One of my SuperBetter tasks told me to toast myself.  Not to wait until I had done something fantastic, but to toast myself… just for being me.

Mind blown.

You see, every week or so, I walk by this fancy bottle of lemonade at the food store.  I’ve always wanted to try it, but I told myself that I would get it the next time I had something to celebrate.  I didn’t think I deserved bubbly blood orange-flavoured lemonade any more than I deserve a trophy or a ribbon or an award.  Fancy drinks are for celebrations, and I have nothing to celebrate.

And it felt sort of… I don’t know… like I was tempting fate to just buy myself this product I had been saving for a special occasion.  But what was I waiting for?  What if I died tomorrow and never knew what blood orange-flavoured lemonade tasted like?  I drove to the store and bought myself a handful of Kind bars and a fancy drink.

At dinner, I poured a bit for each of us, and I asked everyone to raise their glass and toast something about themselves.  Something they accomplished, even if it was a small thing.  And then I told everyone that we were awesome just the way we are, and we drank to that.  In fact, we drank the whole bottle.  And Josh removed the sticker for me and washed it out so we now have a fancy water bottle for the dinner table so people don’t have to get up to refill their cup.

How you like them apples?  (By which I mean blood oranges.)

Go buy yourself a fun drink today and toast yourself.  What small thing are you celebrating?

The most interesting things I’ve read in a long time is an article in the Verge about a woman who built a bot out of her friend’s old text messages.  It is subtitled: “When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence.”

So begin there.

Photographers may try to remember people with images, and writers may jot down all of the stories, but Eugenia Kuyda — the “her” in the story — is an inventor of bots, so it makes sense that she would use her chosen art form to memorialize her friend.  But in memorializing him, she was able to sort of… speak… with him again, for lack of a better word.

Reading Mazurenko’s messages, it occurred to Kuyda that they might serve as the basis for a different kind of bot — one that mimicked an individual person’s speech patterns. Aided by a rapidly developing neural network, perhaps she could speak with her friend once again.

She set aside for a moment the questions that were already beginning to nag at her.

What if it didn’t sound like him?

What if it did?

I’ll admit that I read this article because I love this idea.  I’ve written before about Bina48 and similar projects.  I have a hard time with goodbyes and letting go, so this intermediary step feels like an insurance plan, a way to still connect with the person after they’re gone.  Even if it isn’t totally “them” in the sense that you are communicating in real time with the actual person.  Except… you sort of are, right?

As the article points out: “Modern life all but ensures that we leave behind vast digital archives — text messages, photos, posts on social media — and we are only beginning to consider what role they should play in mourning.”  What do we do with all the digital pieces of our personality that we leave behind?

I would want this.  Even if it extended the mourning period.  Even if it was painful at times.  I would want something like this very badly.

What are your thoughts?

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

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This Wednesday is St. Frideswide’s feast day.  We celebrate it as a family every year, usually doing something Alice-related or having a special meal or cake.

But this year, celebrating St. Frideswide Day on St. Frideswide Day isn’t really going to work.  I can pull together scones for breakfast, but that’s pretty much it.  A bunch of work projects are all due at the same time, so it would be really great if we could celebrate her life on Tuesday.  Or Thursday.  Sort of any day but that Wednesday.  (Unless Hillary would like to reschedule the debate?  Then we could tuck it into the evening hours.)

I feel weird celebrating a holiday not on the holiday, even though it’s a great solution to a common problem.  Lots of people celebrate a holiday early or late so they can get people together or celebrate with two different groups, one after the other.

What do you think of celebrating holidays not on the actual day?

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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.

Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  When I saw the news, I said, “Oh, look, Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  I didn’t know they gave it to musicians, but… okay.  That’s cool.  He’s a great writer.”  Then I went on the Internet.

Instantly I was swept up in a river of rage as people needed it known that (1) Bob Dylan didn’t deserve it, (2) Bob Dylan totally deserved it, and (3) certain writers deserve to win Grammys, and… well…  a lot of other stuff because this is the Internet and the Internet is a passionate rage machine.

I like Bob Dylan.  I only listened to one tape for all four years of grad school, and it was the first tape of Biograph.  If you got in my car, you were going to listen to “Lay Lady Lay,” and you were going to like it because it was the only tape in the car.

Moreover, we named my guitar Bob Jackson partially after Mr. Dylan and partially over the fact that he didn’t die taking bad medicine.  So I am pro-Bob Dylan.  And anti-bad medicine.

(P.S. I still think Peebles St. Ives would have been a great name for the guitar)

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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:

• “The Happy/Sad of Adoption” (Lavender Luz)
• “Squawk Box: Empowered and Determined Through Grief” (Unpregnant Chicken)
• “Wedding Wrap-up” (The Road Less Travelled)
• “My response to ‘Women Who Wish They’d Never Had Kids’ and ‘Why Parents Hate Parenting’” (The Unexpected Trip)
• “Judging Hillary Clinton by Bill Clinton” (Stirrup Queens) — thanks, Jess!

Okay, now my choices this week.

On one hand, the only introduction No Kidding in NZ’s post needs is “amen,” but I will promise you that if you click over, at least one (and probably all) the paragraphs will resonate with you.  You may even cheer.  This is the one that got my hands clapping in agreement: “I am furious that so many men only feel personally feel offended by poor treatment or attitudes towards women if they think that their ‘wives and daughters’ might be treated badly, but didn’t feel any concerns or were not motivated to do anything about it previously when their wives and daughters or all the other women around the world were and are still denied the right to make decisions about education, or family building, or their own bodies.”  So well said.

Travelcraft Journal has a post about a mug that was purchased on a trip with her grandmother.  She writes: “I wish there was a word for the opposite of regret, to describe things that, even in hindsight, you are 100% glad you did.”  Isn’t that so perfect?  I wish there was that word, too.  Someone invent it, please.

Lastly, An Engineer Becomes a Mom has a post about an adoption-themed dance that occurred on the show So You Think You Can Dance.  I ended up watching it.  You know what would have nipped that whole dance story in the bud?  Having an open conversation about adoption from day one so the child grows with an understanding of her story.  Go jump into the conversation on AEBaM’s blog.

The roundup to the Roundup: Bob Dylan wins the Nobel Prize. 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 October 7th and 14th) 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.

Leviticus 16 is the section of the Torah read every Yom Kippur.  It’s not the most exciting portion, and it’s not one that normally gets under my skin like all the infertility talk on Rosh HaShanah.  (That service is like navigating a land mine.  I don’t think I’ve ever gotten through it without crying at some point.)  Leviticus 16 is the story of Aaron and the two goats.

Two goats are chosen from the herd.  They must be exactly alike, practically indistinguishable.  For instance, you cannot take one healthy goat and one unhealthy goat, or one fat goat and one thin goat, or one unblemished goat and one blemished goat.  Exactly alike.

One goat gets sacrificed as an offering, and there are strict rules for how to use the goat’s blood.

The other goat has a very different fate.  It is told all the wrongdoings of the community and then sent away to wander the desert, far away from the people whose sins he is forced to figuratively carry on his little goat shoulders.  (Do goats have shoulders?)  He is — as you probably guessed — the scapegoat, forced to own everyone else’s terrible decision.

But here’s the thing: Those two goats are exactly alike.  Their fate is determined by a lottery.  Each has an equal chance of being driven out of the community.  And, frankly, as much as it would suck to wander around the desert without water and likely die in the wild, it would suck more to definitely be killed as part of a goat sacrifice.  In one situation, you have a fighting chance for your life, and in the other, you don’t.  And, let’s all be honest, as we read this, we think these outdated ideas are a little odd, right?

Right?

I guess this Torah portion got under my skin because we are in an election season where the scapegoats are being named, left and right.  Whole genders, nationalities, religions, sexual orientations, and physical situations have been blamed for amorphous issues such as unemployment, terrorism, and crime.  The people in those scapegoat groups are going to have their lives as they know it obliterated, more akin to the sacrificial goat than the wandering one.  If Trump comes into power, families might be separated, marriages might be taken away, more violence might errupt.

But here’s the thing that goes back to those goats.  With the goats, everything was equal.  Each had a chance to have to carry the burden of the community.  But there is a lot of inequality with the groups targeted as scapegoats this election.  There is a lot of privilege being abused in the name of bettering the country.

It is so easy to blame other people for your problems. It is so much harder to sit with your own role in creating that problem or admit that there are problems without clear-cut solutions.  I am terrified when I hear Trump speak.  When I think about the direction his rhetoric is taking the country.

This country needs fewer scapegoats and more people willing to work together to take care of the herd.