I thought I was going to hate the new version of Gmail and dreaded seeing my inbox switch over, but I have to say, I am in love with the new system.  My social media notifications go into one column, and I can read/delete/archive them in huge batches.  Anything promotional goes into another column, and I can now quickly drag product pitches over there and never have to see them again.  I’ll just comb through that column once a day to make sure no legitimate emails got stuck in there.  It’s like having a turbo spam filter.

And then the rest of my emails are all coming into my normal inbox.

I get a lot of email every day, and a chunk of my evening is spent separating out the emails I need to read from the ones I just need to glance at and archive.  And don’t even get me started on my annoyance over the amount of junk mail I receive.  Now I can scroll down a column, hit “all” and poof — they’re gone.  Archived.  Trashed.  Whatever I want.

Well done, Google.

*******

Last week, we drove down to Carmen’s for water ice.  As we drove over, I realized that I had no cash on me.  I hate using a credit card for a small amount of money, so I decided that I would buy a Crave card (one of their gift cards) and use it immediately, keeping the remainder for another day.  Problem solved.

Except when we stepped up to the door, there was a sign saying their credit card machine wasn’t working.  We went inside anyway to see if it had miraculously been fixed and they just hadn’t taken the sign down.  Alas, it was like Ladyhawke — they could only take cash, and we had no cash, no ATM card, no blank check.  We only had the credit card, and they had a broken credit card machine.

We were going to have to leave without water ice.

I told the twins we could come back on the weekend, and the ChickieNob promptly began to cry.  It had taken us a while to get there, she had debated flavours in the car, and now she was going to have to wait days for her water ice.  Carmen’s is also nowhere near our house — a long drive — and she knows from past experience that the best laid plans sometimes don’t happen when we need to figure out how to get there again.

As we crossed the lot, we heard a woman call out to us.  “Come back,” she said.  “Let’s figure this out.”

So we went back in the store, and the owner came out from the back room.  Apparently, after we walked out, the employee went to tell him how sad the ChickieNob had been, and being the parent of a similarly-aged kid, he decided that they must have water ice that day.  They simply couldn’t be expected to wait.  He brought out a portable credit card machine that they use for their carts, and rang up our water ice.  It tasted even better than it would have if we hadn’t thought we wouldn’t be having water ice that day.

That’s the sort of nice step a family-owned business can do for its customers.

Later that weekend, we came back because I had indeed promised the kids water ice on the weekend.  So they ended up getting two water ices in one week.

Thank you, Carmen’s, for not sending away two very sad eight-year-olds sans water ice.

*******

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:

• “This is my Therapy” (Mama Said Knock You Out)
• “Birth Plans” (Stumbling Gracefully)
• “Advice, and Double Dark Chocolate Beet Muffins” (A Half Baked Life)
• “Straddling Worlds” (Searching for Our Silver Lining)
• “Six Years into this Lonely Walk… Saudade” (The Empty Cookie)

Okay, now my choices this week.

No Kidding in NZ has a post about setting up your future when your future isn’t following the course you thought it would take.  In other words, answering the internal question, “what’s next for me?”  She writes, “When a big life goal – whether you’ve held it for your entire life, or simply the years in which you were trying to conceive – is taken away as an option, we often feel that we need to replace it with something equally big. How do we save the world, make a difference, feel as if we’ve achieved something, and leave our mark on the planet if we’re not going to be a parent?”  She answers with her own advice for this question.

Starlit Dreams has a happy post about gratitude.  Maybe it’s having read her for so long, to know how dark some of the dark days were, that it made me smile hugely to read her post and think about this happy space keeping her from sleep.  May everyone get to feel that type of contentment in their lives.

On the opposite end was Baby, Borneo or Bust’s post about moving, also starting from a place of being unable to sleep.  You can practically feel the excitement of the night before your life changes popping off the screen.  Wishing her safe travels.

Lastly, Baby Makin’ has a post about when her job and her infertility collide.  This line really moved me: “Will I ever be able to tell my child to ‘make something pretty!’ when I drop them off and see their excited faces when they bound up the stairs at pick up time with their project from the day?”  And then this one: “I give her a small smile to try and make her feel better. She doesn’t know, however, that I’m crying inside, wondering if I’ll ever have a little girl like her.”  That last one got me crying.

The roundup to the Roundup: Love the new Gmail.  Thank you, Carmen’s.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between July 12th and July 19th) 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.

This question is part of the GRAB(ook) Club, an online book club open to anyone and everyone.

There are two types of teen characters that seem to pop up in books and movies — the realistic, everyman who stands in for tons of kids that you could actually point out at your school (for instance, the students in Breakfast Club) and the kid-you-wish-you-were (for instance, the kids in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars).  There is nothing realistic about them.  They are too witty to be actual people, too self-actualized, too lucky, too unlucky, and too much the creators of perfect movie-like moments.  This seems to be a running characteristic of John Green characters: they are the people you wish you were or you wish were your friends, therefore, it is a joy to hang out with them in paper form on the page.

Do you tend to gravitate towards books with realistic characters who remind you of people in your day-to-day world (or you could see being an actual person you might encounter one day) or characters who have almost super-human personalities that allow you to escape from all those regular people around you due to their cleverness?

After you answer my question, please click over to read the rest of the book club questions for The Fault in Our Stars.  You can get your own copy of The Fault in Our Stars by John Green at bookstores including Amazon.

This is a post for the GRAB(ook) Club. Like the idea of a book club where you don’t have to leave your living room? Then read more about the GRAB(ook) Club which holds the book discussion on blogs, a Facebook group, and a GoodReads group.

July’s Book is The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.  You can jump into the discussion by clicking any of the blogs below (links will appear when the post goes up), or joining the Facebook or GoodReads group (links to those groups are in the information post).

• Stirrup Queens
• Me Plus One
• Are You Kidding Me?
• The Road Less Travelled
• Adventures in Writing, Reading & Bookcrossing
• Lavender Luz
• Two Bees in Love
• CD1 Again
• Amy (on GoodReads/Facebook)

NEXT STEP: sign up for the August book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (discuss August 15) by leaving a comment below telling me that you’re in, the name and url of your blog, or whether you are blogless and will be discussing on the Facebook/GoodReads groups.

If you haven’t yet read Tess Vigeland’s brilliant speech from the World Domination Summit, I can wait until you’ve looked that over.  It’s right here.  It’s long because it’s a written version of a spoken speech, not a blog post, but it’s worth dedicating the time to get all the way to the end.

You finished it, correct?  No?  Then go back and read the whole thing so I can talk about it.

The speech focuses on that concept of leaping without a net, of leaving what outsiders think of as an incredible job to do… what?  She doesn’t know.  She left without a game plan in place, and while everyone cheered on her bravery, she tells the true story of what it is like to step into nothingness, not knowing where your future is heading.

Hint: it’s really scary.

There are parts of the speech that many of us will never be able to relate to — for instance, the hold her old celebrity has over her:

But will anyone want to listen to me if I’m not some national journalist anymore? What if I decide to follow what I think might be another passion and go work for the Red Cross… admirably, but relatively anonymously? Do I lose all my Twitter followers and all the fans – strangers — who’ve friended me on Facebook? Will I disappoint all those people who think I was really great at what I did? Does it matter? Why do I care what other people think? I KNOW I’m not supposed to care – but I do.

How do I get back to remarkable?

But she also veers into very familiar territory such as knowing your passion and being denied your passion, a topic that most of us with infertility can easily relate to.

She tells a story about applying for a job with All Things Considered, a job which should have been a lock for an already successful radio journalist.  She interviewed well, she performed well, she got excellent feedback all around.  But she didn’t get the job.

I didn’t spoil that part of the speech because I told you above to read the whole thing.

She knew exactly what she wanted (the All Things Considered job).  She was well qualified for the job, so it wasn’t a pipe dream.  She did everything one would need to do to get this coveted job including exercising patience.  Throughout that section of her speech, I kept saying in my head, she is so going to get this job and this is going to be a speech about always trusting that things will work out.  And she freakin’ sucks for writing that because for many of us, things don’t work out.

Or they work out but at a very high cost.  Or, yes, it works out, but it certainly doesn’t look like what you thought you would get in the first place.  Sort of like applying for a job at All Things Considered and ending up with a job at Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me.  Fun in its own right and prestigious too, but not the same thing at all.

That’s the NPR version of Waiting for Holland: you apply for a job at All Things Considered but end up at Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me.

So she didn’t get the job.

And my heart — the same one that was cursing her for having things be so easy moments earlier — was now sinking on her behalf.

It’s not a things work out speech at all.  It’s a sometimes things don’t work out and how are you going to deal with that speech.

The job I wanted to get wasn’t one that anyone else could apply for.  I wanted to be a mother to my future kids.  There were no other applicants I was competing against; just my own uterine competency.  I did everything one should do once they get their heart set on being a mother and begin defining themselves by that position.  I took prenatal vitamins and had sex at the correct times and ate well and slept well and jogged on the treadmill.  And did my kegels.  And when I didn’t get the job of mother, I couldn’t even look at another person who got the job of utilizing my uterus and say, “fair enough; they were good too.”  There was no one else, just me.  Just me not getting the job.

Thanks, universe.

It’s not exactly the same thing except that having been through publishing, which is just like applying for a job again and again — you constantly need to apply to keep the job of writer by writing more publishable things — and infertility, I can tell you that the rejection (by a publisher or your body) feels frustratingly the same.  It really doesn’t matter why you don’t have the job.  What matters is that you don’t have the job.  And that sucks.  Hardcore.  And is very scary because you don’t know how many times you have it in you to apply to another dream position or to attempt again to make a baby.  By which I mean, emotionally have it in you.  It hurts a lot to be denied something you really want, something you thought you’d get.

I don’t get a sense that Tess Vigeland (and this is an assumption from the speech, and I apologize if it’s completely off) feels the immediacy of needing a job.  She is taking on freelance work to skate by, and there is (likely) a second income with her husband.  In other words, she doesn’t need a job because of the money, she needs a job because a job defines her, as it does for many people.  While, yes, she obviously needs money at some point, she can hold out for the best position.  She is not exactly in the same place as someone who leaves a job and now needs to scramble as quickly as possible to land a new one so there will be bread on the table.

Her urgency in getting a job comes down to happiness: not having a job makes her unhappy, and having a job brings her personal fulfillment.  And perhaps that is how I could leap from job search to infertility; because while infertility is not life threatening, it is certainly lifestyle threatening.  It is hard to be free-floating in that experiencing, not knowing when or how it will end.  The urgency that comes with treating infertility isn’t one of saving your life; it isn’t cancer or a staph infection or something you need to treat now.  And yet, for our own emotional comfort, it has the same immediacy of those diseases.  Because that urgency comes from alleviating the emotional pain that comes from being kept from something you know is right for you in your deepest heart.

I hope Tess Vigeland finds the job of her dreams again.

I hope everyone experiencing infertility gets the resolution they crave.

Battlefish posed an interesting question to me a few weeks ago.  Her wristwatch broke, and it made her wonder how many people actually wore wristwatches anymore since phones (which tell the time) are so commonly in people’s hands nowadays.

I had to admit that my watch died last year, and I decided to stop wearing one.  The jeweler was replacing the battery when he informed me that the watch still wouldn’t start.  It was just too old.  While the parts could be replaced if I was willing to send it away (I wasn’t), I could buy a new watch for much less than what it would take to fix the current watch.  The current watch had sentimental value, and I would rather have an unusable watch in hand than risk possibly losing it but having it fixed.  So I went home and put my watch away.

I considered getting a new watch, and we looked at a few.  But I never found one that I loved as much as the one I was no longer using.  And then it started to feel redundant with the phone.  The phone was like always having a watch in my pocket; one that could hold hundreds of alarms throughout the day.  I couldn’t see spending money on something I clearly didn’t need.

So I’m now watch-free.  I’m also datebook-free (paper calendar was replaced by phone calendar), camera-free (I usually just use the camera in the phone), and book-free (sometimes I have a paper book with me, but usually I read whatever book I have loaded on the phone).  So I’m lighter.  But I also sort of miss my wristwatch.

Do you still wear a wristwatch, or do you use the clock on your phone?

Who was to know the future of the wristwatch when I begged my parents incessantly for my pink, plastic Swatch?