sort of like placing a lion in an elementary school.  You can do it, and it would certainly be interesting, but I don’t think it would be what we’d call successful for either the lion or the students.

Meaning, people have a tendency to see something working in one place and believe they can implement that idea in another place.  The reason it works in the first place is because the idea is integrated into a larger mentality and belief system, and the reason it usually doesn’t work in the second place is because the system doesn’t really fit with the overall personality of the new space.

The idea of UBI is to give people an allowance that covers all of their needs.  You work out what is the lowest amount of money a person can live on while having their basic needs of food, shelter, and health care met, and then the government gives that money to the citizen so they have the breathing space to find their most productive space in helping society continue to run.

You may have heard about it recently because Finland is testing out the idea on 2000 people.

Listen, there are definite benefits to UBI.  If everyone has a basic income, you don’t need millions of social welfare programs.  There would be no homelessness, no hunger, less crime, more education.  People wouldn’t stay in jobs that make them miserable simply to hold onto benefits.  In fact, employers would no longer have to worry about providing benefits at all.  You would still need to work if you wanted extras like fashionable clothing or iPhones.  But your basic needs would all be covered.

It sounds good, and it certainly could work, small-scale.  But UBI requires high taxation levels (at least it would in capitalistic countries like the US), and a social mentality where people put taking care of their neighbours over their own personal gain.  I can’t really see that working out large-scale in the US, especially not in today’s political climate.  I can’t even see it working large-scale in Finland, or any country without a shift in mindset.

But I’m totally curious to watch it play out.

Do you think something like UBI could ever work, large-scale?  Any economists out there with thoughts on this?