Many years ago, there was an advice column where a person needed to buy a new bed.  The question asker was single, and all she currently needed was a twin bed.  But she reasoned that if she got a partner, she would want a queen-sized mattress.  So was it better to spend the money and get the queen bed and be done with it, or buy the twin bed she needed in the moment, which made her feel as if she was resigning herself to being eternally single?

The advice columnist told her to get the twin bed.  It was the bed she needed in this moment — that she could afford in this moment — and she should only make decisions based on what was happening in this moment.  There were billions of what ifs people could use to make purchases, but none were a smart way of making spending decisions.  The columnist promised that if life changed in a few months and she was moving in with someone, they could pool their resources and buy a queen bed and make the twin bed the guest bed.  The right bed would be purchased at the right time.

Personally, I would have splurged on the queen bed.  I hate shopping, and I would have wanted to get it over with once vs. risking having to go to the store twice.

But I digress.

I was thinking about the column because in Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife, the main character decides she will buy a house if she’s still unmarried at thirty.  She writes, “Although I told no one, keeping this idea in the back of my mind provided reassurance; it made my life seem less like something I was waiting for and more like something I was planning” (p. 95).

I think everyone reading this understands why that thought resonated with me.  When you’re going through infertility, it feels like life is something you’re waiting for, not planning.  So you look for those places where you can make declarations, you can wrest back some control, you can be the one in the driver’s seat (even if you can’t drive where you really want to go).

I love that she looked for houses.  It’s such a small thing, shifting her focus, but it made me care so deeply about the character.

Because we looked for houses when we couldn’t have a child.  We looked for houses when we were going through treatments.  I think about that when I sit in this space, having no clue whether or not we would ever reach those other goals so going for the one that was within our control.

I guess that’s why I always wanted the question asker in that advice column to buy the queen-sized bed.  She can’t control whether she gets married, but she can control the size of her bed.  I guess I just liked the idea of a person getting the bed their heart really wanted because of what it represented to her.  The idea of taking a break from the waiting game and stretching out across a delicious new mattress.

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It isn’t surprising to read that you can’t exist on one food alone (though potatoes apparently would keep you alive the longest), but did you know that you’re hardwired to eat a varied diet?  The BBC article states:

Humans have built-in mechanisms to avoid just such a situation (probably because it eventually leads to malnutrition) – specifically, a phenomenon called sensory-specific satiety: The more you eat of one thing, the less you can stomach it.

But I love eating the same thing.  Back in graduate school, I ate the same thing for every meal.  It was a roasted vegetable and tofu sandwich on a bagel.  I ate three of them every day for years.  I would still be eating at the sandwich if everyone else in this house would agree to consume it, too.  But the meal varies from night to night because I have to cook dinner for everyone else.  (Though breakfast and lunch are always the same for me.)

There is no possible way I could ever get bored of Special K.  No way that I could ever get sick of cucumbers.

What is the one food you think you could eat over and over again, sensory-specific satiety be damned?

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Josh decided that Linus needed a new cage.  He has been using Truman’s old cage, which fit Truman’s personality.  Truman was a pig that liked to know where I was at all times and not move very much.

Linus, on the other hand, likes to run.  He likes to run and jump.  He likes to land in his food dish and toss all the pieces of kale in the air.  He likes to jump over the food dish and kick his little legs to the side like he’s in the ensemble of Newsies.  Everything is exciting in his world, and he likes to make life a full body experience.

Josh was at work when the new cage arrived, but I opened it and let him check out the base.  He looks so little in the vast space.

He licked the bottom and sniffed the sides.

He thought about it long and hard…

…and peeked out the top.

And finally he backed himself into a corner and peed to mark his territory.  He was home.

Allison told me about the Yayoi Kusama’s exhibit at the Hirshhorn, and now I’m trying to get tickets.  The timed tickets are free, but I read that they’re snatched up in seconds whenever they go up for grabs.  Aren’t the rooms gorgeous?  NPR posted a video for the exhibit this week:

It reminds me of the mirrored room children’s memorial at Yad Vashem.  That space makes me feel so tiny; like I’m floating in space.

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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 Is” (North of Wrigley)
• “In Response” (Not a Wasted Word)
• “I Do Not Miss TTC” (Infertile Phoenix)
• “Innen und Aussen” (Elaine Ohne Kind)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Great minds think alike.  Kmina’s Blog also posted about dealing with the world when it feels out of control.  She writes: “Seriously, can you blame me for wanting to retreat in my own bubble and not.leave.it.until.it.gets.better? Yet, I can’t. Now more than ever, normal people need to be heard. So I read the news, and comment, and disseminate information and articles that are SANE and point out to the TRUTH.”  It is a wonderful post, and I love the dream at the end.

Ms. Infertile has a great post about an art exhibit that bubbles up questions about infertility.  She explains, “I decided, after a couple glasses of wine, to sit and take part of a performance piece called ‘Negative Data: Questions’  – you ask a question via writing and the artist answers back with another questions, the dialogue as a series of questions until we run out of paper.”  She has a picture up of the back and forth.

Infertile Phoenix recounts a frustrating exchange with her mother.  Her mother points out that she still spends time with people who have parents despite her own mother being gone and asks why her daughter can’t build a relationship with her cousins now that they have children.  This post is so important because it highlights the depth of misunderstanding in the general public about the absence inherent to infertility.

Lastly, Res Cogitatae has a post that asks an important question: Is it always good to delve back into memories?  As she reflects on old entries in a journal, she writes, “The entries are nothing special. I didn’t know, of course, that those visits would turn out to be the last visits. I thought we had years left.”  It is painful for her to read them now, knowing what she knows.  Go over and participate in the discussion about returning to memories.

The roundup to the Roundup: Seeing Yayoi Kusama’s exhibit (maybe?).  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 24th and March 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.

I listened to a podcast and read a piece in Slate on the same phenomenon: Tilt.  Tilt is a poker term for “when players become overwhelmed by bad news and it starts clouding their decision-making.”  It comes from pinball — when you tilt the machine, it stops working — and Annie Duke, the poker player, explained why it’s so prevalent in cards.

Poker is a place where you make a decision and see results from that decision pretty quickly.  If things stop going your way, you start blaming the decision itself vs. the fact that you made a guess based on the information you had on-hand in the moment (and remembering that sometimes those guesses will yield good results and sometimes they won’t).  You get emotional, and the worrying starts clouding your judgment.

Infertility has more in common with cards than it does with other decisions in life.  While you may not find out the results instantly, you find them out comparatively quickly (within a few weeks or a few months), and then the next set of decisions steps up to the plate.  This is true regardless of how you’re resolving your infertility — each path demands that you make decision after decision and experience the results.

Compare this to making a decision about what you’re going to eat for breakfast.  You’re unlikely to see the results of that decision for decades, whether it buys you better health or clogs your arteries and gives you a heart attack.  Whether to transfer two embryos or whether to have an omelette for breakfast are both decisions; only one reveals the outcome early on and the other one hides it for many years.

Annie Duke gives a simple thing you can do to break the sensation of tilt and return to the same mindset you had when you made the first decision — before everything started to go to shit.  You ask yourself how you would feel about the moment if it had happened a year ago.  Would you still remember the decision, or would it have become a forgotten disappointment in a larger sea of disappointments?

Reflecting on this, I can see how some of my negatives affected me differently than other negatives, even though I treated all the negatives the same way in the moment.  I gambled in my cycle and I lost, so I was devastated.  But looking back, I can see plenty of those negatives were actually still pretty good decisions even if they didn’t yield the ultimate desired result.

I made a decision with the information I knew in the moment, and remembered that is the best a person can do.  They can’t have foresight and know definitively how things will turn out.  They acknowledge their emotional capital and spend it accordingly.  Doesn’t that make sense if you think about your emotional energy as a stack of poker chips and spend it depending on the hand you’re looking at in the moment?  Because that’s all you have — the information in-hand.  You can’t know the next card that will turn over except in terms of its probability.

So play the cards in your hand.  Accept that you may win and you may lose.  Don’t tilt.