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

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How is this for meta: a MicroblogMondays post about MicroblogMondays.

If you are looking for a resolution for this upcoming year, look no more.  You should make the commitment of writing in your own space on the Web at least 52 times in 2017.  One post each week; at least one sentence long.  There is no rule that blog posts must be 500 words.  I’ve seen posts that were one sentence or one paragraph, and they were just as thought-provoking as long pieces.  Ask your readers a question.  Tell them what you are doing at that very moment instead of putting those words on Twitter.  Anything.

Why do I think this is important?  Because I think posting things in your own space not only gives you the warm glow of ownership over your ideas, but it also makes people more circumspect.  It makes people support their thoughts with examples, provide links to sources, and unpack their feelings.  When it’s your own space, you think twice before posting.  When it’s your own space, you tend not to forward or link to other articles without checking them out first.

I think blogging in your own space helps keep balance with the quick-moving world of other social media sites.  It’s like the front porch to a house where people sit down to talk and listen.  People don’t quickly scroll past blog entries.  And I think blogging is even more important — especially first-hand accounts of the world — in this day and age of fake news and slippery facts.

So I’m just putting this out there: Go write in your own space in 2017.

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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.

Bookmark this post because you are going to want to come back to it if you don’t have 45 minutes right now.  I promise that this tiny game will be well-worth your time.

I stumbled upon the Seers Catalogue much in the same way the character in the game finds the mysterious ad in the back of a magazine that leads them on their adventure.  Random clicks brought me to an article on The Verge, and the name of the game stuck in my mind when we were picking our next selection for our interactive fiction club.

“Let’s play Seers Catalogue.”

Where are we? 

A hiding place.

The game takes about 45 minutes to read through.  While you can leave it open and walk away from the screen, you cannot save your progress.  This is — perhaps — a good thing in the sense that the game lulls you into a dream state, and it’s better to commit to reading it vs. playing in drips and drabs.  It can only be accessed from a computer — not a mobile device.

It was like Mysterious Benedict Society for adults (though I didn’t see anything in the first play-through of the game that was inappropriate for kids, and I’m letting the twins read it).  It felt like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in game form.  There is no way to lose the game, but a few ways you can twist the story.

“Anything that is important has power,” says Mr. Bud. “And this is what the powerful use to maintain their control.”

Bookmark this post because after you play, I want you to come back here and tell me where the story took you.

Truman went back to the vet this week.  I thought his eye looked a little strange when I gave him breakfast, but it was still dark in the room and I was barely awake, so I chalked it up to weird lighting and moved on.  Later in the day, there was a cricket in the house, and I think you are all aware of the loud screams that I emit when I see a cricket.  Afterwards, I went to (1) calm Truman and (2) calm myself by getting love from Truman when I saw that his eye was red.

Like weirdly red.

I waited about a half hour and then called the vet because as I waited, it looked like Truman’s eye was turning inside out.  I would post a picture, but it may make you throw up in your mouth.  They told me to bring him in, so we drove over while I sang Truman’s favourite song — “Strike the Bell” — over and over again.

She checked that it wasn’t a brain tumour and then determined that there was an injury to his eyeball.  About three days earlier, I had opened a new bag of hay, and Truman had been happily rubbing his face in it while chirping on about how good it tastes by wheeking non-stop.  In fact, I had moved him several times when he tried to sleep with his face in the hay bowl, something that confused him because was I aware that this bag of hay was particularly delicious?  It seems that Truman has poked himself in the eye with said hay.  Good going, sport.

We’re only a few days into the eyedrops, but his eye has mostly gone back to normal.  It’s still clouded over, but at least it doesn’t look like it’s turned inside out.  The injury is still there, which freaks me out because the next step would be taking him to a guinea pig ophthalmologist.

Has he learned not to rub his face in the hay bowl?  No.  He was doing it again within 24 hours of returning from the vet.  Because the hay is that freakin’ good.

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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:

• “It’s Not Just a Brick” (The Empty Cookie)
• “Dinner Parties” (Ms. Infertile)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Notes from the Ninth Circle has a post contemplating her worth.  She bleakly wonders, “I wonder sometimes if the reason why God won’t give us another baby is because I’m not worth enough because I don’t do enough, don’t do well enough, at taking care of the family that I do have and the child that He did give me already.”  Even when your brain rationally knows your worth, it’s hard to convince the heart to shut its mouth.  Thank you for writing this.

Birds, Bees, and Medicine is taking care of herself, and that means calling a therapist to check herself for depression.  It’s an important read; moreso because she is a therapist herself, and she points out the importance of having an outsider judge your mental state vs. relying on yourself.  Good advice for non-therapists to take to heart.  You wouldn’t self-diagnose cancer, right?  You would go to a doctor if you felt something abnormal and allow them to judge the facts.  The same goes for our brains.

The Empress and the Fool has a post about people who give her know-it-all advice on the babies she is gestating.  The reality is just as nothing can prepare you for some life events, no one can know how your parenting experience is going to go.  I love this: “I am under no delusions about the rigors of raising children, while I am simultaneously humbled by the recognition that this is something I will not concretely understand until I am inside the experience, but treatment and miscarriage are also exhausting, except they are of the soul-sucking sort and entirely bereft of the joys that make parenting gratifying.”

Lastly, POF and Now What? has a post about family myths, those stories we tell ourselves about how our life should look.  She counters the list with all the myths she has removed from her definition of self, and all the things she actually is accomplishing.  It’s a really important post, and I hope everyone pauses to make their own three lists.

The roundup to the Roundup: Truman’s eye injury.  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 December 9th and 16th) 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.

So today’s SuperBetter tricks are concrete things you can use to get through difficult holiday moments.  Or, really, any moment.  We’ve been using them all over the place.

Distraction

The twins sat down for dinner and looked out the window. Every night, a family of deer ends up walking through our front yard or a neighbour’s yard, so we spend a lot of time looking out the window, waiting for them. I set down the meal and said, “I’m going to give you a task. I want you to spend 10 seconds NOT thinking about the deer. Don’t think about the deer AT ALL. Got it? 10 seconds, no deer. I’ll count.”

They both started giggling nervously as they looked at each other, and admitted at the end of the 10 second count that they had spent the entire 10 seconds thinking about the deer. How could they not? I had told them (1) don’t think about deer and (2) they were sitting by the window which is where they always see the deer. So there was nowhere to look that didn’t trigger the thought that I had just reminded them several times not to have.

I gave them the second part of the task: “Once again, spend a minute NOT thinking about the deer. But this time, I want you to come up with a list of words that contain an “S” somewhere before an “E” like house or seat or stare. As many words you can come up with in a minute while not thinking about deer. Got it? I’ll count again.”

They giggled through the first few seconds, but then I started seeing their fingers pop up as they counted how many words they could list in a minute. When I called time, they told me that while the deer had popped into their brain a few times towards the beginning, by the end, they had mostly forgotten about the deer until I stopped the activity.

The exercise highlights the idea of spotlight attention (p. 33), which explains how we can fully lose ourselves in a game and not realize how long we’ve been playing it. It’s also something that a person can use to distract themselves from anxiety when you’re in an uncomfortable situation or you’re going to your worst case scenario mental place, even if triggers for those thought are all around you. If nothing else, playing this quick game is an internal reminder that you need to re-focus. At best, it can break the anxious or disruptive thoughts long enough that you can get back on task. And it only takes a minute to do.

Power Breathing

I love this one.  I’ve been reminding the kids to do it whenever they’re scared, and I do it whenever I start panicking as I’m lying awake at 2 am, going through what ifs.  Breathe out double the length of time that you’re breathing in.  That’s it (p. 82).

So breathe in for the count of 3 and breathe out for the count of 6 (or use 4 and 8 if you have enough lung power).  In for 3, out for 6, over and over again, for as long as you can keep up this rhythm.  If fact, set the timer for a minute, close your eyes, and try breathing like this until the timer goes off.  It may not solve all of your problems, but I’m willing to bet that you will feel calmer or more relaxed after one minute.

These are just two of the hundreds of exercises in the book.

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.

Next Monday, the Electoral College will meet to cast their votes, though the votes won’t be counted until Congress meets on January 6th.  That is also the last day for anyone in the House or Senate to object to the results of the Electoral College vote.

It feels like some of us are in the bottom portion of an hourglass, feeling the grains falling on our heads and wondering if someone will come along to flip the glass in time, or will we be buried and suffocated under an avalanche of sand.

As I said weeks ago, this election is not like any other election in recent history.  Americans elected a group of individuals (since when you’re voting for a President, you are also voting for all the people who come with said President from his Vice President to his advisors to his cabinet) that are not for ideas but against groups of people.  This isn’t the usual case where there are multiple paths forward and all have their pros and cons.  There are few people who will experience pros with this administration.  There are many more people who will experience cons.

When we can actively point out the groups that will be discriminated against under the proposed policies, the fors don’t matter when, in order to put them into action, they go hand-in-hand with againsts.

I wish everyone understood what it feels like to be in the lower bulb of the hourglass and be on receiving end of discrimination.  I don’t want other people to have to actually experience it — it’s awful to feel fear — but I can see from the way people voted that they don’t understand what life is like down here.  If they did, they would never make a decision that could possibly lead to people being in the lower bulb.

I am grateful to the people who have not experienced the fear that goes hand-in-hand with discrimination but were able to imagine how horrible it would be to have people shout a racial slur at you or how it feels to walk up to your shul and see it covered in swastikas and hate slogans and voted accordingly; especially to people who wanted a third-party candidate and chose to vote for Hillary Clinton not because they were for Hillary but because they were against hate and were going to do everything within their power to stop this situation from happening.

Hate isn’t just words.  Hate isn’t just images.  They are proof of an ideology; its manifestation in visible or auditory form.  And history has shown us time and time again the results of that hate-filled ideology.

So we wait for next Monday and then we wait all the way until January 6th to find out if anyone is going to flip this hourglass or if some of us are going to drown.