Oh damn you, Bio Girl, you and your book recommendations.  I finally got to check I’ll Give You the Sun out of the library and spent a weepy week with it.  It’s a good book.  You can see the twists coming from many miles away but that doesn’t make the book any less enjoyable.

The book is about twins who are best friends at 13 and not speaking by 16, and you learn what drove them apart.  I got the sense that the author both knew twins and that she has never spent real time with twins.  These twins were like the John Green equivalent of twins.  You know how John Green teenagers both act like teenagers and nothing like teenagers at the same time?  These twins were like twins and nothing like twins at the same time.

And that is not a criticism.  If I want real twins, I can walk into the kitchen.  If I want real teenagers, I can call my niece.  Most of the time, when I am turning to a book, I don’t want reality reflected back at me perfectly.  I want a little hyperbole so I can notice things in my own life.

Anyway, a small fear I have — in the back of my heart — is that my twins will one day grow apart.  I believe it is possible and I don’t believe it is possible.  They have always been each other’s best friend, and that continues to this day even as they gravitate towards people outside the family.  But I also know that relationships change.  They wax and wane.  Maybe one day they will grow apart.  Or maybe they won’t.  In any case, I told them the plot line, they collectively rolled their eyes and informed me that they would never destroy their relationship and did I know fact from fiction, Mum?

Um… yes.  I was just checking.

I’m a little sensitive with twin-themed books.

Anyway, there were three passages I noted in the book that I will turn over to you for discussion.  None of three actually require you to read the book.  They’re just questions the text raised inside my brain.  The first and third sort of loop together, but I think I’ll ask these questions separately so I can see how I want to phrase the last one after I see the answers to the first.

So here’s the first question:

Would you rather unknowingly have your life be a terrible truth or a wonderful lie?  Meaning, you would never know that your life was a lie; there would be no horrible moment of knowledge.  So with that fact in mind, would you rather unknowingly have your life be a terrible truth or a wonderful lie?

I read a post on SheWrites that resonated with me a lot.  Emily Lackey applied the ideas in The Life-Changing Power of Tidying Up to social media.  She asked a simple question: did it bring her joy?  Facebook itself didn’t make the cut.  Twitter was cleaned up to a manageable size; a feed that made her feel happy when she looked at it instead of like crap about her own life.

I loved the idea until I went to apply it to my life.

The reality is that there are a lot of things I read each day that don’t make me happy.  They definitely don’t bring me joy, and on many occasions, they make me downright frustrated.  They make me feel like crap about myself.  But the thing was, there wasn’t a single blog or person that I encounter that does that 100% of the time.

There was no one to unfollow, no blog to delete from my feed, no site that I needed to stop visiting.  Unlike the simplicity of the KonMari method where a shirt is either worn or not worn, blogs and social media feeds were much harder to cull because sometimes they fit me and sometimes they don’t.

I agree with Lackey that mental clutter is detrimental to our well-being just as much as physical clutter, but I still couldn’t see anything or anyone to cut.  Not when I knew that every single story that I follow is valuable to me in some way.

Here’s the thing, I went to a reading last week for two authors.  They’re married and sometimes work together, but mostly work apart.  I’m not going to name them because… well… this story isn’t really about them.

Anyway, one of the authors is wildly popular and the line to get him to sign books looped around the whole room.  Admittedly, we were there for him, too.  But his wife turned out to be the more interesting speaker with the more interesting book.  She had a much much much shorter line, and many times she was left at the table with nothing to do except smile at the people in line to see her husband.  We ended up going out in the hall to buy her book and got back in line to have her sign it.

As we stood there, I noticed something.  The first writer had exuberant fans who were clearly happy to get a chance to see him.  They walked out of the room in droves, clutching their signed books and looking pretty damn happy.  But the second writer had thoughtful fans who were clearly moved to get a chance to see her.  People lingered in front of her for a long time, sometimes very emotional, telling her their own similar story.  It was a smaller group who walked out of the room clutching her book, but they also looked deeply at peace; like they had plugged into something that recharged them and focused them and connected them to something larger than themselves.

If you only look at the numbers, the first writer is the more successful writer.  But if you drop the numbers, if you don’t look at success as checking off boxes, the second writer was clearly the one that stuck to people’s hearts.  No small feat.

It was what I thought about when I tried to declutter my lists and sites I visit.  The person clearly got rid of the people she sees to be first author types — wildly successful so they make her feel sad in comparison — and kept the second author types — people she loves connecting with.  And that is certainly one way to do it.

But I thought about it this way: what if that wife stopped writing because she saw her husband was so successful that it didn’t feel worth it in comparison?  Then all those people wouldn’t have gotten to have their moment with her at the table; her book wouldn’t have come out.

Instead, she sat there and smiled at his success, and enjoyed her own, smaller version, which turned out to be equally if not more important.

I don’t know the point of all of this except to say that I couldn’t cut one site or person out of my reading list.  And that success comes in many different forms if we’re willing to be open minded.  And for some reason, the story of the reading popped into my head the moment I tried to cull my lists to only people who make me happy.

Do you think you can apply the KonMari method to social media?

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

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I was listening to a recent Nerdist episode with Andy Samberg, and they touched on being tried in the Twitter court of public opinion.  Even as a sketch is unfolding, people are tweeting their opinions of it, and it influences the performer’s… self-esteem?  Work?  Future projects?  All of the above?

Who wants to be creative when creativity can bite you in the ass?

Anyway, Samberg admits that when he hosted SNL, he simply didn’t go online for a bit.  And Chris counters that doing so (shutting out that court of public opinion) shows how much we do have control over how we perceive our reality.  We can tune other people out simply by not going online.

Easier said than done.

If you knew there was a post written about you, could you stop yourself from reading it?  What if you knew for a fact that it was negative?  What if you knew for a fact that it was positive?

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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.

Josh and I went to see the Nats play the Colorado Rockies last weekend. Our boys were doing great, scoring two back-to-back home runs early in the game, and it felt like we couldn’t lose. I mean, we were there with some of my favourite people, and I had gotten a shake from Shake Shack. The weather was beautiful, and we had seats above and behind home plate. It was a perfect day for baseball.

But then we did lose. Later in the game the Rockies caught up and then pulled ahead. By the eighth inning, I had convinced myself that if the Nats lost, it meant that we’d get bad news all around.

I’m a little ashamed to say that by the time Jayson Werth got up to bat in the ninth inning, bases loaded, I cried.

We lost. 6 to 4.

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The problem when you look for signs and then see things you don’t want to see is that you have to spend a lot of time trying to convince yourself that signs are meaningless.

Until, of course, you start looking for signs again.

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I knew we were going to get some results last week, and the night before the call, I was crawling out of my skin. I went to kiss the twins goodnight one last time before I got into bed. The ChickieNob’s arm was stretched behind her at an odd angle, so I bent down and kissed her hand.

A little voice inside me said that if I could kiss the Wolvog’s hand, if it was stretched backwards the same way, it would mean that we’d get good results. If his arms were under the blanket, it was a bad sign.

I know. Ridiculous. Results are not contingent on a child’s sleeping position. Even though my rational brain knew that, I crept into the Wolvog’s room, hope welling up in my heart.

He was sleeping curled up, deep underneath the blanket.

I walked over to kiss him goodnight regardless, even though my heart was deflating, but as I leaned over his forehead, he rolled over and reached his hand up into the air, dangling it a few inches below my lips.

I kissed it, thanking the universe for sending me the sign I needed to see so I could go to sleep, and then guided his hand down onto the blanket. I went back in our room and told Josh the sign and what had happened. He stared at me incredulously and pointed out that the two things aren’t remotely related.

Except, in both cases, it’s all about people I love.

So he went in their rooms and kissed their hands, too, for good luck. Immediately after Josh kissed the Wolvog’s hand, he changed positions in his sleep again and curled up under the blanket.

The next day, we got the call.

All is well.

Side note: Tomorrow is #MicroblogMondays. Get writing.

Truman is doing much better, though the vet ruled that he needs to be on antibiotics for another two weeks.

He was so happy in the car as we drove to the vet, squeaking along to Paul McCartney.  Maybe he thought we were going to the store where we buy his cookies.  But then we walked into the office and he immediately looked at me with terror, as if to say, “Crap!  This place!  Where they squeeze me for an x-ray?”  He went back to being his chill self the moment we got back outside, and he squeaked with ABBA the whole ride home.

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The twins completed the library’s summer reading program and got a free book as a result.  Even though there were no prizes for adults, we were invited to participate, too.  So I’ve been logging my summer reading with the library and got a virtual sticker every time I completed two books.

Um, I really like the stickers.

I remember when we were little that the impetus to do summer reading was that the library would put your name up around the information desk.  There was usually a theme to the program, and the name card was in a special shape.  Once summer was over, you could go by the library and get your name card, but it was a big deal to go to the library and see everyone’s name.  I was the sort of child who needed to go frequently to check my own.

I wish my local library would put my name up at the desk and let people know that I’m doing their summer reading program.  I would like everyone in my town to know that Melissa is feverishly reading books.

But, you know, they don’t have the children’s names up so it would probably be odd if they only had a middle-aged woman’s name scrawled across a beach-ball-shaped name card at the information desk.

Right?

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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:

• “Returning” (Schrodinger’s Catbox)
• “Microblog Monday: Infertility Is…” (Searching for Our Silver Lining)
• “On Being Invisible” (When You Can’t Have Kids)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I love this post by Bereaved and Blessed about getting a sign from her daughter, Molly.  A notification pops up that happens to be from someone with the same name as the daughter they lost years ago.  After a moment of sleep confusion, she realizes that it’s the name of a distant connection.  She writes, “However, it was nice, if even for a moment, to believe that our baby girl wants us to know how she feels about her siblings.”  I like the idea of people being able to communicate with us from worlds beyond.

It Is What It Is (or Is It?) has a tribute to the brother she lost in a car accident when they were children.  It is such a gorgeous post.  The two parts that got under my skin were her musings about all that would be different if not for the accident (“I can’t even conjure who that eleven year old girl would have grown up to be. She is a ghost.”) and the moving conclusion to the post (“And so, it is on this day, brother, a day where I miss you profoundly, that I say thank you.“).

Lastly, A Separate Life has a post about breathing in a moment.  It’s a day when she rightfully could feel otherwise.  She explains, “I can look out the window at my 270 degree view, and take it in, feel gratitude on a day when I don’t really want to feel grateful, and have the comfort of knowing you are all with me on this late winter Wellington morning.”  She finds a small space to be still on the heels of bad news, and she captures the moment perfectly in a beautiful post.

The roundup to the Roundup: Truman is doing better.  I did the library’s summer reading program.  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 August 7th and 14th) 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.