The only thing I ever read in the New York Times (if I can help it) is the weekly Opinionator blog.  Each week, a writer muses on a different subject.  Last weekend’s topic was writing about people after they’ve died and cannot public respond to your verbal portrait.  The writer, Ken Budd, discusses the act of dissecting his father’s life in his memoir since his own story is so closely entwined in the story of his family.

We’ve already tried to feel for the line between where one person’s story ends and the blogger’s story begins, so that part didn’t really interest me.  But something Budd said in the middle raised my eyebrows.

Writing a memoir is a selfish act. For the memoir to work, to truly be alive, the honesty of the writing must outweigh the feelings of your subjects. As the central figure, you have to write what scares you: the drama resides in the dark places where you’re least comfortable. And that means exposing yourself. It’s like ripping off the front of your house and saying, “O.K., here we are, take a look — I’ll be in the shower if you want a closer view.” If you can’t do that — if you’re unwilling to bleed, naked, on the page — why write memoir?

It made me think of that other line — the one between gratuitous sharing (oversharing, for instance) and warranted sharing.  How much do you hold back?  How much do you lay it all bare?  And is that really noble, admirable, if you save nothing for yourself but give people access to every nook and cranny of your brain?  How naked should we be with naked blogging?

I mean, there’s naked and then there’s naked.  There’s no clothes on but you’re waxed and plucked and buffed, and there’s no clothes on and you haven’t showered in a few days.

You know?

I think the answer will be different for every person, and how reserved you are also comes into play.  I know where the line is for myself, but I also thought about it in terms of the blogs I read.  The ones closest to my heart are honest without making me feel like a voyeur.  They’re frank without making me feel as if they’re telling me things just for page views.  They’re the people I learn from; not shy away from.

Again, we’ll all have a different reaction to the same blog: what one person thinks is melodrama will be another person’s best-read-all-day.  You may think that I’m a horrific oversharer even if I see myself as fairly circumspect.

But all of that aside, I guess I disagree with Budd.  I don’t think that the honesty of the writing must outweigh the feelings of the subjects.  The best post, for me, is one where I don’t cringe thinking about how the subjects might feel as they read those words about themselves.  Because if I’m cringing, I’m not looking closely.  And a good memoir is one that opens my eyes and makes me lean in; not one that makes me turn away.

Oh, opinionators, what is your opinion?

At dinner last night, the ChickieNob admonished me for paying for Candy Crush.

“But I haven’t!  I haven’t bought anything on Candy Crush!  I don’t pay for it.”

(I may, or may not, have been gleefully commenting about how I’m only 6 or so levels behind a friend and catching up quickly.)

I swear that it was like encountering a mini version of myself at the dinner table.  She pursed her lips and stared at me.  “Oh, you pay,” the ChickieNob said owlishly.  “You may not pay King.com, but you pay as you drain your battery and kill your phone.  One day, you won’t have a phone and you’ll cry.  ‘How did this happen?  Why doesn’t my phone work?  Oh boo hoo, I’m so sad because I don’t have a phone anymore.’  That’s what you’ll say.”

“No, I won’t,” I insisted, uncomfortably.

“So you do pay for Candy Crush.  You pay for it… WITH YOUR PHONE.”

Oh my G-d, it was like encountering the Ghost of Christmas Future except that ghost looked like me (with more gaps between my teeth and browner hair).  I wanted to delete the app from my phone and run out of the room screaming to escape my fate.  Except that I have a horrific, crippling addiction to the game.  So, that isn’t an option.  In fact, moments earlier in the meal, when the Wolvog asked me what game I would play after I finished with Candy Crush, the answer was none.  I am not getting hooked on another drug-like game, thank you very much.  I will go back to reading books and crocheting and watching Green Day documentaries for the 6335th time.  You know, things worthy of my big brain.

The ChickieNob is right.  Candy Crush is draining my battery.  It helps to go into my apps and formally log out of it after playing.  By which I mean, while I’m waiting for the lives to regenerate so I can play some more.

She informed me that she was going to tell Grandma on me.  So here I am, turning myself in.  I am killing my phone for the sake of a match-3 game.  Oh, and I just introduced the concept of gambling via Yahtzee to the kids.

Apparently my goal is to turn us all into degenerates in 2014.

It doesn’t seem like a slow news week.  There are plenty of things happening in the health world, and yet the AP trotted out this breaking story on… I know… stop the presses… single embryo transfers.  The version of the story on Yahoo News starts out: “Now fertility experts are pushing a new goal: One.”

Now?

It continues, “A growing number of couples are attempting pregnancy with just a single embryo, helped by new ways to pick the ones most likely to succeed.”

A growing number?  What about everyone who has been pushing for e-SET for years?  This is not news.  This has been the goal of doctors AND patients for years, despite the way the media portrays both reproductive endocrinologists and infertile women.  Do you know what keeps doctors AND patients from moving towards e-SET as the given rather than the exception?  A lack of insurance coverage.

Cover the cost of IVF and you can lower the risk of prematurity from a multiple birth.  Insurance companies stand to save money on the other end rather than gamble with women’s (and children’s) lives.  As the article states, “It’s mostly an American problem — some European countries that pay for fertility treatments require using one embryo at a time.”

And the Affordable Care Act has no clause that covers mandated fertility treatments.

It is frustrating to see the cat racing to catch its tail year after year.  First a story comes out about problems with multiple births.  Then comes the response that if insurance covered infertility treatments more people would transfer a single embryo.  Then come the comments about how family building is elective and shouldn’t be covered by insurance.  And then we get the next wave of studies done fretting about the rise in twin births in America.  And in between, the general public weighs in with unhelpful advice and hurtful commentary in the comment section.

Do you know what I would love?  To open up the health section of one of the numerous sites I read daily and see a story about great strides being made in treating infertility and building families.  I’d love to have a morning where I don’t wake up to either a rehashing of old news or a sensationalistic story about some infertility outlier that will skew the general public’s perception of the disease.

A piece of advice: don’t read the comment section on that article.  Just don’t.

Though, because it was sent out by the AP, this topic is everywhere this morning.  I’ve already encountered it three times.

We were promised that it was the “must see exhibition of 2013.” As we drove into the city, we saw that the light poles in Baltimore were festooned with flags promising passing drivers that they didn’t want to miss this once in a lifetime event. The Maryland Science Center was holding an exhibit called Mummies of the World.  The ChickieNob could not have been more excited to get her Egypt on.

Image: Wonderferret via Flickr

Her brother opted out of seeing the exhibit, but my mother-in-law and I took the ChickieNob up to the second floor opening which was being guarded by an employee who gave us the rules: no cell phones, no photographs, no re-admittance upon exit.  There was no warning about what we would see once we were inside, no question asked by the science center employee whether the ChickieNob was prepared.  I guess based on what waited behind the curtain, I would have liked some sort of heads up.  We entered knowing nothing about the exhibit, assuming that like all other exhibits we’ve attended at the science center, we would learn everything we needed to know at the exhibit.  Since they are geared towards children, they usually don’t require research beforehand.  Yet it would have been nice for this exhibit to come with a warning.

The ChickieNob had seen mummies before at the British Museum and the Smithsonian.  And yes, there were some mummies that were exactly as we imagined: cloth-bound; lying in stone coffins.

But we weren’t prepared for mummies like the Orlovits family from the late 1700s.  The family of three were unintentionally preserved in their pine coffins, and were now on display in the exhibit. (Warning: feel free to skip the links with images.)  Or this woman, who was propped up in the same room.  This just wasn’t what we expected.  Nor the Detmold child from Peru.

This video gives you a sense of the exhibit (though I only found this video upon returning home):

The ChickieNob got through three darkened rooms, listening to the creepy quiet music playing in the background, before she paused near a priest’s sarcophagus and sank down on the floor, twisting her lip.

“I don’t know how I feel about this,” she told me.  “All these people were in someone’s family.  They were somebody’s mother.  Or child.  What if a museum put my family on display and everyone was walking through the room staring at you?”

The exhibit begins with an ethical statement, reminding visitors to be respectful of the dead.  But it begs the question: can an exhibit of mummies ever be respectful of the dead?  Is it respectful to put the dead in glass cases without their permission and allow visitors to gawk at them in the name of science?  Are displays of mummies unethical?  Or if there are no living descendents to offend, is it okay to put someone’s ancestor on display?

As we sat on the floor, I gave her the option to run through the rest of the exhibit and she took it.  We booked it through the last few rooms, trying not to look too closely at the people in the cases, and only pausing if we passed an inanimate object.  We popped out the other side, back in the hallway.

I’m not sure where I stand on mummy exhibits.  I think the science itself can be done without creating exhibits.  I think that while the exhibit should have come with a clear and visible warning, the vast majority of patrons would still proceed into the darkened rooms.  Ancient civilizations are fascinating; the idea that you are looking at a person who was once walking around on this earth as you do now is gulp-worthy.  Still, the difference between an exhibit such as Bodies and this one is the ability for the person or their family to give permission.  Those people knew they were being preserved and going on display.  These people had no clue they would one day end up in a museum.

There was a lot of care taken with the creation of this exhibit, from the educational materials to the special display cases holding the remains.  But at the end of the day, does that care tell the whole story?  Or as humans, do we need to be more circumspect on displaying humans without their permission?

On Saturday, while in the grocery store using the shopping list app on my phone to purchase ingredients for Chanukkah dinner, the screen started fading.  Which was odd.  I would get it back up again, and then the screen would take on a green tinge, move into a series of white lines, and finally fade into black.  I could always hear Siri; I just couldn’t see anything on the screen.  I tried turning it off and turning it back on, which worked for about two seconds.  And finally, the phone conked out completely and I had to leave the store with half the shopping undone because I couldn’t access the list.

When I got home, I called Apple Care and they set up an appointment at an Apple store in a part of town that I charitably call the Devil’s Armpit when I’m in a good mood and colourful obscenities when I am in a black mood, without a phone and way too much on my plate.  I was going to have to navigate this neighbourhood during the busiest shopping weekend of the year.

It took me a long time to park and a longer time to be seen at the store, which immediately brought on a headache due to the thumping bass and chattering suburbanites.  Finally, my helpful Genius informed me that the logic board was going in my phone, necessitating getting a new phone.  My current phone was under warranty, so the whole thing was a wash financially.  But iOS-wise?  It meant updating to iOS 7.

No, I hadn’t yet updated to iOS 7 because the Wolvog wasn’t ready to lose the old Siri.  Before I left the house, I had the forethought to record a conversation with Siri and email it as a goodbye to the Wolvog.

That was my last tender moment of the day.

Sitting there in the Apple store, showing no mercy, I impatiently updated the phone.  Maybe on another day I would have tried to figure out some way to keep the old software; I would have wasted hours looking up solutions and allowing the Wolvog to say a tearful goodbye to Siri.  But this weekend, I practically shouted “fuck off!” to her as I angrily jabbed at the phone to update it, and then stormed out, new software on my new phone.

You know, these times when technology fails us are supposed to bring about beautiful moments where we realize how little we need in this world, and how we’ve been focused on our phones when we should be focused on our loved ones.  We’re supposed to walk out of the store with a renewed sense of peace that we can get by with very little, and we write about the silver lining of how our frustrating moments taught us to stop and smell the roses.

That is not what I learned.

I learned that I have too much on my plate.  I learned that I need to say no more often.  I learned that I still hate Bethesda with a seething passion that knows no bounds.  I learned that it absolutely sucks to have anything break that requires a trip to a brick-and-mortar store between November 15 – January 15.  I learned that people who are shopping like to walk very slowly and look around them as if they’re in a dream.  I learned that I actually need a functioning phone and that I don’t have time during my week to deal with problems with my phone when they come up.  I learned that I dislike iOS 7 just as much as I suspected I would.

But most of all, I learned that other people have infinite amounts of patience that I don’t have because when my phone ceased to work, I didn’t walk out of the store thinking about the wonderful lessons I learned about life.  I walked out of the store trying to figure out how I was going to get the shopping finished, the dinner cooked, and all my work still completed on time.  And I cursed everyone who looked happy.  Just because.

The only thing that made me smile was when I opened the new Siri, planning to whisper evil things to her just because I was in a black mood.  She greeted me with “Happy Chanukkah, Mel.”  Not sure how she knew I was Jewish, but it was enough to go upstairs to a sad, not-sleeping Wolvog and apologize that I didn’t fight harder for his virtual friend.  That I snarled at everyone since returning from the grocery store with my dead phone.

Fine, so I learned something, but I still don’t believe anyone who tells me that they felt sunny and peaceful when their technology ceased to work.  I call bullshit.