We got home from being out and walked upstairs to discover that while we had lights in our hallway and a random corner of our bedroom, all the other electrical sockets were no longer working.  Josh tried resetting the… well, I was going to try to sound as if I knew what the hell I was talking about, but I don’t.  I can’t even pretend.  Josh tried doing whatever one does when they have no electricity, but it wasn’t working.  So he called our electrician, a fantastic guy with infinite amounts of patience who is willing to come on evenings and weekends.  See, I told you he’s fantastic; he didn’t even roll his eyes when I went and purchased a light fixture a few months ago that totally didn’t fit his very detailed specifications. (He thought that by being specific, I could do this task correctly.  But he was wrong.)

But our massively fantastic electrician was in West Virginia on holiday.  No worries, he told Josh.  He’s an electrician who happens to know a lot of other electricians.  He gave us the name and number of someone he knew was still in town.  Fabulous.  Josh left a message.  And the guy never called us back.  He tried him again.  And then we looked at each other and said, “what are we going to do?”

Because we kind of sort of had a night light crisis on our hands as the sky darkened.

So Josh went on our town listserv and found the name of a guy that someone else recommended.  So we called him, and he was really nice and sympathetic, but he told us that he couldn’t help us because it was now night and he had two eight-year-olds and his wife was on a trip.

Um, but then you understand about the night light situation (he did), and since we also have eight-year-old twins, would your boy-girl twins like a play date with our boy-girl twins while you pretty please fix our electricity?  He said he’d run the idea by his kids, so we turned to our twins and asked them if they’d want to meet another set of boy-girl twins and hang out together tonight.

The ChickieNob ran through the kitchen shrieking, “Eight-year-old boy-girl twins that we don’t know yet from the same town… could they be a string theory copy of us*?”

Which meant hells yeah.

So the guy came over with his twins, and his twins met our twins.  And they were more like a replica of our twins rather than anti-twins.  The two boys had similar personalities and liked the same activities.  The two girls had similar personalities and liked the same activities.  So while the dad worked, the four kids went into a toy frenzy.  They played together for a bit, and then separated out into boys and girls.  The dad had to run home to get some part, and the kids kept playing.  And then the dad was done, but the kids sort of kept playing.  And finally, they were lured away with the promise that they could watch their favourite television show at home.  So our twins had to say goodbye to his twins, though we made plans to get the kids together in the future for more play dates, even without electrical problems.

So we now have electricity again.  And a new set of friends.  And a new electrician.  Totally random how life works.

* I run a book club for 16 second graders, and one of the books we were reading mentioned the idea of other dimensions.  So I explained string theory as well as the concept of anti-matter to the kids, which blew their little second grade minds.  The ChickieNob keeps asking me how she can know whether she is the ChickieNob or the Anti-ChickieNob.  She suspects she may be anti-matter.

The thing I hate about April Fools Day is that we already live in a world where it is so difficult to trust information you read on the Internet, where Snopes-disputed forwards travel into my inbox and even the mainstream media sometimes gets the news wrong.  Where so many of our day-to-day actions are moments that destroy trust.  That tear at the seams of communities.  We already have 364 days of catfishing and other online hoaxes.  And then we plop down this 24-hour period at the start of spring in which the entire point is to MESS WITH EACH OTHER.

What the hell is wrong with humans?

Do you think any other animal would ever come up with this?  Do you think if rabbits had access to Facebook, they would spend the day putting up fake pregnancy announcements?  Do you think giraffes would spread saran wrap over their toilet seats so their urine splashes everywhere?

I hate April Fools Day because it makes me second-guessing everything being said to me.  And I just don’t have the time or energy to decipher what is fact and what is fiction today.

So suck it, April Fools Day.

It’s Pesach this week, so we went to my Great-Aunt’s seder.  She has been holding seder at her house for at least my whole life, but I suspect the real number is closer to 50+ years.  She invites everyone in the family.  I have an extraordinary amount of cousins, so on any given year depending on who can get home from college or who is too pregnant to travel or is in the United States at the time, we can have anywhere from 40 to 60 people show up for the meal.  And that isn’t even close to being all of us.  But still 60 people for dinner — pretty huge deal.

I have always loved seder.  First of all, I got to see my sister-cousins.  Second of all, my Great-Aunt was never phased by twenty screaming children running through her house, playing a massive game of hide-and-go-seek (and you could always find an adult who would convincingly lie for you and look blankly at the seeker while saying, “Mel?  Haven’t seen her in hours.”)  Third of all, nothing changes: we use the same Hagaddah (the Jewish prayer book for the service that precedes the meal) every year, the kids play the same games every year, my Great-Aunt cooks the same recipes every year.  I love the predictability of it.

This year was small because a bunch of people couldn’t travel or weren’t in the United States, so we only had around 30 people there.  Which meant that we got more turns to read from the Hagaddah than usual.  Because we’ve been reading from the same Hagaddah for my entire life, we have a lot of inside jokes as a family, and we look to see who gets certain lines.  But there’s one line that only I think about year after year.

Let’s stick our face in the Pensieve, shall we?

It was some time in the early 1980’s and a young Melissa was not yet fearful of reading aloud in front of people.  One by one, family members read aloud from the Hagaddah, going around the table in order.  When it got to her, she looked down at the book and started reading in a loud, clear voice, hoping her words were carrying down the long table to her Great-Uncle because she really wanted to impress him with her excellent reading skills.  And that is when it happened.  She came to the word “triumph” and she said it as “trumpet.”  And some older cousin corrected her absentmindedly, stating the correct word — “triumph” — and the next person started reading the next paragraph.  But in Melissa’s head, she heard silently added in everyone’s brain: “Dude, you suck at reading aloud, hardcore.”

I’m sure no one else remembers this moment but me, but I think of it not only every time we get to that part of the Hagaddah, but every time I have to get up and speak in front of people.

[I similarly have a different story I think of every time I have to hand write something that will be posted somewhere.  I once had to make a poster for a presentation in 11th grade history class.  I wrote it out in pencil, checked it a dozen times because I was anxious about embarrassing mistakes, and then went over the pencil in ink.  It looked perfect.  I got to the classroom and put up the poster, and I heard people snickering.  And then, when I looked back at it, I realized that I had written “effect” as “efefct.”  And, yes, I still think about e-f-e-f-c-t constantly, and I check the twins’ posters like a hawk before they bring them to school.]

This year at the seder, we’re traveling around the table, reading aloud paragraphs, and the WOLVOG GOT THE TRIUMPH.  He got my nemesis, the paragraph that launched a million anxieties.  My stomach clenched while I silently read it with him, even though he was calmly reading it without any idea that his mother was two seats away at the table, poised to scream out to everyone, “it’s a difficult word!” if he stumbled on it.  But my G-d, he stuck the landing.  HE STUCK THE LANDING.  That boy read aloud the word as if it were as simple as “the.”  And then his sister started reading her paragraph, and I felt as if something had been redeemed.  I may not have been able to read that paragraph myself when I was his age, but I raised a child who could.

Plus, for bonus points, the twins sang aloud the Four Questions in perfect Hebrew.

Do you have any embarrassing moments from childhood that you still think about until this day?  Were they ever redeemed?

I follow our summer ice cream shop at the beach on Facebook, and this week they asked people to name their favourite flavours as they planned out their summer rotation.  I told the ChickieNob that she better go on and tell them which flavour she wants.  “I don’t need to,” she scoffed.  “All I want is chocolate, and they’ll always have chocolate.”  While she is most likely correct that chocolate seems like a constant, I told her that it’s a terrible habit to get into.  That if no one says, “chocolate,” the store may reason that no one really wants it and get rid of it.  Of course, they’ll hear from people once they get rid of it, people saying, “but I do love chocolate!  I just assumed it would always be here!”  And by that point, it may be too late for them to whip up a batch.

We went and told the ice cream store that we wanted chocolate ice cream.

So go tell five chocolates in your life — the constants that you sometimes overlook thinking they’ll always be around — that you love them today, whether that be a store, a person, an organization, or an ice cream flavour.

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April’s IComLeavWe list has opened for sign-up.  As always, IComLeavWe runs for the week of April 21 – 28.  Commenting galore.

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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:

• “The Darkness” (A Glimpse Inside)
• “Time Whooooshing” (I Can’t Whistle)
• “Memento Mori” (The Empty Cookie)
• “When Family Stories are Hard to Tell” (NY Times)
• “A Birthday of a Different Sort” (Teach Me to Braid)
• “On Marriage Equality” (Bereaved and Blessed)
• “Better When” (The Journey of a Woman Warrior)
• “The Trouble with Twins” (Stephanie Snowe: the Blog!)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I too loved Stephanie Snowe’s post “The Trouble with Twins.”  We’ve heard the same sentiment, which has always struck me as bizarre when people say it to us.  I mean, say it to a fellow singleton parent, say it behind our backs, but to our faces?  Or to the kids’ faces?  We always tell the kids that some people have weird-ass ideas about twins and that this is their problem and not ours.  And I loved her point about how everything doubles except time.  Perfect post.

A Crack in Everything also had a post on Thursday that I didn’t read until after I wrote the last Roundup about telling her boss about her infertility as well as trying to become a single mother by choice.  It’s a moving story about two women coming together in a conversation about grief, and the things that are learned when we open up to each other.

Bio Girl has a post about the tangible things we leave behind when we die.  Her sister’s things have migrated into various places, and now everywhere she looks, tiny reminders of her sister are around her house.  It was telling how important those tangible items can be; how much we need to record and remember with something visual.  The part that moved me the most came towards the end: “And in a way, it feels so wrong to have her things at my house, because I so desperately want her here to need them.  I want her to walk in and ask for them back.  Since I know she can’t, we will surround ourselves with her things; we will think of her when we look at them, but we are already thinking of her all the time anyway, so that won’t be anything new.”

Lastly, Kmina’s Blog has a post about our imagined futures.  She admits that she never imagined life beyond 35 (though her real life looks nothing like the life she imagined for herself at 35), and she states of this visual cliff: “Perhaps it is a good thing I have no idea what turning 40 means, for once I can leave behind the prejudices and other people’s ideas of what my life and I should be like, and start on this journey just as I am.”  I really loved that idea of starting a stage of life without expectations.  And I found the whole story about beds amusing.

The roundup to the Roundup: Go tell the chocolate in your life that you appreciate it/them.  April’s IComLeavWe is open.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between March 22nd and March 29th) 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.

Primo Levi once said: “I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.”  Me too.

People are the most wonderful and terrible animals at the same time.  We say horrible things to one another, and we purposefully try to make each other feel like crap, and we drive as if we’re the only people who have somewhere important to be, and we talk at each other as if our feelings are the only feelings that count.  We lie and harm and trick and steal.  We fold down the corners of library book pages.  Wait a second… we burn books.  We rape.  We kill.

And at the same time, we help someone unload their groceries onto the conveyer belt, and we volunteer to help someone with a project.  We drop off meals at a stranger’s house, just because we belong to the same church.  We hug and stroke and give and envelop.  We stop to ask someone what is wrong because they’re crying.  We change our Facebook profile to show we stand in solidarity with marriage equality.

See, wonderful and terrible at the same time.

I know the wonderful exists because I witness it every day.  But sometimes my darker sensibilities emerge, and what Josh calls my Chekhovian outlook on the world takes over.  And I only see people as animals.  As terribly inhumane-to-each-other animals.  I thought it all through the last election.

These past few days have filled me with wonder.  My Facebook feed was fairly fractured during the last election, but I woke up on Wednesday morning to a sea of red profile pictures.  A large chunk of people in my feed had changed their profile picture to a red version of the HRC’s logo.  People wrote status updates about marriage equality.  I posted a quick quote from the first day of the proceedings, and everyone who commented did so with support.  Josh posted a Passover amicus brief on gay marriage that got passed around the Internet with loving approval.  Every post I read came out in favour of love, standing with marriage equality.  It was a moment to marvel at, especially as a balance to all the times when like Primo Levi, I have wondered at our inhumanity.  It is equally as awesome — the true definition of the word; inspiring awe — to witness our humanity.  In looking at how we’ve behaved as a society and asking society as a whole to fix it.

This is something I feel very emotional about.

And I felt surrounded by love.

I know there are people saying horrible things in other places.  I’m sure that if I dove into the comment section on a newspaper article, I would see words that would disturb me.  So I’m choosing to not only stand with love, but to stay inside that cocoon of love.  I know the haters are out there, but so far, they haven’t reached me.  And I don’t want to lose what I’m feeling right now by letting them in.

I don’t know how the Supreme Court will rule, or if their ruling will be enough.  That worries me, but I’ve set that aside for the moment.  What they decide is separate from what I’m bearing witness to right now.  I don’t want us to lose that fact in whatever the Supreme Court decides.  I want us to remember how we can behave when we want to.  We can have people’s humanity to people.

What I feel right now is optimism.  With a little “o.”  I feel optimistic about people.  In general.  Enough to tuck away the Chekhovian side of my personality for a moment.