Dear Mr. Handler–

My daughter adores you, so by extension, we adore you, too.  She studies your books like a Talmudic scholar, bent over the pages of each book, dissecting word after word, plot twist after plot twist.

When we discovered you were coming to our town for a reading of your latest book a few years ago, my husband took the day off of work to bring her to Politics and Prose.  She was only slightly disappointed that Lemony Snicket wouldn’t be there and rolled with the presentation by his official representative, Daniel Handler.

There is a picture on my phone of my daughter talking to Daniel Handler, shyly smiling as he… YOU… signs her book.

Fast forward to this week when I got your new book, We Are Pirates.  I was all set to sit down and enjoy the story when my eye caught on Neil Gaiman’s words printed on the front cover: “The strangest, most brilliant offering yet from the mind behind Lemony Snicket.”

Are you kidding me?  (And Mr. Gaiman, I blame you as well.)  You cannot write a novel under the name Daniel Handler, official representative, AND admit in the same breath that you are Lemony Snicket.

I froze as we stared at the cover and then I saved your ass with a little quick thinking. (You can thank me later.)  “Oh my G-d.  You were with Lemony Snicket.  Lemony lied and said he was someone else — a representative named Daniel Handler — but the two men are one and the same.  So you thought you weren’t meeting Lemony that time, but you did!”

This cheered her up for a moment, but then the inevitable question was asked: why did he lie?

She has decided that you must have been in danger.  For instance, what if the woman with the hair and no beard walked into the bookstore, or worse, been sitting in the audience?  You clearly lied because you had to lie.  You may have even lied to protect the children in the audience.

Please be forewarned that the next time you go on a book tour, she will likely be at your Washington, D.C. stop, asking you about this.  So make up something good.  Please?  And stick to that story.

Thank you,

Melissa

A completely off-topic sidenote to everyone else: tomorrow is Microblog Monday.  Batten down the hatches.

Tonight kicks off Pesach.  I have tearfully said goodbye to bread and pasta for the next 8 days, and sighed a not-very-welcoming hello to the matzah.  This is not one of my favourite holidays.  It is very hard to be a picky vegetarian at Pesach and get enough protein.

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Skip this section if you skipped the recent post that had the Harry Potter spoiler because there is further discussion of the spoiler.  Leaving a few spaces to give you time to jump ahead.

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Okay, I call foul on the idea that it was a self-generating potion.  That would be completely out of character for Voldemort.  The man/snake has hubris.  He believes he is invincible and smarter than any other wizard.  Therefore (1) he wouldn’t believe that anyone would ever know of the Horcruxes, (2) if they did know about the Horcruxes, they would never seek one out to destroy him, (3) if they were seeking Horcruxes that they would know about the cave, and (4) that if they did reach the cave that they would get to the island.

His security measures are not really security measures.  They are more Voldemort playing with his prey like a cat plays with a mouse.  All the obstacles are there for his personal enjoyment of his own cleverness because he never believed anyone would actually reach that cave, much less the island.  Therefore, there would be no need to create a regenerating potion because the only time Voldemort would be returning to that island would be to retrieve and use the Horcrux.  Why would he want to use a regenerating potion — surely more difficult to create and maintain — if he believed there would never be a reason to refill the bowl?

Plus, he underestimates other witches and wizards through the whole series — from Lily Potter to Harry, himself.  Why would he account for other people’s dedication or intelligence now?

I know, we’ve thought about this way too much.  It’s like we’ve turned into little Potter scholars.

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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:

• “Exploding Lawnmowers and Dog Poop” (Wild and Precious Life)
• “The Lessons She Teaches Me: On Time #WDSD15” (Invincible Spring)
• “Cobra Pose” (No Baby Ruth)

Okay, now my choices this week.

River Run Dry gutted me with her post about giving away the last of the baby things.  Karen already dealt with my hysterical sobby emails, so I will spare you the recap.  But this line gutted me: “As I stood there, looking at it, grief washed over me.  He is my last baby.”  I am with her on the 99% of the time (um… maybe more like 97% of the time), especially when we are biking or plotting out our visits to Harry Potter conventions or reading young adult books.  But that 3% of the time?  It’s there, too.

Bound By Symmetry is back with a post about holding a room for a nursery when there isn’t a child on the way.  Especially when they have guests staying with them soon.  Should she really ask them to stay in the basement just so she can hold the unused room for someone who isn’t here yet?  You can see my take on her situation in the comment section, though add your own while you’re there.

Lastly, it was a week for crying-while-reading.  Something Out of Nothing is writing a series of posts for her daughter with the A to Z Challenge.  The first one, for the letter A, recounts her feelings on losing her mother in the month of April.  She writes so movingly about connecting with her mother through her daughter: “She gave me a connection to my mom I hadn’t experienced before. With every act of mothering, there was a recognition, a repetition. She bathed me and changed my diapers. She worried and watched while I slept. She responded to my cries with love and compassion. She watched in wonder as I grew and changed daily.”  It is such a gorgeous post.  You need to go over and read the whole thing.

The roundup to the Roundup: Pesach starts tonight.  More on the Harry Potter spoiler.  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 March 27th and April 3rd) 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.

At first I was excited by the announcement that Trevor Noah would be hosting the Daily Show.  I’m a sucker for a sexy accent, and he’s cute.  Plus, he comes across as smart and funny when I’ve heard him perform.

And then came the immediate backlash as people dissected his Twitter account, rounding up all of his anti-Semitic*, homophobic, misogynist tweets while gleefully spitting on Comedy Central’s decision.  Of course, now those tweets will be in the back of my head every time I watch him tackle the news.

It’s why I don’t think comedians — or really anyone — should spend too much time on Twitter.  It’s a poor medium for expressing yourself.  Most of the time, 140 characters isn’t enough characters if you’re trying to say something meaningful or helpful, but it is enough characters to get you into a lot of trouble.

We don’t speak aloud in quips or off-the-cuff non sequiturs, because we know that if we did, we’d spend a lot of time backtracking to explain ourselves.  But that’s exactly what we do on Twitter: we throw up 140 characters and then step away to do something else.  Compounding the problem is that social media moves so quickly that people end up saying hurtful things in the rush to be the first, the funniest, or the most clever.

Twitter shines as a way of disseminating information, such as getting out links to longer articles that discuss something in-depth  or giving first-hand accounts as an incident unfolds.  Fact-based Twitter works quite well.  Commentary-heavy, opinion-based Twitter… not so much.

And yet, the rush to condemn people for their tweets scares me.  It scares me that every time a person enters the spotlight, the first thing the collective crowd does is race out to find a reason to tear them down, and the first place they now look is their social media accounts.  What makes a person dive back many years through a Twitterstream unless they’re looking for something terrible to hold against the person?

And we’re not talking about a world leader (though, yes, all presidential hopefuls will have their social media past trotted out on display).  We’re talking about a guy who is going to joke about the news.

Do I think people should be held responsible for what they say?  Yes.  But we’re also judging people on something that was said off-hand, without deep thought, and in some cases, many years ago.

I am more saddened by someone like Lena Dunham who takes a long time to write a thoughtless piece.  And the editor at the New Yorker who edited said thoughtless piece.  And the publisher at the New Yorker who decided to run said thoughtless piece.  There was a lot of time for someone to say along the way, “This is actually quite hurtful” and not have those words published.

Should that article be judged with the same scale that we judge a hurtful tweet?

Listen, do Trevor Noah’s tweets upset me?  Yes.  But I also know that they were sent into the Twitterverse with nary a second thought and probably forgotten by Noah until they were dredged up by critics.  Were they funny?  No.

But if I spent enough time on anyone’s Twitter account, I could find something thoughtless or cruel.  That goes for mine as well.  As it goes in many cases, it’s the response of the person after they are told their words are hurtful that matters more.  I’m disappointed that his response wasn’t, “I’m sorry,” projecting outward to people offended, but instead he focused the moment inward on himself:

To reduce my views to a handful of jokes that didn’t land is not a true reflection of my character, nor my evolution as a comedian.

— Trevor Noah (@Trevornoah) March 31, 2015

Hey, Noah, that’s what we get to say.  Not you.  You should just learn from the mistake, apologize, and then not repeat it again.  Let everyone else point out the danger in holding a person to a single statement instead of looking at their words as a whole.

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We should agonize over what we put online, especially when we’re making a joke out of context.  Comedy works better when it’s more than 140 characters because the jokes are framed inside longer stories.  Not so much when we reduce comedy to a few words.  But while we’re being circumspect over what we post, we also need to take a step back and condemn individual tweets and images without condemning the whole person or their whole career.

Because it’s a scary world when 140 characters can undo years of work or a reputation that took a lifetime to build.

* Yes, I’m aware that his argument is that he has a Jewish grandparent, therefore he can make Jewish jokes.  And Dunham’s argument is that she has a Jewish parent, therefore she can make Jewish jokes.  But here’s the thing; there are Jewish jokes that are funny, and there are Jewish jokes that are anti-Semitic — even when told by a Jew.  So… yeah… that argument doesn’t hold because it both cases, the words were tasteless and cruel.

I took the New York Times quiz on how well I do with forming new habits.  Go over and take it, and then come back and talk to me.

You’re back?  Good.

So I received the grade of Upholder:

Upholders respond readily to both outer and inner expectations: they meet deadlines and keep New Year’s resolutions without much struggle or supervision. Upholders take great satisfaction from moving smoothly through their daily schedule and their to-do lists. They meet others’ expectations—and their expectations for themselves. However, Upholders may feel uneasy when expectations aren’t clear, when they’re worried that they’re breaking the rules, or when they feel overwhelmed by expectations they seek to meet. They enjoy habits, and form habits fairly easily.

Um… that is me.  To a T.

I don’t struggle with resolutions because I love denying myself things.  Dan Ariely has a part in one of his books about how self-control is a “muscle” and how if we deny ourselves things too often, we will overwork the muscle and cause injury to our psyche.  Josh snorted and said, “apparently he hasn’t met you.”  I am the type of person who will bake a batch of cookies just to have something around that I can deny myself.  Upholder to the core.

And I need to know the rules.  If you tell me the rules, I will follow the rules, even if the rules make no sense.  But give me no rules and I become a nervous wreck, wondering if I’m doing something wrong.  And give me no feedback on whether or not I’m correctly following the rules, and I will fall apart completely, baking cookies like mad just to deny myself a little extra.

It was the first time I’ve taken a personality quiz online and actually had it match who I am.  How well did it define you?

P.S. I know I’m annoying in always trying to figure out the rules.  Bear with me.

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

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I’ll admit that I usually don’t read reviews of my books.  I’m afraid that doing so will change me.  And change is bad.  So… I avoid it like an ostrich*.

But I was scrolling past a review the other day and this line caught my eye: “You’ll do well in the future so keep going.”  This stranger managed to say the exact words I needed to hear at the exact time.  I’m not ashamed to admit that I wrote out the words on a post-it note and stuck it over my desk.  If that person is reading this post, thank you.

Maya Angelou was correct when she said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”  That reviewer’s words made me feel grounded.

Two inspirational quotes for the price of one… post.

I do love to surround myself with well-written reminders, the sorts of words that get under your skin exactly when you need them to.  So leave your favourite inspirational quote in the comment section.

*I’m aware that ostriches don’t actually bury their heads in sand.

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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.