So I’m reading a book, and it is affecting me greatly.  I want to talk about the book without naming the book until I’m done talking about the book*.  Indulge me?  In the end, I’ll gather up all the posts that have been connected to the book, name the book, and then… uh… I’ll go and read something else.  Don’t worry; none of these posts will reveal any spoilers.

I’m aware that this is a little ass-backwards in the vein of book discussion.

But this book is unique in that it feels a bit like an optical illusion.  When I look at it from this angle, it makes total sense.  And when I look at it from that angle, it looks bat-shit irrational.  Well, which one is it?  Best idea in the world or worst idea in the world?  Because it can’t really be both at the same time.  Right?

*******

I’m starting with a topic that additionally keep popping up like a weed online lately.  I saw two different posts in two different places in the same week, and this topic also bubbles up in my book.  Do we have the right to be forgotten?

Image: Jlhopgood via Flickr

Both posts riffed off of the same EU ruling that allowed search results (tying a man to a negative experience) to be removed from the Internet.  The man argued that constantly having his name tied publicly to the foreclosure of his house was a violation of his privacy.  The court agreed and ruled for the removal of the auction notice.

It makes sense.  I mean, anyone who could be financially affected by this man would have the foreclosure turn up in a privately conducted search, such as a bank researching a prospective client.  And the general public doesn’t need to know about a person’s foreclosure to make decisions in the same way that a person might want to know if they live next door to a child molester.  It could potentially socially affect the man if every time someone Googled his name, it popped up with that information — which, by the way, is now 16 years old.  It’s embarrassing, I guess.  And it’s information without context — you know about the foreclosure, but you don’t know the circumstances to bring him into foreclosure.  So… yes… makes sense to remove that sort of information from the Internet at someone’s request.

Right?

Of course, some groups are decrying it as Internet censorship.  That to delete anything from the Internet — any information — is an act of changing history, the conversation, the public record.  That makes sense too.  I mean, how do we determine what can be removed and what cannot?  What if President Clinton wanted his relationship with Monica Lewinsky to be stricken from the Internet?  Would we do that?  Their affair isn’t information the general public needs in order to make a decision.  Sort of like the foreclosure.  But… can you imagine removing something like that?  A piece of history?  And really, what if President Clinton wanted it removed and Monica Lewinsky wanted it up?  Whose desire to have the story removed or out there wins?

So… no… when you look at it that way, it doesn’t make sense to remove information from the Internet.

All of this ties in with this idea of whether or not we have the right to be forgotten.  We certainly have the right to be remembered; by belonging to any society, we participate in the right of public record keeping.  Our existence is noted and counted.  Our death is too.  Those are both legal entitlements which give us access to more legal entitlements.

But what about the right to be forgotten?  Do we have the right to erase the fact that we existed?  We obviously can’t force people to forget us — at least, not until we enter an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

But let’s start at the largest level — our relationship with companies, organizations, or agencies.

We already pointed out above an example where someone wanted to opt out of having an agency (or, I believe in this case the agency gave the information to a newspaper who produced an ad about the foreclosure) place their information online.  What about the other direction?  Should it be an individual right to close a social media account — for a person to tell a company that even if they put their information out there willingly, they would now like to remove it?

Were you aware that you give away this right with certain sites?  That spaces on the Internet, such as Facebook or WordPress or Blogger or LinkedIn or Evernote or Starbucks or Barnes and Noble… well, the list is long… specifically state in their terms of service that you cannot delete your account and remove its presence from their servers?  That once you set up an account, once you upload your first status message or your first picture, you lose control of that data.

Which isn’t a big deal if you look at it from one angle.  I mean, why would I care if something I say is on a server in some remote room… somewhere?  I don’t say very interesting things.  At least, they’re not very interesting or controversial in today’s society.  Based on what I know now, I feel comfortable with everything I say online.

But what about tomorrow?  Or the next day?

The world could change, and something that seems benign now could become anathema.  Twitter takes over the world and starts punishing all former Facebook users.  We quickly try to delete our accounts to save our lives but… WE CAN’T!  Or maybe it’s not even that outlandish a scenario.  Maybe I become famous later and someone digs up my past blatherings; things I thought would only be seen by my friends or things I thought I deleted upon second thought.  Yeah, when I look at it from that angle, I’d sort of like the ability to control my data.

If I have the right to sign up for an account and upload information, I’d like the ability to delete an account and remove my information.  I would like the right to be forgotten by Facebook and WordPress and Blogger, etc. even if I know that I cannot control being forgotten by actual human beings.  But in doing so, am I committing Internet censorship?  Am I trying to rewrite history?  Change the story?

This is getting too long, so I’ll end there and pick up this thread after you’ve gotten a chance to weigh in…

* I want to talk about the real world implications of the book without pulling in a discussion of the plotline and characters in this book.  Also, I haven’t finished it yet, so I would hate for someone to spoil any of the twists for me.  But if you’re dying to know the book before I get to the last post about it, email me and I’ll tell you.  Not a secret; I just want these questions that arise from the book rather than the book itself to be the focus.

I had a sobering realization my first week being 40.  I wasn’t entirely sure of the sex of all the Kardashian-Jenner children.  Or, rather, I should admit that there was one I assumed was a boy based on the name, and then discovered was a girl, and… well… the whole thing made me realize that I’m doing a terrible job keeping track of the Kardashian family.  You could even say that I can’t keep up with them.  I am not keeping up with the Kardashians.

This made me feel very old.  Like walking corpse old.

I told Josh that we need to keep on top of this.  We need to start watching more reality television.  We need to know what the kids are talking about, and no, they’re not talking about Wicked Tuna so those are wasted viewing hours.  We need to put our precious viewing minutes into things like Teen Mom and I Want to Marry Harry and one of those Real Housewives shows.

I feel like I’m pretty solid with good television.  We started Silicon Valley, which is really funny.  We’re watching In the Flesh because… you know… zombies.  And I’m super excited about seeing A to Z this fall, which sounds a little bit like a 500 Days of Summer-like show.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I need to up my bad television watching minutes this summer.  I’d like to know how to use them in the best way possible to keep up with Kardashian-like entities.  So if you have any recommendations for bad television, I would like to party my eyebrows off like the Rich Kids of Beverly Hills.

*******

Time for your weekly nag:

Tip of the week: Find an email client that will allow you to see emails while offline.  The reason?  You can use this email client as a space to back up your email.  Lifehacker had an article this week about email clients for Mac, though some, such as Outlook, also work on non-Mac computers.  Try Googling email client, work offline; a bunch come up.

This is just your friendly nudge to do your weekly backup.  I know, I know, who has the time to create backups on a weekly basis?  No one.  But you still need to do it and forgo ten minutes of something else, once a week.  Right now, before you do anything else, use this post to roll through a quick backup of your email, documents, images, blog, social media accounts, and mobile devices.  Reading the Roundup on the go and don’t have the ability to do your backup right now?  Email yourself a copy of the Roundup so that the email will serve as a visual reminder to get this task done.  Ten minutes of your time once a week may save you a major loss of time and data down the road.  Don’t have regrets.  So, on your marks, get set, back up!

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.

*******

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:

• “#YesAllWomen” (Stupid Stork)
• “A Month Out” (My Scar Smiles at Me)
• “Why Does She Get Two?” (Waiting for Baby Bird)
• “An Open Letter to the Baby Loss Community” (CarlyMarie Project Heal)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Infertility Voice has a post about the embryos being stored at her clinic and making the decision on what will become of them.  It’s not as simple as sticking to the ideas they had back when they started down this road.  They now also have information from their pregnancy to consider and maternal health — two factors that they couldn’t have known when they created and stored the embryos.  It’s an interesting look on this idea of making decisions before you know all the information, and how we make choices after the fact.

Inconceivable! often slays me with her gorgeous writing.  This week, she had a post about life after loss.  She writes of the figurative shoreline: “In the life I live in front of other people, I am fine. I get up each morning. I bathe, brush my teeth, arrange my hair. I laugh. I talk with people. I go to work. I’m a normal, functioning adult.  But when, inevitably, I find myself in the quiet spaces between the motions, I’m there on that lonely stretch of sand.”  I cannot do this post justice; especially when she melds life after loss with the idea of those first immigrants.  This post made me hold my breath.

Darling Propaganda, IVFer and sex worker, has an eye-opening post on #YesAllWomen which brings into play the hazards of her job.  But it’s also a thought I’ve heard echoed many times since the hashtag started making the rounds: that talking about it is just as hard as living it.  That sometimes it’s just as difficult to sit with all of those stories and think about them as it is to walk down a deserted street alone at night.  It’s a thought-provoking post.

There were a few controversies in the community this week, one of which is referenced in one of the second helping posts above.  But I really loved the post on  Today’s the Day! about the quality of our comments and the moderate button.  It brings into question who owns the comment box — the blog writer or the blog reader?  Is there an unspoken, loose contract between reader and writer, where both get to speak their mind as long as they’re being respectful?  If you’re going to have a comment box, should you have to accept all comments that fit your commenting guideline?  It’s an interesting conversation, especially since it took days for her comment to finally appear on the post.

The roundup to the Roundup: I would like to keep up with the Kardashians and welcome your television recommendations.  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 May 30th and June 6th) 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.

The ChickieNob and I were having an interesting conversation yesterday about how to choose a college.  The Wolvog has already chosen where he wants to go and will not be swayed from his decision.  In fact, he is so positive about his decision that when he finds a computer engineer or programmer who went to said school, he writes them a fan letter.  You know, as one future alumni to another.  The boy knows what he wants.

Whereas the girl child has some inkling of where she’d like to go but is open to thinking about all schools equally.  Sometimes she wants to go where we went.  Sometimes she wants something completely new.  Location seems to matter above all.

This time the talk turned to the fact that sometimes people choose a school because it matches their personality.  Free spirits may choose Hampshire, where there are evaluations instead of grades.  Some women want an all-woman school like Smith.  Some people are drawn to Big Ten schools.  While there are some people who can thrive wherever they go, I think we can all agree that the type of person who would be drawn to Oberlin is very different from the type of person who would be drawn to Notre Dame.

I think that blew her little mind; the idea of figuring out what sort of person you are and then matching the school to fit your core being.

*******

I recently took a poll on PBS which asked me to put in order of most important to least important eleven values for raising a child.  By the way, the survey took into account both people parenting and people not parenting.

Click on the picture below to go to the site and take the poll yourself.

I discovered that I’m most closely aligned with Swedish values.  Go Sweden!  I could also live in Australia.  I could not live well while parenting in Yemen or Ghana.  The site also gave you the ability to see how your best value country measured up against where you currently live:

But it begged the question: while this is obviously interesting if you’re willing to pick up and move to a place where the culture matches your personality or core values, what do you do with this information if you aren’t inclined or able to move?  It’s sort of like being told that you have to go to Notre Dame when you have your heart set on Oberlin.  What do you do when your personality or core values don’t match up with the people around you?

And this problem, of course, extends beyond parenting.  A lot of times, we live in an area that doesn’t match us at all.  We’re country folk shoved into cities.  Or we’re free spirits caught inside restrictive regimes.  Or all we want to do is dance, but we live in a town that doesn’t allow us to dance.

What do we do then?

It’s an interesting question: how much does where you live fit with who you are?  Has that changed at all over time, or have you just always made yourself fit your space?

Thank you.

I had intended to write everyone back and thank them for their birthday wishes, and then life happened.  I accept that I’m not getting to it by the end of the week when I look at everything else on my plate, so I’m writing an impersonal thank you instead.

Thank you.

Thank you for making a stressful time a little easier.  It’s just a birthday wish, but it’s something so much more than a birthday wish, sort of like one of those confusing math problems where one plus one adds up to more than two.  I feel as if that must happen sometimes in calculus.  I should add that I’ve never taken calculus.

This has been a hard winter and a hard spring, and couple that with a fear of growing old and a strong sense of my own mortality (as well as the ability to freak myself the fuck out about my mortality) as well as general end-of-the-year weepiness, and I managed to make myself physically sick over the idea of turning 40.  Physically sick for days.  I like to think of that as one of my hidden talents along with mastery of the Irish penny whistle and an ability to replicate all of the voices on the London recording of Les Misérables.

By Monday night, my body was starting to surrender to the fact that it was aging, that Little League baseball was ending, that the school year was wrapping up, that we’re in a period of upheaval and I’m going to have to live at this level of anxiety for an indefinite period of time.  And I started quietly to say to myself, “okay.”

Okay.

It’s a little word of acceptance.  It’s an acknowledgment.  Perhaps now is not a time when I feel ecstatically happy and settled.  And that is fine.  There is always the option to pause in okay; for not reaching beyond okay but stopping here and nodding.  This is where I’m at right now.  Okayness.

And that’s okay.

I love this blog and I love Facebook because your birthday becomes this great reminder of all the people out there who are surrounding you in your okayness.  Sometimes social media can make you feel a little bit more alone than you actually are.  It has the ability to isolate; to make you feel as if you’re looking in a funhouse mirror where all the images you’re seeing are taller or thinner (or simply better) than what you gaze upon when you look down at your own reality.  Seeing things as a reflection rather than head-on can sometimes do that.  Social media has the ability to make us feel left out or disconnected or not heard.

And then you have a day like your birthday, when all these random people from various parts of your life come out of the woodwork to say two words: happy birthday.  And with those two words, they remind you that there is also so much good in social media.  It makes us feel included, connected, heard.

So thank you for helping carry me over that line; not just the actual line between 39 and 40, but that much greyer line that delineates okayness.  Thank you for bringing me over to the better side of that, when okay signals an accepting sigh vs. the hiss of reluctant settlement.

Onward.

Well.

It happened.

I turned forty.

And I’m not writing in all-caps (though the day is still early).  I haven’t changed my font to a lurid pink.  And while the week is young, I don’t think I’ll rename the Roundup “The Encircling.”

We spent the weekend at the beach.  We didn’t go to our usual beach.  Instead, we traveled to Rehoboth where I went as a kid.

One time when I was little, my father took my sister and I to the beach while my mother stayed home with my baby brother.  He took us to Funland, an amusement park on the boardwalk, and I wanted to do the teacup ride.  But seconds after the ride started, I realized that it didn’t feel like the one at Disney World.  It was moving too quickly, in tight, nausea-inducing circles, and I started to scream.  My dad got the operator to stop the ride, and then he jumped onto the floor before the ride had completely stopped to scoop me out of the teacup.  My father made me feel so safe, knowing that he was always just a few feet away, able to convince a ride operator to stop the teacups for his daughter.

I felt pretty scared about turning forty.  I wanted to be somewhere I had once felt safe.

We sat on the beach and read books.  The Wolvog lovingly recited his favourite hexadecimal codes as we stared at the water as if he was reading poetry.  We ate French fries and waved away seagulls.  At night we went to that boardwalk amusement park after dinner.  The ChickieNob and I rode the haunted mansion ride and screamed.  The kids and I squeezed ourselves into one cramped car of the ferris wheel.  And we ended the trip by riding the merry-go-round.

I have a personal policy of never walking by a merry-go-round, and I have a bit of a talent of sniffing out random merry-go-rounds.  I even found one tucked into a random courtyard by walking down an alleyway in Rome.  There was a merry-go-round outside my art school, and I rode it almost every day because I figured I may not remember the etching techniques that my instructor was trying to teach me, but I would always remember riding the merry-go-round.  And I do.  So we finished the night with a last ride on the merry-go-round, and I watched the amusement park and beach blur around me, as if I were spin art splattering all these memories from so many beach vacations on a figurative canvas that I could hang up to remember the first half of my life.

We drove home at night, eating fudge in the car and singing along to Les Misérables, so I could be here to step into middle aged.

So now I am forty.  Now I am middle aged.  I’m trying to be okay with that.