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

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Last weekend, we went to the beach for the day.  The experience reminded me why I like to go to the beach mid-week during high season.

Beyond how crowded it is on the weekend, there were two types of things that annoyed me that I rarely encounter during the week.  The first was the breaking of established rules where the activity affected other people.  For instance, smoking on the beach.  We ended up moving two times due to smokers.

The other was more slippery: playing music on the beach.  As far as I know, there isn’t an established rule against playing music without headphones.  But we all know that it is annoying unless the person blasting the music happens to have inadvertently chosen music that you also enjoy.  I’m sure those people wouldn’t want to hear my music, and I certainly didn’t want to hear their music.  But I had to hear their music because they decided to play it aloud.

I feel that way about cell phones in cars — it’s breaking an established rule that is there to protect other people — and perfume — not a rule but certainly annoying and affecting others when a person wears too much in public.

The answer is, obviously, to never leave my house.

What are your pet peeves in public spaces?

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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.

A bunch of people have been linking to and discussing the recent New York Times piece on empathy. The assertion is made that while people often state variations of we need to walk a mile in another person’s shoes, we are awful at actually doing so and the task may be impossible in practice.

So where does that leave blogs?  Because part of my reason for reading blogs is to imagine a life unlike my own.  I’m less drawn to blogs that mirror my own way of thinking and more toward blogs that serve as a window into a life different from my own.  I mean, every life is different from my own since… you know… that whole every human being/situation is unique thing.  But you know what I mean.

So is there a reason to keep reading blogs?  Do they become solely entertainment if they’re not actually a tool for building empathy?  I know some people read blogs as if they’re a reality television show, tuning in for the next installment to see what happens to X or what was the outcome of Y.

But for those of us who tune in not to be entertained but instead to be taught… can we really be taught?  Or is that all just hopeful thinking in our brain?

Because I agree with the NYT’s author:

It’s impossible to actually imagine what it would be like to have certain deeply significant experiences, such as becoming a parent, changing your religion or fighting a war. The same lack of access applies to our understanding of others. If I can’t know what it would be like for me to fight in a war, how can I expect to understand what it was like for someone else to have fought in a war? If I can’t understand what it would be like to become poor, how can I know what it’s like for someone else to be poor?

If others can’t really imagine what it is like to be me, how can I believe that I can imagine what it is like to be someone else?  Our imaginations are really really really limited.

Still, this is a case where I think giving it the old college try is more important than success.  Maybe we need to start from an understanding that we won’t have success and be okay with that.  Instead, it’s the effort expended, the attempt made, the desire to try.  That a willingness to consider someone else’s reality is more the point than actually succeeding in understanding someone else’s reality.

At least, that’s my hope.

Your thoughts?

A side note: tomorrow is #MicroblogMonday.  Get writing.

I may have been sucked into the hype about Fallout Shelter and downloaded it to the iPad.

I’ll admit that I don’t totally get what to do.  This game hasn’t clicked with me like other games where I instantly get it and want to keep playing.  I followed all the steps and set up my underground lair, but now I’m sort of looking around and thinking, “and…”  It took me a while to figure out how to see a player’s stats, but I still don’t know if I’m using a player well.

It’s sort of like post-Apocalyptic Hay Day, only more complicated and less straightforward.

Anyone else playing?

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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:

• “Imagining the Lives of Others” (New York Times)
• “Microblog Monday: Easy, and Six Minute (Vegan) Chocolate Cake” (A Half-Baked Life)
• “Can a Picture Really Change the World? It Can, and I Will Tell You How” (Giovanni’s Journey)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Torthúil is returning to work in the fall.  She writes about trying to make the decision: “I’d turn things over in my head one hour, and think I’d made up my mind, only to feel completely the opposite about the matter the next hour. Wake up at 1am with one idea of what I could live with, wake up at 5am with a different one.”  This is my process, too, with huge decisions, so the post felt familiar and comforting.  I know I’ll return to it the next time I have to make a decision and feel less alone.

Hope Floats Among the Cherry Blossoms has a post about life shifting like a kaleidoscope.  It’s a wonderful philosophy about following your heart, making plans with the information you have on hand, and knowing “that plans are just plans, and they will bend, evolve and change.”  Something I needed to read (and take to heart) this week.

Infertile Girl in a Fertile World has a post about returning to the pharmacy where she always got her fertility drugs, only this time she is visibly pregnant and going for prenatal vitamins.  A post about noticing life changes and reflecting on where you’ve come from.

The making and breaking of plans is a theme this week in my feed reader.  No Kidding in NZ talks about coming to a place of acceptance with life plans changing.  She finally gets to leave the unknown of family building, but when she arrives at a place of knowledge, it isn’t where she expected to be.  She writes, “But finally the certainty that I had craved had arrived. But it wasn’t the certainty I wanted. Getting that certainty in the knowledge that we would never have children – well, it was very difficult.”  It’s a great post about letting go of control and embracing the fact that plans change.

Lastly, Edenland has an emotional, raw post about a very difficult time in life.  She so eloquently writes, “It’s my blog and there will be tumbleweeds blowing through here if I want to. Some days everything is wrong and I want to punch inspirational quotes in the face, rage at the state of the world out there and the world in my heart. I don’t even want to be happy – just ok. I just want to be ok. I fight to be ok.”  It is the perfect post to read if you need to howl.  And yes, at some point Life takes all of us down to our knees and we just need to howl.

The roundup to the Roundup: Anyone else playing Fallout Shelter?  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 June 12th and June 19th) 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.

This is the premise of the reality show: two families in need are each given a briefcase containing $100,000.  They have three choices:

(1) Keep and use all the money for themselves.

(2) Give some of the money to the other family, who is also in need, and keep some of the money.  The first family doesn’t know that the second family also has a briefcase.

(3) Give all of the money to the other family.

So it’s about how philanthropic you are when you hear about another person in need, especially when you are in need yourself.

Oh, and you’re filmed while you make your decision so the whole world can judge you for being altruistic, greedy, or a bit of a fool in how you spent the money.

I haven’t watched the show yet.  In Hebrew school, we were taught Rambam’s Ladder of Giving, and this sort of giving falls firmly around the second rung (or, in that inverted version, level 6).  Give me a show where people are acting on the top rung (level 1), and I’ll give the network an hour of my time.

But I know that IVF and adoption come up as situations in the first few episodes of the show.  The couple in need is given $100,000 but told about this other couple who really needs the money to build their family.  Are they moved to donate or not?

I’m going to spoil it for you.  So click away if you don’t want to read the rest of this post.

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With IVF, the couple gives the women in need $25,000 toward treatments.  Impressive, except that the women who need IVF give the other couple $99,600 of their $100,000.  In other words, despite the fact that they need the money to build their family, they opt to give all but $400 to the other couple.

With adoption, one couple needs the money to adopt because the woman cannot carry a child, while the other family lives apart much of the year due to the nature of the husband’s job.  The couple who want to adopt give the other couple $20,000 and keep $80,000.  The other couple gives the adopting couple $40,000 and keep $60,000.

I have a lot of fears that this show will be detrimental to the overall act of giving (toward any situation) but moreso to the general public’s feelings about family building.  If people didn’t have enough judgment on a personal level, it’s now being fomented on a much larger level for entertainment purposes.  This is a show about judging the worth of another person, whether we think they are deserving or not.

Because what we’re teaching here is to judge worthiness.  To not give because we want to give but to give because we think someone else’s story is sadder than our own.  And to do so without all the information; these people don’t know that the other couple also has money to give away or keep.  It’s a stunt that could have emotional fallout for the people involved in the show, but could also impact the way we give out here in the non-reality world.

What are your thoughts?  Are you happy or cringing to hear that infertility featured on the Briefcase?

Not a Wasted Word and I share a deep love of talking about decluttering.  I would say we share a deep love of decluttering, but the reality is that I schedule my declutters far more often than I do them.

A few weeks ago, she sent me a New York Times article celebrating clutter.  Not declutter.  Celebrating clutter.  The article points out how useless it is to stress about the accumulation of stuff because accumulating things (intangible and tangible) is part of the human experience.  Why should we get rid of the things that we once wanted or that remind us of happy times or which simply bring a spot of colour into the corner of the room?  Why should we get rid of books we’ve read or clothes we rarely wear?

The part that really resonated with me was this:

The stuff we accumulate works the same way our body weight does. Each of us has a set point to which we invariably return. Each of us has been allotted a certain tolerance, if not a need, for stuff; each of us is gaited to carry a certain amount of weight in possessions.

Some of us, rare breeds, tend toward the minimalist; some tip into a disorder of hoarding. Most of us live in the middle range. How marvelous it is to simply accept that, and celebrate it.

If this is true, it explains a lot.

I love minimalism, but I don’t think I really have a minimalist “body.”  Just as I’m more curvaceous in nature, my possessions bulge in places like my pear-shaped body: piles of books for my wide hips and stacks of paper for my big chest.  And a lack of knickknacks for my thin arms and no decorative touches for my thin legs.

I do have to declutter regardless of what this author says, but I am going to allow myself to keep whatever my heart wants.  After all, it’s mine.  And I love my stuff, too.