Our family went on a retreat recently with our shul.  I had been looking forward to this retreat for a long time, beginning with the fact that I have fond memories of retreats from when I was a kid to the time to get to know some of the other families better to the fact that it was all preparation for the twins’ B’nai Mitzvah.

Yes, the little monkeys that were still drinking from bottles when this blog started are now going to have their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.

But that’s not what this post is about.

The retreat was at my old sleepaway camp.  It’s not that far from DC, but I hadn’t been back in 20 years, and I was so excited to see the space again.  I knew we were staying at a new building they had constructed on the other end of the campus, but surely it wouldn’t be a big deal to slip over to the older side of campus and see my old cabin.

I loved sleepaway camp; like passionately, with every cell in my body, loved it.  I loved everything about it, even the enormous hill that we had to walk up and down several times each day.  I loved being in my cabin and dances in the big all-purpose room and art in the little shack at the top of the hill.  I was the type of person who came home at the end of the summer and cried for a full week because I couldn’t handle the idea that I wasn’t at camp anymore.  At school I was struggling to fit in, but for 4 weeks in the summer, I had a crew, I belonged.

So during the first break, we tried to find the old campus.  We trekked through the woods, confused, because nothing was where I remembered it.  We found one building that I recognized from a different part of the campus, and we went inside, marveling that it still smelled exactly like itself.  This old, musty cold smell like wood and metal and dust.

We returned from break confused about where the old camp would be.  Compounding the problem was that they had built a new set of cabins in a new section of the camp and named it the old camp section’s name.  So when we got directions, we had been sent to the new location of the old camp.  I had pretty much given up on the idea of finding it when the rabbi asked if we wanted to go on a walk to the lake.  There was only one lake, so if he could get me to the lake, I could orient myself and find the old site.

After a long walk through very unfamiliar woods, we came to a memorial that had been at the lake when I was a kid.  The boathouse was gone and the tennis courts were overrun with weeds (not to mention the fact that the pool was now a tomato garden), but the snake path still stretched out towards the top of the hill.  Everyone else went ahead, but the twins and one of their friends and her dad climbed up to the old site.

I was so strange and wonderful and sad and overwhelming to be in that space again.  The campus has been closed for years, and the buildings that hadn’t yet been torn down were damaged beyond repair.  The dining hall was missing as well as the little camp store where we would buy Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews.  But both my cabins were still there.  We couldn’t go inside because they weren’t safe anymore, but the little screened in porch where we liked to sit when it rained was still there.

The theater was still partially standing, though all the benches in the amphitheater had been removed.  And the all-purpose room (we called it the Ulam) where I was banned from attending one of the camp dances because we were caught with (gasp!) boys in our cabin one night.

The twins and their friend were so excited to hear about camp back then.  I was grateful that they were with me because it was a chance to talk about the space, plus it was somewhat creepy to be up in that abandoned camp.  But also because I don’t know if I could have left if they hadn’t been reminding me that we had to return to the program.  I felt so sad standing there in the mud, staring at what was left of one of the most important places in the world to me.

I really could have stood there for hours, trying to remember everything.

Is your old camp (or school — I’m aware that lots of people never went to camp) still standing?  Have you ever been back?

On Tuesday night, for about two hours, Freddie Mercury was alive.

My dad and I got tickets to the one-night-only showing of Queen’s December 24, 1975 Hammersmith Odeon concert.  My dad used to buy me Queen records at Peaches, which was a now-defunct Rockville record store where all the albums were stored in wooden fruit crates.  (Excellent for splinters!)  In elementary school, I told my teacher that my favourite song was “Bicycle Race” but it was really “Killer Queen” and still is.  Plus I liked to look at the fold-out poster that came with Jazz of all the naked ladies.

So to say that I was excited for this event was an understatement.

But first I had to get there.  It wasn’t that far away, but the traffic was so terrible that my heart was pounding thinking that I wouldn’t make it in time.  I was averaging three miles per hour.  But I got there and found a parking space and found the theater, and we plopped down in our seats a few minutes before show time.

And then we waited.

And waited.

And the people around us started muttering about something being wrong with the broadcast.  For 20 minutes or so, we didn’t know whether they would be able to air the footage, and I just wanted to sink down onto the floor and cry.  Which I know sounds very dramatic, but I had been so looking forward to this event.  A non-viewing would have been the straw that broke the camel’s back on my crappy day.

Except it didn’t because the management came in and told us they had worked it out, and then suddenly Freddie was on the screen!

So the film began with a documentary.  They interviewed the three remaining members of the band today and showed old footage from interviews in the 70s.  And it was great except… it was running for a really long time and I started panicking that this was it: that it wasn’t the actual concert itself but instead a documentary about the concert.  Sure, they were showing tiny clips from the show, but the vast majority of the half hour was just the band members talking about the making of the first four albums.

Then the credits started rolling and someone in the theater shouted, “It better not be over!”  But when the credits finished up and those first chords of “Now I’m Here” started, my heart exploded.  There was Freddie on the screen with his mullet (what an unfortunate choice) and his skin-tight satin body suit with no visible panty lines, and Roger Taylor sending up a spray of water with his drums.  (Roger Taylor is like Aquaman.  Totally cute but you may miss him because he’s overshadowed by the Superman-like Freddie.  So I’m telling you, look at him.  Because totally cute.)

Anyway, it was a really really good night, and just made me so sad that Freddie’s voice is gone.  Recorded, yes, but I’d rather still have him here.

*******

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.

*******

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:

• “Having 3 of the 5 Instead of Having it All” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Northern Star!
• “MicroblogMonday: Signs and Symbols” (Searching for Our Silver Lining)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Will Carry On has a post about two visits to the cemetery to visit her children’s graves.  She writes about trying to break up the ice covering their markers and admits: “I’m not sure what came over me. Perhaps it was maternal instinct, but I couldn’t have that layer of ice suffocating my babies. I realize how silly that sounds, and even knew it then. I mean, how could they suffocate, when they’re already dead?”  She counters that visit with a return to the cemetery.  It’s a post about the many facets of grief and finding beauty in the sadness.

Life and Love in the Petri Dish has a post about the ups and downs of a donor egg cycle that speaks volumes about the hidden story behind the public’s understanding of infertility.  It’s the sort of post I want to send out to everyone and say, “This is infertility.”  Not the glossy stories told after the fact, but these gritty moments in the thick of it all.

Hope Floats Among the Cherry Blossoms has a post that made me say, “me, too.”  It’s about how all of our lives are on a timer, and she wants to spend as much time with her parents while she still has them.  She asks if she is the only person who thinks this way, and my answer is that I think about stuff like this a lot and take proactive steps so I never have regrets.  Plus my parents are really cool and I genuinely like hanging out with them, such as going to concert movies above.

Lastly, Project Progeny has a brief, sad post where she admits: “When I start to think too much, to feel too much, the gremlins in my head start talking – ‘You could be replaced by a brick and nobody would even notice the difference’.”  But clearly I would notice the difference since bricks can’t write poignant posts.  Which leads me to believe that there is really no one out there who could be replaced by a brick and have no one notice.  Just a thought.

The roundup to the Roundup: One night with Freddie Mercury.  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 March 4th and 11th) 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 have been thinking about busyness since my Randi Zuckerberg post as well as Raven Rambling’s post about realizing why she overschedules herself.  She writes about how she overcommits in order to feel needed, and I realized reading it that I do the exact.same.thing:

It makes for a very busy life, but I like to be busy. Nothing makes me more content then getting shit done – even if I’m sick, I keep on trudging. It makes me feel useful, and I need to feel useful … I don’t actually enjoy being so busy…but I need to be busy for my own peace of mind. And I need to be busy because it makes me feel useful… and I need to feel useful because I usually feel like a useless, infertile, non-mothering woman.

That is me.  Except that I would say that I need to feel useful because it staves off this feeling that if I’m not useful, I’m without worth. If I’m super busy, it means I’m worth something, right?  It means people find value in me and my skills.  It turns me into the equivalent of a dollar.

You know, dollars: you put dollars in your wallet and would feel bummed if one fell on the ground and was lost to the wind.  Whereas if a penny dropped to the bottom of your purse or out of your pocket… oh well… not a big deal.  Being seen as a dollar is so commonplace that it’s totally attainable.  I’m not looking to be the best or the biggest or the brightest: just someone with some basic value.

Image: Moneyblognewz via Flickr

I mean, yes, hopefully to Josh and the twins and people like that, I am more than just a dollar.  Maybe I am a million dollars or priceless.  But to the rest of the world, the greater world, I want to be a dollar.

So I try to make myself feel valuable by saying yes a lot.  Sometimes it feels like I don’t stop from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep.  But I also know that’s how I want to see my life.

It’s the story I tell myself about my day.

*******

Because I’m not busy by Randi Zuckerberg’s definition of busy.  I can fit everything in.  I get some me-time.  If I want to grab dinner with a friend, I can make that happen.  I do a half hour of yoga every morning.  I have a lot of time with the kids.  I mean, we still have time to sit down and read books together in the afternoon, an activity that takes a shitload of time when you think about it.  Josh and I take two hours or so of downtime every night to watch television or read a book or… do other things.  And I work about 9 hours a day.

I go through busy periods, but I would never tweet about the Writer’s Dilemma.  Busy periods, like first-pass, are all limited in scope.  Two busy weeks where I have to buckle down and put in more hours, and then… back to normal life.  Which is apparently not busy.

And yet, Raven Rambling’s post spoken volumes to me because prior to reading Zuckerberg’s tweet, I would have said that was overcommitted.  But am I, really, if I can fit in many different facets of life?  Maybe not.

*******

I don’t think most people want to live with their life battery on empty.  Few people have the stamina of someone like Barack Obama whose every second is accounted for and squeezed for its possible usefulness.  I mean, the man can’t even change into his pyjama bottoms at 4 pm.  What sort of life is that — wearing real clothes until night time?

In a Daily Dot article on busyness, the author states,

Busyness has become a status symbol of sorts, one that we use to promote our worth to the rest of the world. “Almost everyone I know is busy,” wrote the New York Times’ Tim Kreider in 2012. “They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work.”

Yes, it’s a status symbol regardless of your job — everyone wants to appear as if their existence matters and their presence is needed.  Would people have sat up and listened if Randi Zuckerberg said, “Hey, people, I’m not busy at all right now.”  Nope.  She wouldn’t have sounded like she mattered.  I mean, if you’re a someone of value, you must be busy, right?  So the moment she says, “I am so busy,” we all nod and answer, “Me too.”  Because if not, aren’t we sort of saying that Randi Zuckerberg is more important than the rest of us?

Maybe she is?  I don’t know.  I’d sort of be okay with that.

*******

The point of that Zuckerberg post is that we all need to take a long, hard look at how we spend our time and be honest about it.  Can we really not spend time with our friends, or did we spend so much time on Facebook one afternoon that the day got away from us?  If we hadn’t checked into Facebook at all, could we have grabbed coffee with a friend for an hour?

I can say, with my life, the answer is almost always yes.

I loved Northern Star’s comment on the last post about the old Wall Street Journal article on busyness:

Instead of saying “I don’t have time” try saying “it’s not a priority,” and see how that feels. Often, that’s a perfectly adequate explanation. I have time to iron my sheets, I just don’t want to. But other things are harder. Try it: “I’m not going to edit your résumé, sweetie, because it’s not a priority.” “I don’t go to the doctor because my health is not a priority.” If these phrases don’t sit well, that’s the point.

There are times when I get busy and I can’t return a phone call or see a person.  I work during the day, so many of my hours are spoken for, and I live by the twins’ schedule in the hours after that.  But if the other person is flexible and the commitment isn’t time sensitive, I can shift things around and figure out how to work it all in.  All five of those things are a priority; it’s just that sometimes one thing on the list trumps other things on the list.  But yeah, if you look at my week overall, I get to all of my priorities.

(Remember, you may look at those six categories in the other post and say, “Feh, exercise is something I just don’t care about.”  So then you’d only have five priorities.  Or the six you come up with may look totally different from mine.)

Back to Randi.  Does Randi Zuckerberg really never have time to see friends?  Or does she look at the friends she has and think, “I can get more out of life right now going to a cool event for work than I can having yet another slice of pizza with Mary.”  Poor Mary.  But the point is that we all make decisions with our time, and sometimes I think those decisions are the kind I speak of above: to make ourselves feel busier than we actually are in order to stave off some other feeling.  And other times, it just feels yucky to think that we’re not making someone or something we love a priority, so it’s easier to say that we’re just too busy for it.

*******

You know how some restaurants tape their first dollar to the wall? (You know, the classy joints.) They do it to remind themselves of how far they’ve come.  From one dollar to a thriving business.  Maybe I need to do the same thing: tape a dollar bill over my desk because it’s all perception.

I know I am a dollar.  I know I do my job well.  I’m not the best or the biggest or the brightest, but if someone hires me to do a job, I complete the task and turn in a strong product.  I think I have value when it comes to my friends and family and community.  Sometimes I have a lot to do, sometimes I don’t.  Sometimes I’m in a period of time that is more thinking than accomplishing.  It’s all part of the process.

I don’t know if I’m busy or not.  I suspect that I’m not based on other people’s answers.  But I’m also okay with that.  I sort of like not being too busy.  It means that I get to do all the voices for Hunger Games while reading to the kids, and I do an awesome Effie Trinket.  It’s worth at least a dollar.

I just realized that I resent being told not to use my cell phone. I don’t mean in a doctor’s office, where privacy is of utmost importance and it’s easier to ban the phone vs. certain activities on the phone, or in the library where usage may bother other patrons. Actually, our library just tells people to put their phone on silent when they enter. But movie theaters or regular theaters or school buildings; truly, none of that bothers me.

But I resent mobile bans that are constructed to pass judgment.

The article that raised my hackles was about a bookstore that banned mobile devices. Not because they bothered other patrons or because they were worried about people taking photos of every page in the book instead of buying a copy. But because the store owner is overwhelmed by technology and therefore believes that everyone else is overwhelmed by technology, too. And therefore, because we cannot detach from our devices on our own accord, we need people like this bookstore owner to create mobile-free zones.

He states: “And there’s this growing awareness, quite mainstream now in this community, that being in front of your screen the whole time, being plugged into digital technology the whole time, isn’t great for your happiness or your creativity.”

I agree with him in the sense that doing anything all the time is not great for your happiness or creativity, and that includes reading books. Like the books he sells in his bookstore. Keeping your nose in a book and not experiencing the world around you is detrimental to your happiness and creativity. Unless it’s not, since you are probably a better judge of your own happiness and creativity.

I love this XKCD comic that depicts all the fears we’ve had over the ages about the ways people are ruining their lives. Whether it is books, newspapers, magazines, televisions, Walkmans, or phones, we’ve repeated the same argument over and over again. People are worried that other people are not focusing on the world around them enough.

But here is the real question: why are so we concerned about how other people are living their lives vs. focusing on ourselves and letting other people focus on obtaining their own happiness?

Listen, there are plenty of good reasons to ban mobile technology, especially when its usage affects the people around the user. But I don’t need to be told when to not use a phone just because someone else thinks it’s detrimental to my creativity. The bookstore sounds like a lovely place, and if I was ever seeking a mobile-free space, it sounds like the perfect place to go. But let’s just admit that his decision is marked by judgment: that distraction by book is good and distraction by phone is bad.  And I just can’t get behind that way of thinking.

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

*******

I have an article on L’Inconnue de la Seine open in the Internet browser on my phone.  It has been there for days.  The article itself made me so sad, and then it felt wrong to close the page, as if doing so somehow diminished this nameless woman’s life as much as turning her into death mask.  Or Rescue Annie.

There are dozens of other open searches, from a pinball machine to a video on how to find all the minikits in one of the LEGO Dimension levels to the lyrics of a song I was trying to remember a few weeks ago.  And those are just the open pages on my phone.  Please, let’s not even go into all the tabs I have open on the computer full of random things I’ve looked up this week and never closed.

Do you leave web pages open for days?  Which ones are currently open on your phone or computer browser because you looked up something and never closed the tab?

*******

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 posts.