I applied for a grant.  When I got the thin envelope in the mail, I knew it was a rejection.  Nothing good comes in a thin envelope, right?  It was a ridiculous reach that I wasn’t really counting on getting, and it cost me nothing but time and ego to apply.  But still.

It hurt to see the thin envelope.

No one wants the thin envelope.

I texted Josh a picture of the rejection letter so he would know what a loser he was married to that I didn’t get the grant, and he wrote back all of the other things I have achieved recently.  And he’s right — I am only focusing on the thing I didn’t get vs. the things I did get — but thin envelopes do that to you.

*******

We’ve started taking the twins to college campuses.  I know this seems ridiculously early, and we’re certainly not making special trips to see schools.  But if we happen to be near a college they may want to apply to one day, we swing by the campus to get a sense of the space.  They’re mentally making a list of what they like or don’t like.

I think a lot about their senior year and how they’ll have to apply to schools.  They’ll get into some — I hope — and they’ll likely get rejected from a few.  Those rejections are going to suck.  This grant — it was nothing, a little ego massage and money — but not getting into a school?  That’s like having someone torch a bridge, cutting off one of your possible life route.

I know I would have been a different person if I had gone to a different school.

There’s no way to protect them from that, unless they don’t apply at all, which doesn’t sound like the best way of dealing with the problem.  You’re probably going to tell me that rejection is a life lesson they need to learn and it will make them more resilient and yadda yadda yadda.

But here’s the thing: I’ve experienced this life lesson, and I have learned nothing from it.  Thin envelopes still hurt, even when they’re low stakes.  Even when they come the same week you sign a new book contract.  If resilience is not hurting when rejection comes, I have not learned resilience.

J.K. Rowling just posted two of her rejection letters online.  You don’t save things that are meaningless to you.  I’m not inside J.K. Rowling’s brain, but I would hazard a guess that if she saved those rejections, they probably bothered her at the time.  Regardless of what else she has accomplished in life; despite moving millions of copies of her books.  Rejections still hurt.

So, no, I don’t believe you can learn anything from rejection except that after you lick your wounds you need to be like Hercules Mulligan and get the fuck back up again.

Licking my wounds now.  I’ll get back up soon.

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

*******

I am currently working my way through Ben Aaronovitch’s books based on a friend’s recommendation.  They’re fantastic — Harry Potter for grownups.  It’s a series, which is nice because if you like the characters in the first one, you know what you’ll be reading next.

Though I know that — like the True Blood books — I’ll probably take a break after three books to read something else, and then dip in and out of the series the rest of the way, even though I always start out with the intention to read a whole series back-to-back.  I didn’t think about how I read series until The Paperback Princess asked whether you read your series back-to-back or dip-in-and-out.

I’m a dipper, but I’m the worst sort of dipper because I pretend to be a back-to-backer so I can purchase the whole series.

How do you approach series: back-to-back books or dip-in-and-out?  Or does it depend on the series itself or the number of books in it?

*******

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.

I am more than a little smitten with the story that Abbey National Bank, which acquired the address 221B Baker Street, hired a secretary for many decades whose sole purpose was to answer fan mail addressed to Sherlock Holmes.  Mental Floss writes,

Rather than simply throw away mail addressed to a fictional character, the bank decided to hire someone to answer Holmes’s mail—as his secretary. Until Abbey National moved its headquarters in the 2000s, the bank continuously employed a series of secretaries to respond to fans, letting them know that Holmes had retired to the countryside to raise bees, or even replying occasionally as Holmes himself, using quotes from Doyle’s books.

Isn’t that brilliant?

Image: David Jones via Flickr

Fan mail is now answered by the Sherlock Holmes Museum, which isn’t as good a story.

Which makes me wonder whether other fictional characters get fan mail.  What happens if you mail a letter to 4 Privet Drive?  I’m assuming it ends up here, but does anyone answer it?  Can you write Leopold Bloom at 7 Eccles Street or Phileas Fogg at 7 Savile Row?  Will I reach the Steadmans if I write to 1710 Bryn Mawr Avenue, Philadelphia, PA?

It sort of wouldn’t matter to me if it was just a secretary writing me as long as I got a letter back.

Which fictional character would you want to write?

As I said over on BlogHer, this is my least favourite day of the year.  I know a lot of infertile women struggle with Christmas or Mother’s Day, but my worst day is April Fools.  It’s a day that turns otherwise thoughtful, kind people into jerks for 24 hours.  I hate all pranks, but especially fake pregnancy announcements.

I could write off everyone who posts something asinine on social media today and say, “Well, it is April Fools, and I know it’s a joke.”  But here’s the thing: It isn’t funny.  It isn’t funny to see someone mocking fertility (or in the case of the video I linked to in the BlogHer post, mocking adoption).  It isn’t funny to wade through picture after picture of pee sticks.

So I’m mostly offline today.  I’ll be on social media when I need to be for work, and I’ll read the blog posts in my feed reader since I feel pretty certain that no one I read would post a fake pregnancy announcement.  But other than that?  Avoid avoid avoid.

*******

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:

• “Thaw” (A Half-Baked Life)
• “Tick Tock” (The Road Less Travelled)
• “A Meaningful Life” (Lavender Luz)
• “Intensity” (Unpregnant Chicken)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Sad in the City has a gorgeous post this week called “Letting Go of Biological Motherhood.” A walk with her dog places her in the path of a child, and while the exchange would normally be welcome, it comes during a time when they have decided to stop treatments.  She says this so perfectly: “I am mourning the lost bit of living I feel like I have missed out on.”  This post… You just need to read the whole thing.

Anabegins has a post about applying the Kondo method to her life, which is brilliant.  The idea of tidying up your time: “I suspect I’m spending my time and energy on  things that don’t bring joy or utility to my life. I am squandering my precious minutes and hours on things that don’t matter, that suck away my joy and satisfaction and don’t bring me any closer to my goals.”  I’ve seen more than one person this week trying to put this into practice.  It is such a smart idea.

There is also Twangygirl’s post about getting the call, the one from the adoption agency.  There is so much giddiness in this post that I actually got chills down both arms reading it.  My favourite part: “Actual Baby is awfully, awfully sweet. The JB held him for three hours straight, until his arms hurt. That’s a kind man. And here I am, over Newfoundland, catching up with them, and now you are now caught up, too.”  Go wish her congratulations.

Lavender Luz has a post on the third anniversary of her book about how the project emerged from an unflattering blog post someone wrote about her.  She could have shut down and lost her voice, but instead she listened, considered, and reworded her thoughts.  And what came out of that experience is something incredible.  It’s a great story.

Lastly, Searching for Our Silver Lining has posted two very pretty pictures of herself, and it’s fitting that she is putting a face to an infertility story this week on a day when so many people need to remember that infertility affects real people.  Have I mentioned how much I really dislike fake pregnancy announcements on April Fools Day?  But I do love this.

The roundup to the Roundup: I really dislike April Fools Day.  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 25th and April 1st) 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 was fascinated by the study outlined on Mental Floss using Facebook to see if children go into the same careers as their parents.  The Facebook study also looked at whether siblings choose the same field.  The study found that,

15% of siblings share an occupation, which is higher than the 8.6% rate for any two same-gender, same-age individuals in the population. Twins’ tendency to choose the same occupation, at 24.7%, is even more striking.

Still, the study also found that “in absolute terms the vast majority of kids strike their own path and choose a profession different than that of their parents or their siblings.”

In my family, two of us are in the same field, and the other three are in three different fields, yielding four career fields for five people.

But then I went ahead and married a writer, therefore, my kids have two parents in the same field.  One wants to be a writer, too, and one doesn’t.  Though, of course, they’re young so that may change many times over before they settle on a career.  After all, I wanted to be a fish researcher or a cardiologist when I was their age.

How about you?  Same career field (not necessarily same job, but same area of work) as one of your parents?  As one of your siblings, if you have siblings?  As your partner?