Welcome back to IComLeavWe. It stands for International Comment Leaving Week, but if you say it aloud, doesn’t it sounds like “I come; [but] leave [as a] we”? And that’s sort of the point. Blogging is a conversation and comments should be honoured and encouraged. I like to say that comments are the new hug–a way of saying hello, giving comfort, leaving congratulations. Here is the vital information, pure and simple (a more detailed set of rules follows below the list):

• The list opens the 1st of every month. It remains open until the 21st. You can add yourself at any point. The list is open to everyone in the blogosphere–blog writers and/or blog readers.
• Add yourself to the list by filling out this form after adding the icon below: The March list is now closed.  The April list will open on 3/27.
  
• Click here to cut-and-paste this bit of code to add to your sidebar (if you have the old code from another month, remove it and replace it with this one). You need to add the icon or a link to the current list on your blog (see below) and will not be added until it’s up.
• Commenting kicks off every month on the 21st. Please mark it somewhere (calendar, post-it note taped to your computer…), though I will be sending out an email reminder on the 20th. Commenting week runs from the 21st to the 28th. Every day, leave 5 comments and return 1 comment for a total of 6 comments. You are highly encouraged to choose the blogs you comment on from the participants list below, but this is not required.
• I will send a second email on the 28th to remind you to remove the icon from your blog.
• Read below if you want to find out about Iron Commenters.
• The commenting ends on the 28th. We catch our breath and the whole thing starts again the next month on the 1st. Drop in and out according to what is happening in your life between the 21st and the 28th.

The March 2015 List

1. Stirrup Queens (twins, books, writing)
2. Breathe Gently (IVF, recurrent miscarriage, toddler-mum)
3. Constant inthe Darkness (open adoption, waiting #2, toddler mama)
4. Life of an Army Wife (army, parenting, donor gametes)
5. Amateur Nester (infertility, faith, encouragement)
6. The Modern Belly (infertility, information, hope)
7. Accio Baby! (infertility, fertility treatments, encouragement)
8. Pages, Stages & Rages (parenting after IF, adoption, grief)
9. Just Another Infertility Blog (ivf, life, change)
10. BattleFish (life, pregnancy #2 after IF)
11. A Little Bit More (life, ttc, pcos)
12. All The Dirty Laundry (relationship, babies, life)
13. Waiting for Baby Bird (infertility, faith, pcos)
14. Four Years Later (pregnancy, stillborn, pre-school mom)
15. Infertility Unfiltered (pregnancy, loss, lie)
16. The Quest for a Tiny Human (infertility, IVF, furbabies)
17. When Agony Met Hope… (infertility, donor embryo)
18. In Due Time (loss, faith, waiting)
19. Wild Island Love (parenting, twins, post-infertility)
20. Creating a Family (infertility, adoption, adoptive parenting)
21. The Empty Cookie (loss, children, life)
22. My (In)fertile Confessions (FET, 2WW, parenting twins)
23. Three Quarters Full (infertility, parenting, IVF)
24. The March list is now closed.  The April list will open on 3/27.

Q: What if I miss a day?

A: Catch up the next day by doubling your comments–12 comments instead of 6.

Q: What if I have two blogs? Can I sign up twice, listing both blogs?

A: Yes, but you also need to double your comments. If you have two blogs listed, you should be leaving 12 comments per day.

Q: What is an Iron Commenter?

A: Not for the faint-of-heart. People who wish to be an Iron Commenter and be entered on the Iron Commenter honour roll need to leave a comment on every blog on the participants list (exceptions are blogs that require you to have a special log-in, such as some LiveJournal accounts or other similar situations). You can spread out this commenting any way you wish over the whole week, but the final comment needs to be left by midnight on the 28th (EST). Reaching Iron Commenter status is done on an honour system. Please email me if you earn Iron Commenter status so I can add you to the wall of honour.

Q: Why do I have to add that bit of code to my sidebar?

A: The code is the latest icon (the icon changes colour every month so you know that you’re on the right list). This month, the icon is green, the next month it will be blue, etc. The reason is two-fold: (1) it enables more people to find out about IComLeavWe and (2) it gives you easy access to the current list once the commenting week actually begins and better ensures that you’ll use it. Too many times, people sign up and forget to actually do IComLeavWe and this icon gives you a daily reminder (with the dates on it) every time you open your own blog. The icon is linked back to the current list. On the 28th, remove the icon from your blog. A new one will be created for the next month.

Q: It’s the 23rd and I just saw this for the first time on my friend’s blog! I want to join the list–why can’t I?

A: Because IComLeavWe happens every month, once the list is closed, it’s closed. If you’re finding out about this on the 23rd, you can’t join the current month. But leave yourself a note to check back in a week on the 1st and you can sign up for the next month.

Q: You said the list closes on the 21st. Well, it’s still the 21st where I am. Why aren’t you moving my information onto the list?

A: All dates and times are U.S. Eastern Standard Time (UTC/GMT -5 hours). The list closes around 11 p.m. EST on the 21st.

Q: What if no one comments on my blog and I have no comments to return?

A: Well, that really doesn’t happen for the most part, but in that case, simply choose another blog and add an additional comment. The goal is to hit 6 comments daily as a minimum. Going over that is fantastic and encouraged.

Q: Mel, my question wasn’t covered at all. What do I do?

A: Email me; I’m quite friendly. It helps to place “IComLeavWe” in the subject line. You could also check this post which contains the history of IComLeavWe and see if you can glean anything there.

Looking for the comment section? It has been closed on this post. Use the form in the directions to add yourself to the list.

Not to continue on the morbid streak, but Pamela Jeanne sent me an article from NPR that I’ve been thinking a lot about, too.  It’s on historical preservation; not just the stuff that we know is important in the moment, that we immediately put behind a glass case.  But the things that we think we are doing a good job preserving for future generations to see that will be inaccessible or gone altogether.

It’s not just preserving photographs in a medium that will still be used in the future.  I mean, that is something anyone who has gone from records to audio cassettes to compact discs to streaming music can wrap their brain around.

It the sheer deluge of words; how do we separate out the important ones from the toss-away?  How do we curate and preserve the important tweets?  The Facebook status updates that created change or are indicative of how we live our lives right now?  Self-publishing has brought about a tidal wave of books: a good thing for the present moment and a logistical nightmare for preservation.

Especially when we look deep into the future.  Despite people building careers on preservation will we inevitably have our moment in time boiled down to a handful of artifacts?  Are humans not meant to hold onto everything, despite being hardwired to hoard?

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In the NPR article, Vint Cerf takes the example of research conducted on old letters and photographs; things we can still pick up and use even though technology has changed.  Whereas consider the hours of audio cassette interviews I’m storing in the basement.  (Why?  I have no idea.)  They’re hard to access now.  I need to borrow equipment in order to listen to them.  Will they be completely inaccessible forty years from now?  Just a piece of useless tape encased in plastic?

I’ve been thinking about how I need to print out photos.  I have my pictures backed up in multiple places, but all of those places are useless if the technology moves on and I can no longer look at them.

It’s not just that the world may be a very different place 100 years from now and the people no longer understand why social media meant so much to us or the jokes on Saturday Night Live.  It may be that there are people who want to understand, who want to do research on our lives, and yet have no way to get to the information or even sort through the data to know what is important to consider.  When every tweet is kept, how do future generations know which are the important ones within the sea of trillions?

I’m thinking about building a personal time capsule book for the twins, something that they can pass down through the family.  Nothing huge; perhaps only a photo or two from each year.  Commentary on current events.  Written recordings of big family moments.

I wish I had something like that from the prior generations.  Did they have the intention to do something like that, too?  Did life get in the way, or did it not occur to them that future generations would want this information?  I can’t believe that preservation is a modern thought, which begs the question: why didn’t recent past generations protect and curate for us?  Is there something we don’t know?

I was sad to read Oliver Sack’s piece in the New York Times about his terminal cancer diagnosis.  I’ve enjoyed his books, and it’s always moving to read someone write about the end of their life.

There were a few sentences near the middle of the piece that gave me pause:

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.

He goes on to explain that these worries — politics or global warming — belong to younger generations.  There will be people in the future to grapple with these problems and new ones, but he cannot be the person who holds them in the current moment.  That part I understood; it’s hard to worry about things deep in the future, especially if you know that you won’t be there to find out the outcome.

It’s before that: “There is no time for anything inessential.  I must focus on myself, my work and my friends.”

He’s not allocating 60 minutes to NewsHour because those minutes could be better spent doing something else.

I guess I paused because while Sacks knows that he is staring death in the face, all of us are potentially breathing our final breaths.  He knows and therefore adjusts.  But some of us have no clue, and then it begs the question: should we all cut out the inessential (being honest with ourselves about what is inessential) on the off-chance that we’re nearing the end of our life?

If I died tomorrow, would I be happy with how I spent today?  Not really.  I mean, there were things I had to do: take the ChickieNob for a haircut, do work, make dinner.  I’m fine with all the obligatory minutes of living life.  But there were so many minutes and hours wasted.  I read a bunch of fluffy lifestyle sites even though half the articles made me cranky.  I spent over an hour searching for a sketch pad (that I never found) even though I should have given up after ten minutes and waited until I could ask the ChickieNob if she remembered where it was (she did).  I checked email way too many times, making me less productive.

I spend so many of my minutes on inessential activities.  Do you know how many times a day I need to check Facebook?  Once.  Do you know how many times I do?  I’m embarrassed to admit it.  It’s a distraction.  It’s something easy to click.  Work is hard.  Facebook is easy.  Facebook wins out.  And then I kick myself for wasting time because really, I’m scrolling through the very same status updates I saw a half hour earlier.

There are the things I do that I know are a waste of time.  There are the things I do that seem important in the moment, things I believe I should do because they’ll bring me something in future, even though I also sense (when I’m honest with myself) that they’re a waste of time.  I could easily cut out both of those categories of activities and people without missing them too much.

It would be like the anxiety that comes after a drastic haircut when you stand in the shower and feel your hand slip off the ends of your hair and think, what have I done?  And then, days or weeks later, you look in the mirror and think, the haircut was a good move.  It is so much easier to take care of now.

I guess his words gave me pause because there is a sea of activities and people in a third category.  How do you even know what is a waste except in retrospect?

Will I be happy with the books I managed to read?  The movies I managed to see?  The tea I managed to drink?  If it were all to end tomorrow, would I be able to look at my life and say, “yes, I brought it down to the essentials; to the the activities and people that made me happy.  I made the best choices with the information I had at the time.”  And if I can’t say that right now, then what am I waiting for?

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

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There were a few things in the Rosie Project that hit close to home.  One was a thought on page 173 about repetition: “I settled on Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty.  With the repeat button on, it became the soundtrack to my driving and reflections over three days.  Unlike many people, I am very comfortable with repetition.  It was probably fortunate that I was driving alone.”

I love repetition.  I love repetition so much that it takes a lot for me to try something new.  Back in graduate school, I had one audio cassette from Bob Dylan’s Biograph, and that was all I played for several years.  It ran on a 90 minute loop.  No one wanted me to drive because they were so sick of “Lay Lady Lay.”  It was a big deal (to me) when, in my final year, I sometimes played the second tape of Biograph.

I am the type of person who would be fine eating one food, reading one book, watching one movie, or listening to one album for the rest of her life.

Are you good with repetition, or do you always need the thrill of something new?

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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.

Am I the only person who wishes the new Blogger captcha checkbox that says “I am not a robot” also came with an option that said “I AM a robot?”  Because… you know… for the robots.

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The twins have settled on their science fair project.  It was one of those whiny negotiations where they wanted to work together, but one decided on a project the other one didn’t love and then refused to budge on the project.  The non-excited child’s problem turned out to be the inclusion of the word “tearoom” in the title, insisting this was not a real word despite it being a real word.  Once the veracity of the word “tearoom” was accepted, both children were on-board.

They have made a set of robotic arms, programmed with an arduino and Lego Wedo parts, that can brew tea, remove the tea bag after a set amount of time, and then add sugar.  They’ve designed it with a whole steampunk theme as a nod to the Doctor Who episode “Deep Breath.” Because my kids are cool.  Even if they used an excessive number of plastic cups designing the sugar adder and DIDN’T RETURN MY TAPE TO THE PROPER PLACE!

Pictures forthcoming when they complete the project.

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I used the snow day to make all the cookies for Purim.  They’re now in my freezer.  13 hours of work.  228 cookies.  My back gave out in the tenth hour from leaning over the low table, folding hamantaschen.  I crawled toward the cookie finish line, too.  But you’ll never see a CNN news report about my tremendous feat like you will about the marathoner.

I don’t know whether to be impressed with her drive or shake my head at her failure to listen to the limitations of her body.

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We’ve recently gotten massively into Sherlock.  Totally enjoyable — enough so that I’m willing to overlook any weakness on the plot construction.  Though with only 3 episodes per season, we’ll soon need another show to watch.  I mean, another show beyond The Americans.

A little off-topic side note (though is this post really any particular topic?) that tomorrow is #MicroblogMonday.  Get writing.