Instead of going through the whole explanation again about how this giant love fest came to be, let’s save the space because you can click here to read about the project and find out how you can participate in the next one.

The words below come from the hearts of others around the blogosphere. If your blog is featured below, I hope you carry these good thoughts with you, use them to continue writing and continue putting your heart out there.

• Yeah, Science!: I can’t believe this woman even had to contemplate starting a blog.  Her writing is so honest and hilarious, that I get genuinely excited when a new post shows up on my feed.  It never even feels like reading, it feels like sitting down with a girlfriend who you’ve known forever and can be your free, uninhibited self with.
• Dragondreamer’s Lair: Kristin is one of the kindest and caring people I know. She never fails to reach out and give her support to anyone who may need it.
• Old Lady and No Baby: Amber is a pretty amazing person. She is one of the most dedicated commenters I have ever seen, and her comments are always kind and supportive!
• A Single Journey: Michaela is an amazing writer & talented story teller. I am amazed by her strength…I admire her honesty…my heart breaks for her pain & loss.
• Stirrup Queens: There are so many reasons why I love Mel, why so many people around the WORLD love Mel, but I want to show my appreciation for one thing in particular. Her unflinching support of reproductive choice. All reproductive choice. As a blogger with a large readership, she sometimes takes a hit when she posts about pro-choice issues. I admire her insistence on standing up and saying this is important. For us, and for future generations.
• The Lucky Life: She is one of the kindest spirits one will meet. She is someone who is also in touch with reality. She has seen terrible pain in her lifetime and infertility has also left its ugly scars, but the realism and the calm spirit that she is carries through in every post of hers.
• Are You Kidding Me?: I love her comments. She is not blogging very consistently now, but she is a champion commenter, and there is sense and logic to everything she says. I love her dry wit and how she always makes a valid point.
• We say IVF, They say FIV: She is very sensitive and I feel like she gets it. We are worlds apart, from very different backgrounds, and our lives are very different and yet, it seems she and I share this common invisible thread that ties our thoughts. I find that I would process a number of things the exact same way as she did.
• Kmina’s Blog: Her humour is a killer. She effortlessly seams in humour and sarcasm in her posts. Never out of place, never futile… I find myself grinning so often. She is also very kind, and generous with her comments.
• Kmina’s Blog: While I love Mina’s blog, where she really shines is in her comments.  She’s a frequent commenter – always thoughtful and frequently hilarious.
• Mrs. Spit… Still Spouting Off: Mrs. Spit is someone who is working hard to learn new things about herself and apply that knowledge to the world.  She does a fine job of expressing all the joys and sorrows and challenges of her life.
• Mama Said Knock You Out: Yo-yo Mama’s blog is a place where you can tell that someone is pouring their heart out.  Family life, annoying coworkers, adorable and challenging children – subjects that all lend themselves to giving a true glimpse at someone’s internal mental workings.

Love this project?  Click here to read about it and find out how you can participate in the next one.  When is the next one?  That’s the beauty of it – you never know when these kind words will show themselves, though I always post once I have a critical mass of blurbs.

What if someone in the public eye stepped forward and wrote a brutally honest, calm, rational, no-apologies opinion article in the New York Times about infertility as Angelina Jolie just did for the BRCA1 gene?

What if they went through the statistics that play into decision-making so readers could see what the average person experiencing infertility needs to contend with when discussing options with their doctor?  Maybe they would see that it isn’t a problem with one-size-fits-all solutions that the average person can solve by throwing out a sentence that begins with “just” such as “just adopt!” or “just do IVF!”  Maybe readers would see that it’s a balancing act working with success rates, pain tolerance, schedules, and financial risks.

What if someone pointed out the discrepancies in society; how we’ve priced something life-saving or life-giving out of the range of the average person?

What if someone talked about the physical realities of treatments, neither exaggerating them nor diminishing them, but speaking them about them matter-of-factly because the physical side of treatments is a fact as real as the price tag.

Would it help people outside the experience understand it?

I think it would.

Jolie ends her piece with this: “Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.”  She says this with a dose of realism, pointing out that while she still has a 5% breast cancer risk even with this surgery, it is less than what she had prior to this point, and she feels powerful for taking the control away from the statistic and doing something active to possibly change the course of her life.

Isn’t that what we all want?

Thank you, Ms. Jolie, for stepping forward and talking about the decision you made. It’s not the same one that everyone else will make, and those who reduce their comment to pointing out that they think you’re foolish or fantastic are missing the point.  Those, of course, are probably the same people who would leave a comment on a New York Times piece about infertility pointing out what they think the person should have done, as if the decision they would make is the best and only decision a person can make facing that situation.

Let’s ignore those people because they don’t seem to realize that personal decisions are personal — I’m glad you did what you needed to do to get through your challenge — but I’m grateful that even knowing how crappy the public can be, you didn’t hide it or pretend it didn’t happen. You used your challenge to educate. And there needs to be more people like you in the world who are willing to step forward and use their voice to speak out.

I got asked to join the site, GeekDad*.  I’ve read it for a long time, and it was a huge honour to be asked to join the team as an occasional contributor.  Getting the invitation is very similar — so I imagine — to be being tapped by Skull and Bones. It comes when you least expect it, being slipped into your email inbox. It starts out with a congratulations on the invitation, and it ends by talking about getting you set up with your log-in materials. The point being that no one in their right mind would turn down the invitation to be a GeekDad, so we might as well forgo the question of “if” and just start you on the road to “when.”

And they’re right. I mean, as much as I’m joking about it, they’re right.  Beyond my own blog, there are three places I want to write for.  I’ve already been writing for BlogHer since December 2007.  GeekDad is number two.  (The third I’m keeping to myself because it’s sort of like announcing to the whole middle school whom you have a crush on.)

Before I said yes, I asked the twins how they felt about it since I would be writing about them and what it is like to navigate my way through technology with them.  They thought about it and told me to go for it because (1) they hoped I would one day be asked to review a Lego product and (2) tech stories tend not to be embarrassing and (3) I pay for their gadgets and computer programming classes.  Plus, I told them that if they help me with an article, I will pay them for their work.

My first post went up this week about playing Infocom games with the twins.  I will be writing more stuff with the twins over there, so if you like ChickieNobisms and Wolvog thoughts, you can subscribe to my feed on the site, or I’d just recommend subscribing to the site in general.

And speaking about BlogHer, there were two posts in Blogging & Social Media that I’d love your thoughts on.

The first is about being an Internet Bystander; inadvertently reading something on someone’s blog, and in doing so, entering a difficult spot where you observe someone who may or may not need help.  On one hand, the situation isn’t happening in front of you so you can’t judge the danger with your own eyes.  Yet on the other, if you take the writer’s words at face value, the person clearly needs helps.  Stupid Stork poses a really interesting question about what you would do if you encountered a post online where the person was writing about harming themselves or being harmed by someone else.

The second is a post about depression and social media.  While I don’t think social media can cause depression, it can certainly bring out cognitive dissonance.  It pulls us apart as it brings us together.  I wrote,

Humans have always been trying to keep up with the Joneses, and nowhere is it easier to see what the Joneses have that you don’t than online. Number of followers on Twitter? Number of friends on Facebook? Invitation to Disney Moms? Book deal? Comments on a post? Likes on a status? And then all the things that we talk about online that aren’t actually contained in cyberspace: the crafts we think up that we put on Pinterest and the gorgeous pictures of a new home and the vacations to exotic locales and the non-tangibles: seeing that someone else thinks they have the best husband in the world or the cutest kids. The most love, the most happiness, the most ease.

Because then the question becomes, if we know it can be emotionally harmful, should we put limits in place?  Either set limits ourselves or as a society?  I’d love your thoughts on it.

So that’s it.  Proud to be a Geek, and still thinking lots about blogging & social media over at BlogHer.  Smearing myself across the Web.

* I am aware and they are aware that I am a woman.  There are actually a small handful (maybe 4) of women on staff.  It’s sort of cool to get to work with an almost all female staff (BlogHer) as well as an almost all male staff (GeekDad) at the same time.

I think I may be the only person who didn’t have a Mother’s Day post.  There was no reason; I just didn’t have anything to say.  Being with my mother makes me happy, and I hope that I always convey to her how important she is to me the other 364 days per year.  I am but a diluted version of her greatness; if she is a cubed woman, I am merely a squared woman.  So the holiday is a nice reminder to check in mentally and remember if I’ve told her lately that I love her.  A reminder to tell people how you feel about them I can get behind.  All the other trappings of the holiday, I can’t.  Especially breakfast in bed.  I do not eat upon awakening.

I can’t really eat for the first two or three hours.  I can drink coffee, but I can’t put food in my mouth.  Am I the only person who can’t eat first thing in the morning?

Anyway, the kids have a class on Sunday morning that I made them attend.  And we discovered that the ChickieNob’s teacher has been spelling her name wrong all year.  ALL year.  We finally got an explanation for why our daughter keeps asking us how to spell her own name, which… you know… seemed like an odd question.  But despite having spelled her name correctly on all forms, her teacher chose a different way to spell her name.  Odd.

The point being that on Mother’s Day, we had a chunk of time to read while the ChickieNob was in class having her name spelled wrong.  And Josh took this photo of me in a Starbucks.

This is the story behind the photo.  I needed a casual head shot, so I sat down in a seat against the wall and waited for Josh to get our coffees.  As he was coming to our table with our coffee, this man overturned a 20-gallon bucket of water right at our table.  I was already sitting cross-legged on the bench, so I didn’t get wet, but we had to choose a different table since there was over an inch of water on the floor.

We moved to the center of the store, which didn’t have a neutral background, and then finally grabbed the chair next to a man that we had already determined was an undercover spy (is there really any other kind?).  I think my eyes look glazed-over in this photo, but it will have to do because it’s in focus.

Afterward, we went out to my parent’s house, where I got my Mother’s Day present, the only sort I will accept beyond pipe-cleaner bracelets.  My parents taught the twins how to ride a two-wheel bicycle.  The twins and my father and Josh went to set up, and then when my mother brought me over, they both took off on their bicycles, their little legs pumping, not wobbling at all.  The look on their faces as they turned the corner and started riding back to me made me burst into tears.  They were so proud of themselves, so excited to be on a bicycle, unencumbered by training wheels and the feelings that come with having something babyish attached to something grown-up.

Their smile was the manifestation of freedom.

All these little stories sort of sum up how I feel about the day.  It is ups and it is downs.  After going through infertility, it’s impossible to not feel something on Mother’s Day.  In a single day, the ChickieNob went from having her name spelled wrong to mastering bicycle riding, and I went from overturned water buckets to a photograph that I can use.  I went from being woken up by the twins with cards to thinking about how I cried in the parking lot after looking at baby clothes the day before to watching the twins with excitement as they pedaled to feeling the bittersweetness of aging.

And that’s sort of the way this kind of day goes.

There.  I said it.  I dislike 3D movies.

I have become very frustrated lately that whenever we want to see a popular movie, our choices are either to see it at an inconvenient time (10 pm?) or to see the 3D version.  The latest incident came with the Hobbit — we wanted to take the kids to see the movie in the theater.  We didn’t want to see the 3D version.  So our choices were to take them way past their bedtime or to see it in the morning at the smelly theater inside the cinema. (It’s the theater that no one likes, so they stick all the non-3D movies inside.)  We opted for the smelly theater.  We felt like Sneetches without stars while the 3D Sneetches had their weiner roast in the better theater, laughing and spilling their popcorn as wargs tore off the screen right at them.

I’m actually just assuming that was one of the 3D effects.  It sounds like it would be a 3D effect.

I like the idea of 3D movies, but I get a headache from the glasses.  It is partly because the glasses need to go over my existing glasses, and the 3D glasses rest against my nose.  Things touching my nose make me feel cross-eyed, and the feeling doesn’t end when I remove the glasses.  In fact, I feel cross-eyed right now just writing about this.

So it’s a fun idea that gives me a headache in practice.  But I seem to be the only person with this problem.  And the solution people offer me is to put on anti-3D glasses.  Which are still glasses over my glasses, which touch my nose and give me a headache.  And then beyond that, sometimes I just want to sit in my seat in the theater and zone out.  I don’t want to feel as if I’m dodging wargs or having spaceships fly at my face.  Sometimes I just want to sit in a theater and know I’m in a theater, hanging out with all these other moviegoers who are there for the story.

I’m sort of hoping that the 3D fad ends soon.  Though I fear that our days of watching movies in the movie theater may be numbered.

How do you feel about 3D movies?  Like them or avoid them?