When I was in seventh grade, I had the most gorgeous social studies teacher.  Since he still teaches in the county (yes, I Googled him) and has an easy-to-find name, we will call him Mr. Cohen.  Mr. Cohen looked like a young John F Kennedy.  My dad had a book about John F. Kennedy’s presidency, and I liked to borrow it and sit on my bed, staring at this one picture that closely resembled my middle school teacher.

I still remember all of the quotations he would scrawl across the board.  Lord Acton’s “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  A song we wrote to remember all the amendments to the Constitution.  And the look that he got on his face when he discussed the Protestant work ethic.  It was clear, at least to someone like me who studied his facial expressions as much as I studied world history for his class, that he liked the concept of the Protestant work ethic.  And by G-d, if this man liked the Protestant work ethic, then this little Jewish girl was going to work her fingers to the bone in order to impress him by being even more Protestant than the Protestants.  I was going to out-Protestant work ethic them.  I was going to make those Puritans look like wusses.

Mr. Cohen gave me an A for all my hard work.  He did not ask me out on a date.  That only meant I needed to turn up the volume on my work load.

In eighth grade, I moved over to a new social studies teacher whose classroom was adjacent to Mr. Cohen’s room.  Sometimes they’d open the door between their classrooms to speak to one another.  I assumed that if I amazed this new teacher that she would tell Mr. Cohen about my work while they chitchatted in the door frame.  Isn’t that the only thing teachers talk about with each other?  The most interesting things in their lives: their students?

She assigned a ten page research paper.  This assignment was a huge deal, the first major essay I had to write for school.  She asked for ten pages.  I wrote 40.  40 pages.  40 pages on the assassination of Lincoln.  She wanted us to turn in 20 research index cards.  I went ahead and created about 80.  All the other kids were stunned when I pulled them out of my backpack.  I was sure that this was going to be the tipping point, the moment when Mr. Cohen understood the intensity of my Protestant work ethic.

No offer was made to take me to the school dance or even a movie.  He ended up marrying another teacher at the school.  All I got was a note in my yearbook to have a good summer.

I started dating boys my age, but I held onto Mr. Cohen’s beloved Puritan-style of living.  To this day, I’m frugal.  I’m efficient.  I will never stop working as long as there is work to do.  And I can always find work to do.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing.  I completed a double major AND a certificate of study while in college, while working two days a week.  I went on a week-long work camping trip while I had mono.  I didn’t stop working when I had hyperemesis gravidarum with the twins, vomiting into Venti Starbucks cups while I drove to school. (I needed to pause at a garbage can at a midway point between my house and the school because I only had two cup holders in the car to contain my two full cups of vomit.)  My personal motto has always been “suck it up.”

As I neared the deadline for this edit on Apart at the Seams, it made sense to forgo things like eating and yoga and just sit in front of the computer for 12-to-15 hours per day, writing non-stop.  Apparently, my back cannot keep up with my brain and my burning love for Mr. Cohen, because hunching over the keyboard for hours at a time destroyed the rhomboid muscle in my back.  On Friday, Josh took me back to the doctor because even with the pain killers and muscle relaxants, I couldn’t sleep.  The pain was just too intense.  Delivering twins vaginally felt like a day at the spa in comparison to the spasms in my back that had been going non-stop for seven days.

This new doctor looked at me in horror when I told him why the muscle cramping started, and I wanted to scream in his face, “I can out-Protestant the Protestants and Mr. Cohen should have loved meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”  He asked if I had ever considered taking breaks, walking around, swinging my arms and stretching.  Had I considered this?  Is he crazy?  Waste time with things like stretching?  Do you know how much I can accomplish in the time it would take me to stretch?  Did the Puritans pause to stretch?

I hobbled home with a new prescription and slapped on two heat strips.  And then I Google Mr. Cohen because this is all his fault.  If he hadn’t been so cute, so charismatic, so charming 27 years ago, I would never be in the pain I’m in today.  If he had instead had a flicker cross his features when he mentioned slothfulness instead of the Protestant work ethic, I would be happily lounging on a beach somewhere, relaxing.  But no, he had to be enamoured with Puritans, working their farms until their bodies gave out.

I found him first on a “rate my teacher” site, where high school student after high school student raved about his counseling skills.  He had guided them to the perfect career path.  He would do anything for his students.  And in that moment, I realized that I was just one girl in a sea of thousands of kids who had crossed his path and fallen in love with him.  There could be hundreds of us with chronic back problems due to our love for Mr. Cohen.

I said a quiet goodbye to my crush and vowed to become lazy.  That is, right after I finish editing these 270 pages.  I swear, I can quit any time.

A bunch of people emailed me about level 181 of Candy Crush recently after I wrote a note about it on the level 180 and 182 post.  So maybe it’s not as straightforward as it seems.  I tried playing it again to remember how I did it, and of course lost on the first try.  It took me a bit before I could win it again.

So you have to bring down two cherries.  They’re locked on the side columns with multi-break whipped cream below them.  The only way to pop that whipped cream is to smash through the whipped cream in the middle and make as many striped horizontal candies as possible to shoot them through the side columns.  If you make a horizontal striped candy higher than the cherries, don’t use it until you can bring it down.

Should you make a vertical candy?  No, not unless you can also make a wrapped one or a speckled doughnut and combine it.  Every move needs to be either smashing that whipped cream in the middle or doing something to set up a horizontal stripe.

This is not a level where you can predict whether a board is good or bad before the first move, so it’s worth playing on Facebook because you won’t be exiting out the board.  Just look for places where you have two of the same colour one above the other (let’s say, yellow), a yellow one off to the left or right, and another yellow one in the same column as the first two yellows.  You’re looking to make a foursome vertically so it creates a striped candy that moves horizontally.

Hope that helps!  Off to go moan about my back.

While my back heals, I’m writing out advice for passing level 130 and level 140 of Candy Crush because I have a lot of requests for those two levels in my inbox.  They both require skills that pop up a lot on later levels, as well as Candy Crush Saga’s penchant for red herrings.  More on that below.

Level 130

To pass this level, you need to make ten striped candies and combine them five times.  Well, maybe you’ll end up making a few striped candies that you’ll never use, or striped candies that accidentally get set off before you can combine them, but for the most part, you’re looking to pop two striped candies together, five times.

Look at the board above.  Four columns over from the right, you’ll see three yellow candies, with a 4th one in the column to the right.  Slide that one on the right over one and you’ve made a striped candy.  Now look above it at that formation of blue candies.  The instinct is to slide over that 5th blue candy to form a wrapped candy.  DON’T.  Instead, slide that blue down four rows from the top and you’ll have a striped candy land on top of that other striped candy.  Combine them, and you now only have 4 more combinations to go with 38 moves.

Plus there are two more stripes waiting to happen in the board above.  Do you see them?  One is a vertical yellow stripe three over from the left, and the other is a vertical red stripe four over from the left.  You’ll need to mess around a bit with the red one to bring it down a level or two so it’s next to the yellow one, but this can be done.

This board uses the same threading technique that will help you when you get to level 356.  In fact, this board mirrors that one almost completely with the added difficulty of how the board on 356 is set up.  So go over and read those hints, but the one that will help the most is to look for places where you have two of one colour (let’s say, red), one of another colour (blue), and then another red.  Make a match below ONLY the blue candy to gently pull down another red candy into that row.  That will form a stripe for you.

Level 140

This board is what I call a red herring board.  You think you have to only focus on the reds, oranges, and yellows since those are the orders you’re filling.  WRONG!

If you did that, you likely won’t make enough matches even with 45 moves.  You need 99 moves to clear this board if you keep making three-combination moves with only those colours.  See, impossible.

What you need to do is make as many special combinations, regardless of colour.  The opening move for this board creates a red striped candy (two columns over from the left).  This is actually a fairly crappy board (above) because you can only make one special immediately.  I would restart (exiting out if you’re on a mobile device.  If you do this on Facebook, it takes away a life) until you have a board where you can make two specials as an opening move.  When I played the board above, I didn’t pass on the first try despite making a speckled doughnut and combining it with a red candy, as well as a striped/wrap combo.

So ignore those orders and instead take out whole rows and columns (or many rows and columns) by creating and setting off special candies.

Currently: I’m on Level 409, and I’m happy to go backwards and explain how I did any board before that. Sometimes it was stupid luck but other times, there was actual thought involved (here are the other advice posts I’ve written). Let me know the level you’re struggling with.  I’m finishing a write up for 181 that will be up in a moment.

Do you know what doesn’t go together?  The polar vortex and my muscle relaxants.  People kept asking me all week if the cold was making my back feel worse.  My back already feels like hell, so no, once you’re already at too-painful-to-breathe, there isn’t a big difference between terrible and horrible.

But the muscle relaxants made my mind so fuzzy that every time I heard the term polar vortex, my limbic system would send out a warning siren as a mental image of a slow-motion cloud of swirling polar bears descending over our town, sucking all the houses into its core, popped into my brain.  And then I’d have to remind myself that there is no swirling cloud composed of polar bears, just as there is no Sharknado.  My brain would calmly turn off the alarm until the next time I heard the term polar vortex and my brain silently screamed at me to take cover!

Other things to avoid while on muscle relaxants: beat poetry, lava lamps, and strobe lights.  Oh, and Sharknado.  Wait, did I also mention polar vortexes…

Polar vortex [gasp]

Take cover!!!

*******

For anyone keeping score at home, no, my back isn’t better.  We’ve tried massage, muscle relaxants, painkillers, stretches and heat.  I think I’ve actually been throwing too many solutions at the problem, making my back feel even worse.  So I’m going to take the weekend to try to heal just by lying still.

And playing Hay Day.

But mostly lying still.

*******

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:

• “It’s Not Envy; It’s Absence” (The Unexpected Trip)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Torthúil has a post about finding happiness, though the reason I loved this post is for her description of the opposite: “During the quieter times of the day and night I found myself feeling heavy. Not only because of the yummy food.  I felt like I had a hollow empty space right at my center, and every day a drop of something liquid and weighty would fall into it, like a big dollop of cement.”  Isn’t that beautiful?  You need to read the whole post to catch lovely moments like that one.

My Scar Smiles at Me has a post about blogging and conversations.  Or really, reading the blog post after having a conversation via some medium with the person.  Getting to process their words on two different levels.  And how reading a blog post aligns closer to having tea with a friend.  I love this.

When Did I Get Like This asks if blogging is dead?  She writes, “The notion of diminishing returns is also self-fulfilling, of course, because I have less motivation to post when it feels like no one is reading. But why would anyone keep checking my site when I no longer post with any regularity?”  She’s going to keep writing as long as she reaches one person who values her words.  There’s lots of food for thought in the post, even though it’s non-IF.

You will never look at Fawkes the phoenix in the same way again after reading Inconceivable’s “Burning Day.”  It will blow you away.

Lastly, Fruitful Furbishing has a post about recent nosy, thoughtless questions.  I love how the song “Let it Go” from Frozen has been applied to so many situations, and I imagine there are a lot of women walking around right now with it playing in their heads.

The roundup to the Roundup: The polar vortex is not a swirling cloud of white bears.  My back isn’t better.  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 3rd and January 10th) 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 there was a piece in the New York Times this week about how doctors Google their patients, written by a doctor.  Haider Javed Warraich writes,

Doctors do “Google” their patients. In fact, the vast majority of physicians I know have done so. To my generation, using a search engine like Google comes as naturally as sharing pictures of our children or a recent vacation on a social networking site like Facebook.

If my doctor Googled me, well… first he would find Melyssa Ford (uh… and he might be disappointed when I walk through the door in my very unsexy yoga pants and Batman t-shirt)… but slightly further down the results page, he would find my BlogHer page, my author site, my Amazon page, and linked to all three places: my blog.

I don’t know if it makes me happy to think that my doctor possibly know what I’m going through emotionally before I walk into the office, or if it creeps me out to consider that he may be thinking about my dead hamster while he gives me a Pap smear.

Do you always want to know if someone is reading your blog?  Or is ignorance bliss when it comes to certain family members, friends, and doctors?