This is the last post I’ll write in my thirties.

All eight years of blogging have been in my thirties.  I started this blog a little after my 32nd birthday.  The twins were not yet two.

When I started this blog, I had no idea that eight years down the road, I would still be writing it on a daily basis.  I wasn’t the most confident writer.  Actually, I’m still not the most confident writer, but I know my voice better.  Yes, I can say that.  I know my voice better.  I know what sort of topics I can write about and which ones I can’t do justice.  I’m still nervous before I hit publish sometimes, but overall, I am more comfortable in my writing skin on the other end of thirty.

All my niches on the Internet were carved out in my thirties.  I joined Twitter and Facebook.  I started writing for BlogHer.

I was massively pregnant when I left my twenties and entered my thirties.  I gave birth to the twins that summer.  I left my teaching job soon after that.  And now I am leaving my thirties with two almost-ten-year-olds and four published books on my bookshelf.

My thirties were amazing, mostly because I had finally reached this huge goal that I had spent most of my twenties trying to reach.  I’m sort of ashamed as a feminist to admit that it wasn’t the four books despite getting that MFA.  It’s those two kids.  I wanted to be a mother so badly.  I wanted kids specifically with Josh, but I also just… there was this overwhelming pulse inside my heart that kept throbbing out this message: you want to be a mother you want to be a mother you want to be a mother.

I wanted to be a mother.

And in my thirties, I got to be a mother.  I got to do all of my parenting thus far inside that decade.  Their life began as that decade in my life began, and now we’re moving into a new decade together — their tens and my forties.  They are so amazing.  They are funny and creative and sensitive and cuddly and independent and stubborn and intelligent and they make huge mistakes and they get some things so completely right.  They are messy and wonderful, and we are so lucky to have them in our lives.  To get a front row seat to watching them grow up.

[On a side note, I told the twins that I wrote a paragraph about them since I always give them a heads up and ask permission before I mention them.  The ChickieNob pursed her lips and looked at me owlishly as she said, “you could only come up with one paragraph of things to say about me?”]

When I was little, I watched the show Thirtysomething, and I thought about how thirty was sort of this drab little decade where you weren’t  cool like a twenty-something and you weren’t an adult like a forty-something.  I’m not sure how I overlooked including thirty in adulthood, but it didn’t carry the weight of middle age like forty.  It felt a bit like a balloon, bobbing between the shininess of twenty and the settled feel of forty.  The cast was lovely and talented, but I always felt a little badly for them.  I mean, who thought about their thirties?  It was just a tube of years on the way from this place to that place.

I just walked that tube of years.  And I loved it.

My thirties taught me who I am.  What I can’t change.  What doesn’t really need to be changed.  What I should probably work to change.  I discovered what I like and don’t like and how to say what I need to say emphatically and without apology.  I became more flexible with yoga,  and I became less flexible with compromising my needs to make someone else happy.

And in the end, I grew and I grew and I grew.

Thank you, thirties, for treating me well.  For leaving me in a better place than when I entered.  Thank you for Josh who continues to hold my heart with care and do most of the laundry.  Thank you for the twins who blow my mind on a daily basis.  Thank you for my parents and siblings and siblings-in-law-who-are-really-more-like-siblings, and nieces and nephews.  Thank you for my wonderful friends: the ones that I see in my face-to-face world, the ones I keep in touch with over the phone, and the ones that I email through the computer.  Thank you for my work, for my books, for helping me find my writing voice.  Thank you for our little house.  Thank you, thirties, for being the decade when all of this happened.

May my forties go just as well.

No birthday wishes yet, please.  I want a chance to say goodbye properly before I sigh, close the door, and say hello to the next decade.

This is the last Roundup I will write in my thirties.

Gulp.

I wrote all of the previous Roundups as a thirty-something.  What if something happens to me next week when I turn 40?  Like I start writing in all-caps?  Or I get an urge to change my font to a lurid shade of pink?  Or instead of the Roundup, I feel moved to rename it something New Age-y like The Encircling?

I guess we’ll know what is what in the 497th Roundup.  Whoa… I’m going to hit 500 Roundups by my blogoversary.  I mean, that is unless I get all-caps-y with The Encircling.

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I told you I’d do it, and so I shall.  As I said in this post, I am going to annoy you every week with a reminder to create a backup of all your important documents, images, and sites.  It will appear in this top section of the Roundup, like so:

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.

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That wasn’t too annoying, right?  By putting a reminder every Friday in the Roundup, I will remember to do my backup.  And in turn, you will remember to do your backup.  And we will all walk around patting ourselves on the back for taking a small step to ensure that we don’t have a major headache in the future.

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So the first time I saw this on BlogHer — before I read the post — I was taken aback. BlogHer featured my image in their badge for the Selfiebration?

And then I realized that the coding pulled your profile picture into the 10.  So everyone who visits that page on BlogHer (as long as they’re logged in) sees their own picture.  Oh my G-d, I love this so much.

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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:

• “And, One” (Tales from the Waiting Room)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Thinking Miracles has a post about reclaiming her space.  She left her blog during a difficult time, and even though life is not currently easy street, she wants to document moments lest they slip away such as the breakfast with her nephew that features in this post.  Welcome back, Thinking Miracles.

A Woman My Age has a gorgeous tribute to Maya Angelou.  It was the single best one I read all week, and that includes every tribute I read on every literary site.  The heart gets it best, and her post made me cry.  I love this: “I just wanted her to see me, really see how much I loved her, her words, her very being in this world.”

Serenity Now has a post about the twenty years that have passed since her cousin committed suicide.  Wow.  This post blew me away.  From the twist in your heart lines — “Have they all changed? Or did I just not KNOW them before?” — to the story of her cousin crashing someone else’s psychic reading.  If you read nothing else this week, read this post.

Lastly, No Ways to Say It has a post about the hashtag, #yesallwomen.  She writes, “Social media can bring us together in ways we never dreamed were possible. How many of us felt comfortable talking about our experiences with sexual assault before now? Probably not many. I know I certainly didn’t. Yet, seeing other women speak up and share their experiences made me that much more willing to share mine.”  I especially love the end of her post.

The roundup to the Roundup: Last Roundup written in my thirties.  Your weekly backup nudge.  Fun with code in the Selfiebration badge.  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 23rd and May 30th) 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.

So I realized this week that I write the Friday Blog Roundup every Friday.  And I feel like I’m pretty settled in that routine since… you know… it has been eight years of writing the series and I’ve only missed maybe 5 Fridays, ever.  I’d like to add something to that real estate at the top of the Roundup post that will run every week and serve as a reminder.  I’m writing this post to unpack this idea (so I can keep the weekly note in the Roundup to a small paragraph), and I will link to this post every Friday in order to help people form a new habit.

The Friday Backup.

Every week, I’m going to remind you to back up your email (yes, your email!), documents, images, blog, social media accounts, and mobile devices.  Anything and everything that matters to you.  Feel free to expand this idea by adding a comment below on additional places people should remember to back up and ways to back up (eg. external hard drives you love, backup plug-ins, etc).

Here are ideas on how to back up your email, documents, images, blog, social media accounts, and mobile devices in case you don’t already have a system in place.

Email

Yes, you can back up your email, and I do this weekly.  If I were ever to lose my email accounts, I wouldn’t lose my actual emails because they are saved to my hard drive (and backed up additionally on an external drive).  I will state now that I’m not a fan of giving access to my email account to another cloud-based system.  I know a bunch of them exist out there, and feel free to leave your favourite one in the comment section below.  But I won’t use them.

Instead, download an email client that you can use offline such as Outlook, Thunderbird, or MacMail.  Run your account through this client using POP or IMAP. (You will need to enter information both in your mail program and in the settings screen of you email program such as Gmail, but the whole thing should take under 5 minutes.)  Start downloading your messages.  This is going to potentially take hours or even days depending on the number of emails you have archived.

Once everything is current, take your account offline.  And leave it offline.  You’re not going to open up this email client again until next Friday when you bring the account online in order to create a backup.  This way, if you lose access to your account because you are hacked or your email program is down for the moment, you can still look at all your old emails.  Neat!

Documents

Do a weekly backup of your hard drive onto an external hard drive.  I personally like Western Digital’s My Passport, though I don’t use the cloud feature.  I like it because it plugs in like a thumb drive and unplugs when I’m not performing a backup.  A terabyte of space should cost about $80… maybe less.

Back up everything.  Just do a copy of the entire hard drive.  This will ensure that with one click, you will have copies of your music on iTunes or your documents or your pictures.  The other option is to back up certain folders, such as Pictures or Documents.  But really, one click and done.

The first time you back up your hard drive, it may take hours so leave a lot of time.  The next time you back up your computer, give the hard drive permission to skip anything already on the external hard drive.  It should be a quick update after that first, initial backup.

Images

Again, I’m not a fan of cloud-based services, though a lot of people use Flickr or Dropbox to back up images.  Instead, I have a copy of all images on an external hard drive and I burn a copy of same images on a disc.

Blog

Some automatic backup services are a violation of your Terms of Service and can get your blog shutdown if found.  Other people use free software such as Blogger or WordPress, so those plug-ins may not be accessible to them.  So to be more inclusive of all blogging situations, I’m going to recommend that you do a simple “poor man’s” backup of your blog.  Go into tools or a similar category and look for the word “export.”  Export a copy of your blog and save it to your hard drive.  This will give you a version of your posts and comments in a form that can be uploaded (if you ever need it) to a new site.  Now take a screenshot of the front page of your blog so you can remember layout, etc.  Lastly, cut-and-paste your posts into a Word Doc.  You won’t have your comments if the shit hits the fan, though hopefully you have a copy of your comments emailed to you.  Make sure your Word Doc and your backup copy are all in one folder that you can easily find on your computer.  You’ll add to the Word Doc every week, so make sure it is handy.

The first time you do this, it may take a bit of time.  But you’re going to do this every Friday like clockwork.  In the future, it will take up about two minutes of your life.

Social Media Accounts

You can create a backup of most social media accounts.  In Facebook, go into settings and choose “download a copy of your Facebook data” in general account settings.  Then click “start my archive.”  It takes a little while for Facebook to gather up your information, but they’ll send you an email when it’s ready for download.  Save your timeline information onto your hard drive. In Twitter, go into settings and scroll towards the bottom.  Click the box that says “request my archive.”  Again, an email will be sent when the archive is ready for download.  Save your tweets onto your hard drive.  Please weigh in through the comment section if you back up Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and other social media sites and have a preferred method.

Mobile Devices

Take a few minutes to plug in and back up your mobile devices.  Make sure you’re running the most up-to-date software.  Make sure you’ve transferred purchases you made directly from the device.  Make sure you’ve transferred a copy of any photos or videos off your phone or iPad.  Sync your calendar and notes.  Clean off any apps you’re not using.  Wheeeew, much better.

RSS Reader

Make a backup of your rss reader, so you will have access to your feeds if the site ever goes down.  Every reader will be different, but with Feedly, go to the bottom of the screen where you see the three dots in the bottom left corner.  Click on those dots.  It will open a menu where one of the options is “organize.”  Click that.  Scroll to the bottom of that screen and click “save as OPML.”  Then download your feed by clicking the big green button.  Move the file into a folder on your hard drive labeled “rss reader backup.”

But wait, there’s more.

Download it a second time, and this time, instead of saving it, use the “open file” choice on the download.  Select a program such as Excel to open the file.  It should have your feed listed, one blog per line of the spreadsheet.  Save this as a file too.  If you ever lose access to Feedly (or the rss reader of your choice), you can use the first backup to upload your feeds elsewhere.  You can use your second backup to see a list of your feeds if you want to just click on one or two.

What else do you back up weekly?  Also add any services or devices you use that you love to the comment section.  For the sake of reading ease, I will move information from the comment section up into the post from time to time.

Comments are pretty damn important to me.  That’s probably apparent since my response to NaNoWriMo was not to focus on blog writing or poetry or anything else that is akin to expressing oneself a la the novel.  I went for the short and sweet route of focusing on commenting with IComLeavWe.  Comments are sort of the peel of blogging: some people toss it aside or consider it unimportant; something we can choose to consume or discard at will.  But those of us who cherish comments like a ripe apple know otherwise: most of the nutrients of the blog post are in completing that circuit between writer and reader.  Comments can’t be peeled off or crushed in the garbage disposal without changing the value of the post itself.  The two elements go hand-in-hand.

Deep, I know.

Do I want comments?  Yes, I freakin’ want comments.  If I didn’t want to hear what you had to say, I would write down all of my blatherings in Charlotte and call it a day.  But even though Charlotte is now deeply ensconced in my life, I still take the time to write in this space.  I haven’t slowed down or changed what I write.  Charlotte fulfills one need.  But this space, my blog?  It fulfills a very different way of looking at my life or the world around me.  And I need you guys to chime in on this blog.  It changes the way I see the world.

I have learned so much from you.  I’ve learned about books, historical events, and other blogs.  You’ve made me feel supported and virtually hugged.  You’ve made me feel as if my words matter.  But more importantly, your comments have been the fuel that has kept me coming back here for eight straight years of almost daily posts.  Would I have kept writing if there were no comments?  Perhaps.  But I could also see myself returning to the land of paper, journaling privately off-screen.  After all, if no one is going to say anything, why put it up at all?  It’s like talking at the wall.  We don’t do it (or… we don’t do it often) because it isn’t satisfying.

Comments make blogging satisfying.

2986 posts.

61,279 comments.

(1,189,915 spam comments caught by filters).

It’s a pretty good run, nu?

So consider signing up for June’s NaBloPoMo.  The theme is commenting.  Which you probably guessed since this whole post is about commenting.  Think of signing up as a birthday present, but it’s the sort of present where you get a gift too.  Like buying me perfume and then getting to keep the free makeup samples they shove in the bag.  Wait, please don’t buy me perfume.  I really don’t like perfume.  What I like are comments.

So say something.

Image: Talbot Troy via Flickr

If Maya Angelou had been born 60 years later, and had been 26 today instead of dying at 86, she likely wouldn’t have been published.  She would have been met by the publishing world with the question: who do you know?  Even with her work in the Civil Rights movement and her connection to the Harlem Writers Guild as well as her connections from the theater community and various art forms, she still wasn’t a sure shot for publication.

If the answer had been no one, she would have found it extremely difficult to downright impossible to get her foot in the door.  She would have been in an agent’s slush pile, and while we would love to think that her brilliance would have gotten her noticed amid the other manuscripts, we also know that a poor girl from Arkansas has a lot working against her and many successful writers experience a lot of rejection along the way.  How much rejection is enough to get an author-to-be to change their mind about writing?

And let’s say that she did break out of the slush pile and obtain an agent.  The next question would be what is your platform?  How many Twitter followers to you have?  What is the reach of your blog?  Know any famous writers who may be willing to blurb your book?  How can you contribute to the marketing?  Someone would have crunched the numbers to try to figure out whether it was worth buying the book for how many copies they would predict it would sell.  They would have looked at the writing quality for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and weighed it against the subject matter and then examined that against the last book to hit the marketplace that was similar in nature.

She wouldn’t have been a professor at Wake Forest University.  Maybe, if she had published enough, she would have been brought on as a temporary lecturer.  At least until the next hot writer came along.  But let’s be frank about academia — it’s no more welcoming than the publishing world.  There is stiff competition for teaching positions.  For an African-American woman who never went to college much less earned a PhD, the idea of obtaining a faculty position in this day-and-age seems unlikely, even with Maya Angelou’s contributions to the Civil Rights movement and literary world.

There is no question that Maya Angelou lived through a very difficult social time, one in which the colour of her skin brought her a world of judgment.  But she also lived through a time when the arts community sat up straight when they found enormous talent, and the academic community left their eyes and ears open to receive and utilize said talent.

The lesson of Maya Angelou’s life is to leave your mind open to possibilities.  That there is so much raw talent in the world, so many good thoughts, so many change-makers lying in wait.  We are lucky that her voice bubbled up to the surface; that we didn’t miss out on her contributions to the world.

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A long time ago, I taught an eight grade women’s studies elective.  Every day, I made the girls read aloud Maya Angelou’s poem, “Phenomenal Woman,” starting in a whisper and ending in a yell.  I hoped that if they said aloud this poem every single day for a whole year that they would internalize those words and remember for the rest of their lives that they don’t need to walk with their head bowed.  I have no clue what became of those students.  All I know is that it changes you to recite every day: