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

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I really love abandoned amusement parks.  I love well-kept, active amusement parks, too, but there is something so achingly beautiful about grass growing through the cracks in broken-down rides and dried out pools.

The author of Bizarro tries to get at the heart as to why people love abandoned parks, specifically: “Abandoned malls, abandoned NASCAR speedway tracks and abandoned theme parks were all communal spaces for a lot of people. They shared good times there, formed memories. These people don’t want to forget these places, let alone slowly watch them die.”

I love the ones that I’ve been to in their heyday, such as Disney’s River Country or The Enchanted Forest, and the ones I never saw in their pristine, useable state.  I read about an abandoned Wizard of Oz amusement park last summer that offers tours in June, and I’d like to try to visit it this upcoming year.

Do you think abandoned properties are beautiful?

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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.

About once a month, my cousin and I meet for lunch at a vegan restaurant.  Excellent company aside, I love going there because I can order anything off the menu.  Maybe this isn’t a big deal to you because you can do this at every restaurant.  But I generally have one or two choices at most places, or if I have more, they’re all sort of variations on the same thing.  Do I want my grain, tomato, and cheese in pasta form or pizza form?  And if I’m going to have it in pasta form, do I want it with spaghetti or penne?  See, that isn’t really an exciting choice.

But when we go to this vegan restaurant, the menu is wide open save for food allergies.  I never have to ask if the broth is made with chicken stock.  I never have to look longingly at a dish that could have been made vegetarian but for some inexplicable reason has been made with bits of bacon.

But, damn, it’s hard.  It’s hard to look at all the choices and pick just one.  Do I go with what I loved last time, or do I try something new?

This week, I got “chicken” and biscuits with collard greens, smothered in vegan gravy.  It is what I imagine Thanksgiving food tastes like.  I wanted to moan with each bite.  The ChickieNob stole my leftovers when I got home.

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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:

• “Report from Day Two: Consulting My Moral Compass” (Wandering Scientist)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Infertilityhonesty has a post about how infertility has prepared her for the difficult moments in life; such as a Trump presidency.  She writes, “Wishing deep in my heart of hearts that Trump does a good job is much like wishing for a pregnancy on the heels of multiple failed fertility treatments; you want it more than anything but know on a level it’s probably not going to happen.”  Moreover, she gives you 9 ways she (and likely, you) are actually prepared to get through this.

Magpie Musing has a post that gives me hope.  An unofficial memorial created in the Union Square subway stop 15 years ago for September 11th has become a wall of post-it notes following the election.  The pictures make the post ten times more powerful.

Lastly, Hapa Hopes has a letter to her biracial daughter.  I love this part: “I will stand up for you, your dad, and others whenever I can.  I’m not entirely sure what that looks like right now, but I hope that by the time you are reading this you can tell me I’m doing a good job.”  Lots of tears reading it.

The roundup to the Roundup: I love going to vegan restaurants.  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 November 11th and 18th) 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.

My favourite play is Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit.  I taught it in middle school for years, and I still read it from time to time because it’s a good reminder of how people behave when they’re scared.

The play is about an impoverished town that is awaiting a visit from a now-rich-and-famous ex-resident.  They are hoping that she’ll bail out the town and restart the economy out of a sense of nostalgia.  So they wine and dine her, and she says she will help out the residents.  On one condition.

They need to kill their favourite citizen, the owner of the general store.

At first the people are horrified and claim they would never do such a thing — not even to fix all the problems with their town and keep from starving.  But I think you can guess how the story unfolds.  The audience learns how people can justify any action — even murder.  The old woman sits on a balcony above the stage, watching the townspeople find their excuse for why the storekeeper’s death is justified.

It’s a disturbing study of human nature.

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Yesterday I was listening to an older episode of Note to Self featuring Marina Abramović.  She spoke about one of her pieces, Rhythm 0.  She stood next to a table holding 72 random items and told the audience that they could treat her like an object, doing anything they wanted to her body.  In the episode, she said the first few people walked up and hugged her or kissed her or offered her a flower.  But as it states on the Wikipedia page, the performance twisted into something else:

Initially, members of the audience reacted with caution and modesty, but as time passed (and the artist remained passive) people began to act more aggressively. As Abramović described it later: “What I learned was that … if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you. … I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.”

The gun, by the way, was loaded.  And the person curled Abramović’s own fingers around the trigger.

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I listened to the episode exactly a week after the election.  Prior to the election, I kept saying that I think people are inherently good and rational, and they will vote down hate.  They will not stand for someone who is going to discriminate against large groups of people.  Trump’s supporters are the fringe of society, but the vast majority of Americans are reasonable and do not want to actively harm others.

I’m obviously less sure of that assertion today.

I’m less horrified by that fringe I imagined prior to the election; they’re scary and disturbing, but there are always going to be people in any society who do not uphold the ideals of that society.  I’m more horrified by the people who are like the townspeople in Dürrenmatt’s play.  They think they are good.  They know and claim to love people who will be negatively affected by Trump’s policies. They justify.  They dismiss concerns.  They promise that they’re not racist or homophobic or antisemitic or misogynistic — they don’t stand for those sides of Trump.  They may even be Jewish or African-American or a woman or gay, and they voted for him anyway, despite the fact that his words and actions prove that he would not afford those people the same respect.

But that’s the thing with art: It gives you the ability to stand back and observe and notice.

The townspeople in The Visit prove that there is no such thing as an uninvolved bystander when it comes to hate.  You either take a stand, or you don’t.  You either actively work to stop it, or you’re condoning it.  People don’t get to be neutral observers when the shit hits the fan.  Discrimination has a tendency to spray everywhere.

As I said this week on Facebook, unlike President Obama, I do not want Trump to succeed.  If he succeeds, he’s the visitor in The Visit, goading Americans to turn on their own fellow citizens.  I want him to fail spectacularly because good people stepped up and did what was right, protecting themselves and others around them.

The other great episode of Note to Self was about transhumanism.  If you’re not familiar with transhumanism, it’s a movement for using technology to live a better, longer life.  I bet you’re thinking, “Oh, I use apps on my phone to lead a better life.  I guess I’m a transhumanist.”  But slow down, cowgirl.  There’s a little more to the story.

It’s really about using technology to extend your life or capabilities.  It’s about better living, through science, but like really really really through science.  Think about every human limitation: Our need for food and sleep, how quickly we can move, how far we can see.  And then think about addressing that need with science, such as removing our normal, healthy eyes and replacing them with robot eyes that can see miles into the distance.  Or, probably more accessible in the here and now, attempting to extend a person’s life span or cheat death indefinitely.

I’ll admit that while I don’t even cover up my grey to visually extend my youth in an easy, cost-effective way, I am intrigued by the idea of using technology to extend life.  Would I actually participate if it became possible?  I don’t know.  But it’s really interesting to think about.

I guess what it comes down to is this: If a loved one becomes ill, and there is a treatment for their illness, we expect them to do that treatment in order to extend their life — both for their own gain and for our gain, too.  If I became ill, I would accept the treatment not just for myself but because I feel I owe that to Josh and the kids (as well as my parents and siblings).

Would it follow that we would feel we owed ourselves and our loved ones the acceptance of these practices if they became mainstream?  If it was common to replace your heart with a robotic heart at 60, would you do it for yourself or your loved ones, or would you allow yourself to be one of the throwbacks who gracefully ages and dies at what would be — at that time — young?

I can’t say never because I wear glasses that enhance my vision, and if my doctor told me tomorrow that I would die without a mechanical heart, I would take that mechanical heart.  Moreover, I would still feel human even with that mechanical heart.

But I can see from that statement that it’s a field of grey; how much could I replace before I stop feeling like myself, and what if it was just to live better and not live longer?  As in, what if there was nothing medically wrong: Would I take the robot eyes just to see farther?  And since we clearly do things now to live longer, what is the age where we would be okay with death vs. feeling like we need to keep taking these steps to extend life and extend life and extend life.

Your thoughts?

As everyone knows, I love Note to Self.  She recently had Chade-Meng Tan as a guest. He’s a former Google employee who has become a writer and speaker on inner peace.

The entire episode is 24 minutes long.  You can listen to it here.  (Note to Self, I wish you could embed episodes!)

At the end of the episode, Meng gave listeners an exercise.  Every hour, on the hour, think of two people and say to yourself, “I wish for X and Y to be happy.”  Go ahead, try it.  Think of two people you know — or don’t know — and think to yourself, “I wish for Jack and Jill to be happy.”  (Except… you know… fill in their names.  Don’t say Jack and Jill because Jack broke his crown so happiness may be eluding him at the moment, anyway.)

I bet you’re smiling right now.  Maybe not a big, beaming smile, but a small one.  That’s what happened to me when I did this exercise in the car.  I thought of my two people and said the magic words.  And then Chade-Meng Tan pointed out that I was likely smiling, and I was.  It makes us happy to think about making secret wishes for other people; good wishes that may even come true.

Set a timer to go off every hour, and either think of two new people or the same people, and wish them happiness.  You can choose co-workers or family members or friends.  They can be people you’re seeing that day or people you’ll never meet.  They can be complete strangers; just someone you noticed in a restaurant who looks like he/she could use a little extra happiness.

If y’all are okay with it, I may send you a silent, secret happiness wish.