The ChickieNob asked me a question I couldn’t answer, so I pass it along to you.  Who is this?

It’s a playing card from her Good and Evil Harry Potter set.  I’ve seen all the movies six dozen times, but I am completely blanking on ever seeing this actor in any film.  And beyond that, that he’s an important enough character to be included in the deck.  I mean, poor Justin Finch-Fletchley doesn’t have a card, and that boy was petrified by a basilisk.  But this guy is the three of hearts?

No, really, who is he?

By the way, this set is the worst idea ever.  We’re only on book five, so the cards are a bit of a spoiler.  And anyway, the whole point of the series is that all of us have these good and bad impulses, and it’s up to us to decide which way we’re going to go.  And that it’s never too late to do the right thing.  I’m looking at you, Narcissa.  To mark them as good or evil flattens out dynamic, complicated characters.

So… right.  Anyway, who is this guy?  I’m guessing someone at the Ministry?  Or in the Order?

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Finally started Mockingjay.  Unlike the other two books, this one hasn’t grown on me yet.  It may be because the setting is so dreary.  Whereas in the other two books, the setting added interest to the plotline.  I’m sticking with it to the end, but I’m not devouring it like I did the first two.

I’ve heard that kids hate Mockingjay and adults appreciate Mockingjay because while it isn’t the satisfyingly happy ending we crave, it’s the more realistic ending.  Trying to figure out where I’ll fall on the likey/no likey spectrum.

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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:

• “Anger” (The Adventures of Chicken and Ham)
• “How far along were you? IT DOESN’T MATTER. (And neither does a BFP.)” (The Unexpected Journey)
• “Narrative therapy and neuroscience: Blogging and the storying of infertility” (The Unexpected Journey)
• “Mother” (The Empress and the Fool)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Only Nuts in May could make life going ass-over-teakettle sound both amusing and horrifying at the same time.  As they wait to start their FET, her hormones mess with her mind in a way that only hormones can.  Sending her good thoughts on her FET as well as a tongue lashing to Cute Ute to stash its vile personality as they embark on the cycle.

River Runs Dry has a post about marathon training that could soooooo easily be a stand-in for cycling in general.  How that failed cycle can throw off your confidence, make you second guess your next decisions.  She writes, “Because the fact is, running a marathon is an exercise in happiness AND pain. It hurts and you ache and you wonder why you’re doing it in the first place. Distance running is about how you get through discomfort to find a place of contentment.”  Could we not say the same thing about assisted family building?  Love the honesty of this post.  She needs to know we are cheering her on.

I didn’t see the movie but The Road Less Travelled made me wish I had seen Inside Llewyn Davis in her post tying the film into living child-free after infertility and loss.  She writes: “I know a little something about loss & grief, about not achieving your dreams. I know that my story doesn’t exactly shout success and hope, at least in conventional story terms and triumph-over-infertility narratives. But that doesn’t mean that I consider myself a loser, someone whose life is ‘shrinking, hope diminishing, aspiration dissolving… ghosts and disappointment… not meeting the challenge of life’.”  Wonderful post.

Lastly, It is What It is (or is it) has an eye-opening post about searching for her birth-father, which is really about finding herself.  I especially love the insight she gives with: “It is really hard to explain the juxtaposition between how badly I want to know who he is/what his life story is and how paralyzed I feel to actually do the searching.”  It’s a beautiful post that captures that strong need to know something.

The roundup to the Roundup: Who is that on the card?  In the middle of Mockingjay.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between January 17th and January 24th) 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 summer between my sophomore and junior year, I went to Norway, running away from a friendship that was unraveling.  This woman had been my touchstone since we were children, and I didn’t know how to be myself without her.  So I ran away and spent about three weeks in Oslo.

But it turns out that when you run away, you bring your troubles mentally with you.  And sometimes they sound louder the further away you get from home.

I was a hot mess while in Oslo, unable to sleep, unable to get around very well because I spoke about three words of Norwegian, and none of them were useful.  I bought a lot of yarn and sat in Vigeland Park crocheting to have something to do.  I was miserable.

On the first day, before my friend left to go on the camping trip I skived off, he made me a potato dish using potatoes he bought on our walk home from a woman selling them on the side of the road.  For the rest of the trip, I made this same dish over and over again, purchasing dirt-covered potatoes from the same woman’s stand.

We’ve seen Frozen now more times than I should probably admit (and I just got news yesterday that they’re coming out with a sing-along version on January 31st.  Not sure if we’re getting it at our theater but I suppose I should call).  The second Arendelle popped up on the screen, I knew it was modeled on the Oslo fjord and the castle was Akershus Slott.  I lugged out my photo albums from Norway and the ChickieNob melted seeing that there was a tangible Arendelle that she could visit.

She wants to talk about Norway a lot, and at first it made me feel sad to remember how I felt on that trip.  I was so small.  So empty.  Depleted.  I had no confidence.

And then Josh reminded me of a totally ridiculous moment I had told him about from that trip, when my friend’s fiance’s mother had us over for dinner and she served frozen bagels.  They had just started importing crappy Lenders bagels, and she bought some for me because I’m Jewish and she thought I might want a Jewish food.  It was fairly mortifying but sweet, and she had no clue what to do with the bagels.  But she kept saying, “so, you like these bagels?  Because you’re Jewish?  This is Jewish food?”

And now we can’t stop saying to each other, “so, you eat bagels?”

Last night, I made that potato dish for the ChickieNob.  It had been almost twenty years since I last made it.  I told her that it was definitely something that would have been served at Elsa’s coronation ceremony, so we had a Frozen dinner with pea soup (sans pork) and potato pancakes.

It made her night.  And it reclaimed Scandinavia for me.

To make the pancakes, just peel and grate a few small, white potatoes into a mixing bowl and sprinkle with salt.  Melt a 1/2 tbsp of butter in a big pan, moving it around to coat the surface.  Scoop in all the grated potato and sprinkle again with a little salt, flattening it into a pancake to fill the pan with the back of a spatula.  After about 5 minutes of cooking on medium heat, spread another 1/2 tbsp of butter on the top of the pancake.  Flip it upside down so the recently buttered side is against the pan.  Let it cook another 5 minutes until golden and serve.

Pair it with pea soup and you have a Frozen meal you can convince even a nine-year-old that they served at Elsa’s coronation.

She ate every last bite.

We’re on our second snow day in a row.  Yesterday I did a deep clean of the house with the kids, and we made muffins, went sledding, and read Harry Potter.  I got all of the laundry done.  I spent every moment I wasn’t in the snow in my pyjamas, as did the kids.

I love snow days.

But I hate actual snow.

Image: Chelsea Gomez via Flickr

I don’t like the cold.  Every winter, I thank the powers of the universe for pairing me with a man who has never asked me to go skiing.  I don’t. like. skiing.  Before you say anything, I will tell you that I gave skiing a try.  Like a few tries.  Like more than a few tries.  But I couldn’t see the point of paying to go up a hill only to come down a hill.  If the point is to get to the bottom, I would like to just cut out the minutes in between and stay at the bottom.  I stopped skiing at some point in high school and have never had a desire to return to the slopes.

Sometimes I say that I want to go snow tubing, but I forget that means going out in the snow.  And I don’t like the snow.  I really don’t think I can stress that enough.  Me and snow?  Not friends.

I don’t like cold climates, though I lived in Madison for four years.  I would never willingly choose to go somewhere cold.  I mean, there are people I love who live somewhere cold, so I go and visit them in their cold home states. (Or in the case of one friend, she sends me all the way up to Canada!  Windsor-freakin’-Canada!)  But while I love going to places that get cold during their warmer months, such as visiting the aforementioned Canada in summertime (it’s divine!), I would never choose to go on a vacation to someplace snowy in the winter.  When people tell me that they can’t wait because they just booked tickets for a ski vacation, I smile wanly and tell them that sounds fabulous.  But really, that’s my version of hell.  Hell isn’t hot.  Hell is like Hoth.

I wear sweaters through the summer.  Through the DC summer.  Swampy, too-hot-to-breathe-according-to-some-people DC; I don’t think I’ve ever left the house without a sweater in tow in the summer months.  I wear jeans to the pool.  There are two pictures of me on the beach from two separate trips this summer; both wearing heavy sweatshirts over my t-shirt.

Did I mention I hate snow?

But there is nothing I love more than a snow day.  Watching the snow falling outside.  Not being able to go anywhere.  Making sure all the flashlights have batteries.  Wearing sweatpants and heavy socks and slippers.  I love watching snow within a heated space with a panel of glass between myself and the substance.  I mean, yes, for the sake of the kids, I will take them sledding and even take a few rides down the hill, cursing the snow as it seeps into my jeans.  But after fifteen minutes, I’m done with snow and ready to go back inside.

Where it is cozy.

And there’s no homework.  And no early wake-time.  And no driving to activities.  There’s just… sigh.  Good books and hot chocolate.

I’ll start by saying that I’ve said it too: “we are also a baby-obsessed culture (pick up any issue of People magazine to see that).”  It wasn’t until I was helping a friend with her book proposal that I realized that I had been overlooking a truism of the publishing industry which also holds in the general marketing world: rarely is it a good thing to say that there is nothing like your book in the stores.

That’s the instinct, right?  You tell the agent that your book fills this untapped niche.  There are people out there, just like you, and your book will help those people.  But it’s actually not usually a good thing to point out that no book like yours exists on the market.  There is usually good reason for that.  Publishing is very different from book writing.  Publishing is a business transaction.  Usually it matches up: the story is good AND there is a market.  But sometimes, you can have a great book that just doesn’t have a clear-cut audience that the publisher can market to and it doesn’t get picked up.  And sometimes you have a fairly crappy book written by a celebrity who brings with her a clear-cut market and they publish her book because they know they can move copies.

So it is better then to explain to the agent why your book is superior to the ones already on the market.  See, there is an audience for my book BUT my book is better than all the ones already catering to that audience.  Even if you have to stretch a bit to find something even remotely similar.

How does this tie into babies?  Well, I realized as I was telling her this that sure, if we only look at magazines or the way mommy bloggers are approached or sitcoms, we may walk away with a belief that our culture is obsessed with babies.  And I clearly have until this point.  But remember, marketers are not necessarily reflecting what we want or what we believe.  They are reaching out to a specific population that they can reach.

Image: Ken Hawkins via Flickr

For instance, new parents tend to focus on a certain, small amount of subjects.  They frequent the same places.  Therefore, new parents are a good target audience to appeal to for sales.  You know who isn’t a good target audience?  Parents of teenagers.  Parents of teenagers have a large, diverse set of issues.  They go off in too many directions.  There isn’t a clear place or subject matter to use as a focus.  Therefore, while parents of teenagers could probably use their own magazine, they don’t get a nice magazine such as Martha Stewart Baby because it would be too difficult to get subject matter that would appeal to the majority of the population you’re trying to reach. (If the magazine doesn’t contain enough articles that interest you, you’re going to stop reading it.)  And while they know that pediatricians and Mommy-and-Me gyms are going to toss Martha Stewart Baby on their waiting room table, there isn’t a place where parents of teens are congregating in the same way that parents of small children tend to hit the same type of establishments those first years.

In Apart at the Seams, one of the characters muse on how there are so many wedding magazines and no marriage magazines.  Any outsider looking at humans would concur that we are only interested in this single day — the wedding — and have no interest in the aftermath.  Though personal reality tells us a different story.  Yes, we talk with our friends about the wedding, but we continue to talk to our friends about the marriage, especially when there are issues in a marriage.  Yet brides are easy to market to: it’s a finite amount of time, most weddings contain the same moving parts, and there are clearly wedding vendor establishments that can carry the periodical.  Marriage… that’s too amorphous for publishers.  That’s too big a population.  What may interest me about marriage probably won’t interest you, especially if we’re at different points in our marriage time-wise.  Dating is slightly easier to market to because it’s focused on moving you toward marriage.  But marriage itself?  What can you say?  Here are some tips for… more marriage.  More of the same.

That’s what we want, isn’t it (I don’t think anyone wishes to go through divorce), but it isn’t what sells.

So we can’t really look at the media around us to tell us what matters in our society.  We have to look at society itself; human interactions, laws, studies.  We have to go to the personal.  When I look there, I see a conflicting reality.  I see us understanding that babies are a necessity if we want to continue the species and being down-right annoyed by them at the same time.  We pass out lollipops at the bank and ban kids from restaurants.  We’re like this in a lot of places; we’re touched and annoyed by the very same thing: elderly people (love grandma and hate that old people walk so slow!), differently-abled (wow, that was a touching video of someone who had their leg amputated walking again for the first time and then ask in the same breath why people should get special parking permits due to physical limitations), and yes… babies (so cute and yet I don’t want to sit anywhere near you on an airplane).

So I’m not sure we’re really baby-obsessed.  Baby-interested?  Especially because it comes from a biological drive?  But I’ll refrain from making the above statement again in a future blog post (and please remind me of this post if I do).

So I guess I ask all of you: are we as a society really baby-obsessed or is marketing baby-obsessed while we’re baby-interested?  Or are we really not any more interested in babies than we are in the next Super Bowl winner or whatever is in front of us at the moment?

I am addicted to caffeine.  The smallest amount I can consume and still feel okay is 16 ounces of coffee.  That’s the amount needed to stave off headaches.  On days when I need to drive in the afternoon, I’ll give myself anywhere from 8 ounces to 16 ounces of coffee as a booster.  This is down from the very high levels of caffeine that I was consuming right after the twins were born, when we were piecing together a few hours of sleep each night.  I felt okay about it then because we were truly in a you-need-to-do-what-you-need-to-do sort of place trying to feed, change, stimulate, and nap two premature infants on heart monitors.  But once they started truly sleeping through the night at 15 months (yes, I’m aware that’s late in the game.  But we had to do night feeds until then for weight issues), I was able to bring my caffeine consumption down to my current 16 – 32 ounces per day.

Earlier in the week, the New York Times had an article about how caffeine may boost memory.  I was already dragging, getting no sleep from the back pain and working on the book, so I let myself have a few extra cups of coffee here and there, rationalizing that it’s good for my memory.  I mean, the tacit permission is there in the freakin’ New York Times.  Have another cup, Melissa.

The Atlantic didn’t even hedge their bets covering the same study.  In their world caffeine = better memory, and they recommend half a Starbucks Venti.  Thank you, I think I will.

And then Elle put out their own article on caffeine on Friday, beginning with the word “scary” in the title.  Scary?  How can memory enhancement be scary unless we’re talking about remembering things you don’t want to remember?  The “disgusting” (their word) problems that caffeine is making for my body while it helps me remember where I placed my car keys: depression, osteoporosis, and INFERTILITY!

Nevermind that I was entirely off caffeine while we were trying to conceive.  I only drank decaf tea and coffee for over two straight years.

Still, Elle points out that “While not every study has found that caffeine reduces female fertility, most doctors of natural medicine recommend that women trying to get pregnant avoid caffeine.”  I guess the solution for me is to not visit doctors of natural medicine but to go with the hacks who are going to tell me to take 480 ccs, STAT.

Image: Ben Schumin via Flickr

I am constantly amused that if we believe the media and scientific studies, pretty much everything we consume or come in contact with is killing us while helping us live longer/better, all at the same time.

My caffeine product of choice: Iced coffee with half-and-half and Equal.  Second place: Iced tea without lemon.  Third place: Diet Coke.

What is your daily caffeine consumption like?