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

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We recently rewatched Back to the Future with the twins because we’ve been playing LEGO Dimensions and there is a Back to the Future level.  The ChickieNob informed me that Michael J Fox was not that cute, which caused me to gasp and sputter.

Michael J Fox is cute, alright?  He was cute then and he’s cute now.  He’s cute.  Case closed.

But she did make me roll out my long list of childhood crushes, and most of them either haven’t aged particularly well or when I go back and look at pictures of their younger selves, I don’t see what I saw at the time.  Meaning, I don’t know why I thought they were cute.

Do you still think your childhood crushes are cute?

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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 posts.

This post contains spoilers for Doctor Who, so stop reading if you haven’t finished the season but watch the show.

We caught up on most of the season’s end of Doctor Who this weekend.  We still have one episode to go.

We knew what was coming, so the twins kept putting off seeing the last three episodes.  But they finally felt ready-ish to watch it all go down, so we got into our pyjamas and piled into our bed and watched.

It was sad.  It was sickeningly sad because there was enough time for the characters to have regrets (or… not have regrets because one of them unrealistically had zero problem with what had happened…  Really?) and say goodbye and think about what was about to happen.  We all cried.  Well, three of us cried, but I like to think that the fourth member of our family was crying on the inside.  We all liked Clara and change is always hard, even when you know that River Song is coming.

The episode after “Face the Raven” was harder because it began with a concept that is simple and obvious but makes you swallow hard nonetheless when you hear it stated aloud: from the moment you are born, death is written into your story.  We all have death hanging over our head every single second of our life.  We know it is coming and there is no way to stop it.

If that doesn’t make you want to pull the blankets over your head, I don’t know what will.

The kids were sad after the episodes, not as much about Clara but more thinking about death in general.  We cuddled and talked about how hard life was knowing that we have to lose people we love.

I have no regrets that we let them watch Doctor Who.  I don’t like it when they’re sad, and I certainly don’t want them to obsess about death, but I also don’t think it does them any favours to pretend that death isn’t a part of life; that death is a very permanent state.

I think it’s better to let them realize that because it is permanent and irreversible, we should do everything in our power to protect people from death when we can such as ensuring they have food and shelter and health care.  We should work to avoid war and support efforts to reduce violence, both of which are a waste of human life.  That, as humans, we should do our best to help other humans so we can all actively work to put off death as long as possible.  Everyone should get a fair shot of living as long as they can.

I would rather have them sad because they lost a favourite character than have them indifferent playing a video game where they are the aggressor, blowing off a human non-player character’s head.  I would rather they consider the enormity of death and therefore actively work to help others than minimize death and have them dehumanized to the point where they can hear another person is suffering and not have it affect their day.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing to cry.  It’s what happens when you have a heart.

It’s good to have a touchstone, a relationship you can think about to put other things you might feel dismissive about in perspective.  I can always explain to them, “This person in danger is someone else’s Clara, and we need to help that ‘Clara’ because someone else out there is that ‘Clara’s’ Doctor who will mourn her for 4.5 billion years.”  They saw the look on the Doctor’s face.  They saw his fist hitting the wall 4.5 billion times.  They know what love is.

Side note: Tomorrow is #MicroblogMonday.  So get writing, please.

It is well-known that I have an unusual love of Maryland.  Like black-eyed susans trail after me in the air wherever I walk, and I named my bunny in Hay Day Dark Lord Baltimore (as a nod to Harry Potter and Maryland history at the same time).  Therefore, I was happy to see that Mental Floss covered 25 non-crabby facts about my state this week.  Okay, so some of them were crabby.  Is that really what people think of when they think of Maryland?  Crabs?

So did you know that our official state sport is jousting?  Which I guess makes sense since horses are everywhere around here, but I’ve only seen jousting once and it was in grade school.

Interesting: Mental Floss states that “Much to the chagrin of Maryland’s children, the anthem—all nine verses of it—is still part of the public school curriculum.” This is counter to our experience where I have complained that the twins have not had to learn the words to “Maryland, My Maryland,” whereas I did when I was their age.  And it sucked.  It sucked hardcore.

But I can still sing the song.  And snicker at all its vaguely sexual-sounding commentary on being part of the South including “Howard’s warlike thrust” and “She breathes! she burns! she’ll come! she’ll come!”

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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:

• “Walking with Fear” (Jane Rutner)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Waiting to Expand has a beautiful post about her heart remembering what her brain forgot.  She writes, “there was a sadness that hung over me like a winter fog, a sadness that ran deep and couldn’t be defined or explained.”  Please remember with her on the three year anniversary of her loss.

Non Sequitur Chica is in the office for an ultrasound today, but it was her post earlier in the week about this day that held my heart.  I love the mantra: “Today you are pregnant,” but moreover, the bolded advice that she gives herself in the middle of the post.  The thought is so simple, so perfect, it should probably be made into needlepoint and put in every RE’s office across the world.

Lastly, Mrs. Spit has a moving post on the 8th birthday of her son, Gabriel, who died soon after birth.  She admits that there are times when she needs to talk about him, and when she does, she tells the person that it will be a sad story.  This serves as a refrain through the post.  It is a sad story, but it is also a story about a mother and father and son and love.

The roundup to the Roundup: Did you know these facts about Maryland?  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 December 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 was reading a book recently that I’m not going to name because it would ruin the ending (it’s sort of the spoiler to end all spoilers) but it contained this crazy idea*.  The main character is in mourning, and he’s told that this isn’t the first time he has been in mourning.  In fact, he (X) has mourned the same loss of the same person many times because another person (Y) kept resetting the clock, rewinding time, reincarnating the players until X got the task performed to Y’s satisfaction.

Trippy.

X doesn’t remember reliving the same moments.  He has no clue that his life has been on a loop, reliving the same scene over and over again.  Even after he’s told, he can’t remember the times that came before the current one, almost as if his extra timelines all fused into layers, one atop the other.  To that end, he has no way of knowing whether or not he is going to be sent back in time and be asked to relive it yet again, or how far back the resetting went.  Was he just living the last adventure again?  Or the last year again?  Or his whole life, over and over again?

I always thought that I’d want to know about my past lives if I discovered emphatically that I was reincarnated, but reading that passage was a little unnerving.  What if Past Me did something awful?  Is Past Me still Current Me?  Am I responsible for everything I did in past lives, or is it a clean slate each time?

I mean, what if you found out that your neighbour — your lovely teenage neighbour who shovels your walk every time it snows and cat sits for you every time you go out of town — is reincarnated Hitler?  Is teenage Phil responsible for the atrocities he committed back when he was Hitler, or is he now just teenage Phil, separate from his past lives?

And moreover, what if people I knew shifted around.  How could I stay married to Current Josh if I discovered that in one of our past reincarnations, he was my child?  Or my father?  Better to not know and to enjoy everyone’s current incarnation vs. having to hold the baggage of their past lives.

I don’t know — if someone could definitively tell you your last few lives, would you want to know the details?  Or would you rather be in a state of blissful ignorance?

There is a moral to this story:

Sometimes when I am waiting for something to happen, I will latch onto something I want and then tell myself that when X happens, I can have Y treat.  It will be a way of celebrating the occasion or accomplishment.

It is a practice that has NOT served me well.

For instance, I have a book that I was really looking forward to reading, and I told myself that I could read it when I got pregnant again.  I wasn’t silly enough to set the bar at “deliver a live baby” or even “get past the first 8 weeks.”  Just get pregnant.

I still haven’t read the book.

See, doesn’t serve me well.  Doesn’t keep me to task or motivate me.  Because 95% of the time, I’m applying it to something outside my control.  I am putting my future enjoyment into the hands of the universe.  And those hands are often not pushing me toward my goal but rather keeping me from it.

A few months ago, I downloaded a solitaire app on my phone.  I wanted to upgrade to the paid version to get rid of the ads, but I told myself that I should wait until X happened.  Upgrading the app would be my Y reward to mark the occasion.

I kept playing the free, ad-heavy version of the app, and every time I had to sit through an ad, it would remind me that X hadn’t happened.  I asked myself to reconsider.

But I think you all know what happens when you try to reconsider:

I suddenly became superstitious and convinced myself that if I bought myself the app — if I celebrated before the moment — that the moment would never arrive.

So I kept playing the ad-heavy app.  “It’s temporary,” I told myself whenever I got crotchety due to the ads.  “When X happens, you’ll have Y.”

After four months, it became clear that X wasn’t going to happen.  Or if it was, it was going to happen on an unsatisfying timeline.  And one night, in a particularly foul mood, I decided to buy the app.  I bought it angrily, punching in my password with quick jabs to show the universe just how pissed I was that X hadn’t happened yet.

And you know what?  The app makes me happy.  It’s a smaller file and runs much faster than the ad-heavy version.  I like not having to see the ads.  But it also makes me feel like I’ve wasted time by waiting.  I could have been playing this better version months ago if I just hadn’t tied these two unrelated things together.  If I hadn’t been superstitious, or thought that things related to luck should be celebrated rather than just acknowledged for what they are: a game of chance.

So much of life is out of my hands; it’s waiting for another person to accept something or find me or connect with me or for the universe to work its completely random magic and cause something to happen… so why should I ever give it more fuel, more power, to change the way I think about myself or the situation.

I’m not waiting anymore.