Every Saturday morning, I wake up before everyone else and play video games.  It’s my hour or two of “me” time.

I always start out with the same game, a group game that I’ve been playing for years with the same women.  I don’t know these women in the face-to-face world, and I only know them by their avatars, not their full names.  But we’ve been playing this game together for years and usually casually chat during tasks.

They’re like bulletin board friends.

On Saturday morning, I sat down with my coffee and opened the game.  I was greeted by a single message.  I had been kicked out of the group.

I stared at it for the longest time.  You can’t play the game without a group.

I didn’t really feel like playing any video games after that.  I ended up cleaning instead because it was something within my control.  I scrubbed down surfaces and washed sheets and vacuumed the floor.  I sat by myself and cried for a bit because it felt like middle school.  I had no clue what I had done wrong; all I knew was that, without warning, I was no longer welcome at the lunch table.

I applied to join my old group, mostly because I wanted an explanation.  And… everyone acted excited that I was back, but they admitted that it hadn’t been an accident.  They dropped me because they didn’t think I pulled my weight with the group tasks.  No hard feelings, right, Mel, we just really want to win.

But there are hard feelings.  I have hard feelings right now; messy, conflicted, really hurt feelings, especially since I know it’s only a game.  You can get upset about the loss of a real friendship, right?  You can’t really get upset about a game.

This is what I know.  I can focus on single player games; I tend to enjoy them more anyway.  I may have dedicated years to playing with these women, but they don’t even really know me, so how could it be personal?  Plus, they’re right, I’m not going to pull my weight.  They play daily, I play once a week.  They’ve always told me this wasn’t a problem, but clearly it is.  This game will cease to be fun if I try to keep their pace.

And yet, I think they forget that there is a very real person on the other end of that avatar.  It’s something I think we see forgotten daily online — from Twitter to the comment box — that there are very real people on the other side of these social media accounts and blogs. They didn’t think about how I was going to wake up on a Saturday morning and see that the people I’ve been playing with for years dumped me without an explanation.

They put playing the game before the humans playing the game.

Maybe they should.  After all, it’s a game, and the point of the game is to win.  If they don’t think I’m doing enough to help them win, I probably shouldn’t play with them.  And we clearly have different feelings about winning; I enjoy being part of a long-standing group, even if we never win.  And they would rather have a group that wins than the community that comes with the group.  Everyone is allowed to approach games differently.

The game is no longer fun; no longer something I look forward to playing.  My stomach knots as I look at the icon, wondering if I’ll open the game again and see that I’ve been dropped a second time.

It’s okay.  It’s just a game.  If I’m not enjoying myself, I should drop it.

It’s just that I used to like it very very much.

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After I wrote this post, I logged into the game and said goodbye to everyone.  My finger hovered over the delete button for a moment.  And then I took a deep breath, confirmed my choice, and closed the game.

I don’t have regrets, but I don’t feel good about saying goodbye to that game; those players.

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

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Napping is apparently good for your heart health.  This is just one more way I’m shortening my life since I am terrible at napping.

I used to nap, back in college, but now I find that naps mess up the rest of my day.  I wake up groggy and feel mentally displaced the rest of the day.  If someone were to offer me nap time, I would probably politely tell them that I’d love the break, but I’d rather use it to read.

How do you feel about naps?  Love them?  Still take them?  Can’t live without them?  Or they do more harm than good?

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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.

I went to a Harry Potter festival.  In the rain.

We didn’t play Quidditch this time, and we didn’t dress up.  But I did get a little golden snitch…

…That hides a timely, little secret.

How much fun is that?

I feel like the Pied Piper as kids follow me around, begging to click the clasp.  Nothing is more mesmerizing than a golden snitch swinging from someone’s neck.

Love.

Side note: Tomorrow is #MicroblogMondays.  Get writing.

One of the claims to fame of my state is that it is the final resting place of Edgar Allan Poe. He was born in Boston, but his grave is in Baltimore. Every year on his birthday, someone used to leave three roses and a bottle of cognac. No one ever knew the identity of the person, called the Poe Toaster, and the tradition went from 1949 to 2012. The torch may have passed to more than one person during that time.

But for the last few years, the Poe Toaster hasn’t shown up.  The Maryland Historical Society is holding auditions to revive the tradition. I don’t know how I feel about it.

My first instinct was to enter, but then I thought, doesn’t the tradition lose something in turning it into a contest? There was something so sweet, so heartbreaking, about an unknown person leaving behind these sentimental objects on the grave.  A contest in the style of American Idol?  Doesn’t the tradition lose something in the process?

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda are also buried nearby, too.  Don’t I live in a fun, literary place?

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I did a guest post this week over at One Step at a Time.  You can check out my thoughts on parenting after infertility.

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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:

• “34 Things I’ve Learned in 34 Years (Part Two)” (Real Life & Thereafter)

Okay, now my choices this week.

A Half Baked Life has a gorgeous post about feeling helpless in the face of troubling moments around her.  The sound of crying emanating from a house, twins who have lost their mother, a friend assaulted, and a small girl needing 7 sutures in her chin.  Please go over and read the whole thing.

My Path to Mommyhood both remembers the only time she was pregnant (and wondering if it would be the only chance she would get) and considers what if she had released herself from pursuing pregnancy earlier.  She writes: “Sometimes I think about how much the desire to be pregnant took over navigating our journey, and if I hadn’t wanted that experience so badly, if I could have seen the baby for the bump instead of the forest for the trees, we could have been parents sooner.”  It’s an emotional post.

Hapa Hopes has a post about doing a FET and sorting out how she feels about being back at the clinic.  She writes, “I just know that I stood at that desk scheduling FET class and words like saline ultrasound, E2, FSH, and PIO were pouring out of my mouth like second nature again and I hated it.  We’re heading down the gauntlet one more time and I fucking hate the gauntlet.”  There is so much to connect with in this post.

Mrs. Spit has a post about being knocked off balance.  I love this: “My mistake was thinking of grounding as one and done, fire and forget, steady state.”  It’s an important read about embracing those times when we feel off balance.

Lastly, Articulation has a post about needing a pause button.  As someone who often feels too full, who wonders how it will all get done and if I’m even doing it “right,” there was so much I related to in this post.

The roundup to the Roundup: The choosing of the Poe Toaster?  I did a guest post.  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 2nd and October 9th) 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 came across an interesting idea reading Ready Player One — and I want to discuss this in the post and comments without giving any spoilers.  I’m not done with the book, and I know a lot of people haven’t read it yet at all.

The premise is that a programmer, James Halliday, created a virtual reality game that has thousands of worlds.  One of these worlds is an exact replica of his hometown, Middletown, Ohio, on a random autumn day in 1986.  There are non-player characters walking around the town, riding their bikes, mowing their lawns.

There is also a recreation of the programmer’s childhood home, perfectly replicated down to the shag carpeting.  The narrator comments on this preservation because for all intents and purposes, the programmer had a shitty childhood.  He states,

Looking around, I wondered why Halliday, who always claimed to have had a miserable childhood, had later become so nostalgic for it.  I knew that if and when I finally escaped from the stacks, I’d never look back.  And I definitely wouldn’t create a detailed simulation of the place.

It’s an excellent question: why are we nostalgic for some things and not others?  I have no desire to ever see a scrunchie or banana clip again, despite loving to wear them when I was little.  But I would do anything to get my old gummy bracelets back.  I spent hours upon hours playing tag, and while I have fond memories of the game, I have no desire to play all-neighbourhood tag ever again.  Yet I incessantly play old Atari games.

And then you have the situation in the book: if a person has no fond memories of a space, why would they want to create a simulation of it?  Is it worth someone outside of an experience visiting a space to try to understand it?  Of course.  But we’re talking about building an exact replica of something you lived through and hated so you could revisit it.  What would be the benefit of that?

Unless, I guess, he didn’t really hate his childhood.

I would love a replica of my childhood home, but I also have happy memories of childhood.  And barring a replica of it, I would at least like some of my old toys and books back.

What are you nostalgic for?  And what sort of things evoke nostalgia in your life?  Is there rhyme and reason to what triggers you to miss something?