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

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This hoodie is a portable back massager.  Granted, I have no clue what it looks like operating on your body.  Perhaps you perpetually look like you are doing a sitting up version of the worm, but I choose to believe that this hoodie will allow me to discreetly get a back massage all the ding-dong time.

I want.  I mean, I want as long as it doesn’t do odd things to my body on the cellular level.  It’s so brilliant that I can’t believe it hasn’t been done before this point — make a massage chair that can go with you.

What invention do you wish someone would make real?

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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.

So the twins and I read Harry Potter together on a continual loop.  (What?  It makes us happy.)  And this is the question I had this week.

When Ron’s wand snaps in half in Book Two because he crashes into a tree, it ceases to work properly and can’t be repaired.

When Harry’s wand snaps in half in Book Seven, it ceases to work, can’t be repaired, and while he saves the pieces out of affection, it’s worthless.

BUT.

In Book One, when they’re in Ollivander’s, Hagrid confirms that they snapped his wand in half when he was kicked out of Hogwarts.  We also know that the wand pieces are concealed inside the pink umbrella, and he uses it to do magic quite well including giving Dudley a pig tail and rowing the boat with magic.

So why does Hagrid’s wand still work despite being in two pieces?  Any thoughts?

Side note: Tomorrow is #MicroblogMonday.  Get writing!

Enough time has passed that the vast majority of people who watch Doctor Who have gotten to the last two episodes of Doctor Who — “The Zygon Inversion.”  But if you haven’t, skip this section.  You know, spoilers!

On the bulletin board in the office of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, the same image appeared many times, altered slightly on each piece of paper.  It was the man from Ever Dream This Man.

The hoax was debunked years ago, but I still love to freak myself out reading the site.

Especially fitting since it’s Friday the 13th.

Isn’t it odd that Doctor Who would use that image in the background of the episode?  Characters kept standing or sitting in front of the bulletin board, so it kept appearing in the scene.  Almost like they wanted the image to seep into the back of our brains.  Why is no one discussing this online?  Am I really the only person whose eye went directly to that image?

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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:

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Road Less Travelled has a post encapsulating everything that is wrong with marketing via social media.  Firms and sites can collect thousands of points of data about a person, but a computer will still spit out “grandma bracelet” on the wall of a mother whose child died.  Huge fail, Facebook.

A Half Baked Life has a sobering post about a student who feels he shouldn’t visit the 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero, even though he really wants to go there and honour the dead.  She writes, “It made me think about other incarnations of guilt-by-association, and wonder how we can even begin to heal if we can’t even return to the site of our pain, to pay our respects to the dead.”  It’s a really powerful piece.

Trisomy 18 Loss – Music and Musing has a post about what we deserve.  It is a funny word: especially when we apply it to life.   She writes, “It isn’t that simple when deserving is attached to something that can’t be earned by meeting a certain criteria. Who deserves a happy marriage? Who deserves a steady, high-paying job they love? Who deserves a child?  More to the point, who doesn’t?”  It’s a complicated topic but a really good discussion.  The post will stay with you a long time.

Lastly, Solo Mama Life has a post about knowing how to parent.  It’s so simple yet so perfect.  I think I had what I needed so I tend to repeat what I experienced.  But the opposite is true, too: that you can build your parenting beliefs on what you didn’t experience.  Really, go over and read the post.

The roundup to the Roundup: Why is This Man in the background of Doctor Who?  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 6th and 13th) 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.

We went to our friends’ child’s Bar Mitzvah this weekend, which was a hugely wonderful affair.  It was exactly like them: warm, fun, laid back, caring.

A few days before the Bar Mitzvah, I started getting very weepy and chalked it up to hormones.  But I think it was more than that.

I remember when this child was born.  I remember how hard it was to go to his bris: I was so happy for them, and so sad for me.  I remember hiding in a bathroom stall at the shul for a moment after the service and trying to cry silently.  I wanted that to be us: cradling our child, introducing him or her to all of our friends.

They were such sad tears.

I think, this week, they were more happy tears.  Or maybe they were the last of those sad tears coming out, like squeezing a little extra toothpaste out of what looks like an empty, flat tube.

How huge to see everything come full circle.  To have our kids with us at his next life cycle event.  To want to put on the brakes as our own kids careen towards their B’nai Mitzvah in a few years instead of race forward, wishing they would just get here.

To still be friends with the same people!  I mean, that, in and of itself, is a major feat.  For our kids to all be friends and hang out with each other.

When you’re in the moment, when you are grappling with the active portion of infertility (because I believe that there is both active and passive infertility — the action of family building and the more passive emotions that come afterward), it is impossible to see outside of it.  Infertility is so huge that it blots out the future, and you can’t see the future anymore.  You just have to trust that it’s there, that there will be a time when you aren’t crying daily and you aren’t wishing daily and you aren’t feeling as if your heart is being squeezed through the narrow crevices of your rib cage.

So it was hugely emotional to know that I’m standing in a spot I couldn’t even fathom at this boy’s last life cycle event.  When my heart hurt so badly.  When my heart was so full of wishes.

Lifehacker had an article a few weeks ago that I finally got around to reading this week.  It’s about how “walking in another person’s shoes” actually makes us less empathetic.  That those in the community, going through the experience themselves, have less empathy than those outside the situation.

Um…

The article quotes the study from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

We found that people who endured challenges in the past (like divorce or being skipped over for a promotion) were less likely to show compassion for someone facing the same struggle, compared with people with no experience in that particular situation…Taken together, these results suggest that people who have endured a difficult experience are particularly likely to penalize those who struggle to cope with a similar ordeal.

Listen, you can sort of see it in our community when we play the Pain Olympics, or we judge another person for the way they’re choosing to address their infertility, but I wonder if those researchers — overall — would find the same results if they were to study us.

Because I think there is a big difference between the empathy we feel for universal experiences vs. the empathy we feel for specialized experiences — the ones that most people will not go through.  The example of bullying in the article is a universal experience.  Most people will feel the effects of bullying at some point in their life.

But infertility is something most people won’t experience, and because of that, I think it brings out a level of support missing from the general world.

I think you can get more empathy here from other IFfers than you can get from the general population, and that is perhaps because we know the two-fold level of emotional pain that comes from infertility: It’s not just that you’re dealing with the emotions of infertility.  You’re also dealing with the emotions of not being like the rest of the world around you as you deal with the emotions of infertility.  And triggers are always around you, in the form of pregnant women and babies and happy families eating next to you in restaurants and baby clothing sections at clothing stores.

I don’t know.  I’m just thinking back to all the times when I’ve been at a baby-centric life cycle event and while the general circle of women aren’t very empathetic, a fellow stirrup queen will always walk by and rub my back or give me a meaningful look for a moment.  And I know that they know.  And they know that I know.

Maybe we’re just the exceptions to the rule?

What do you think?  Do you get more empathy from people who have been through infertility or people who have not?