There was something horribly, irreparably wrong with Galadriel the fish.

Her (er… his?) body completely still, floating at the top of the fishbowl.  Gills closed.

The Wolvog discovered her lifeless body when he ran upstairs after school to check on her, as he does every day after school.  Only this time, he ran into the kitchen crying and told me that something was wrong and I had to come upstairs quickly.  I climbed the stairs silently cursing the life cycle.

The ChickieNob came upstairs with her friend, and the four of us stood around the fishbowl while I drew in breath to start explaining to them that even deeply loved fish won at Purim carnivals are not exempt from the circle of life, ashes to ashes and dust to dust.  And that is when the ChickieNob’s friend, let’s call her Brenda, smiled beatifically and said, “this is a very very good thing.”

I paused, waiting for her to break the news to the twins that Galadriel was going down the toilet tonight.  She beamed at them.  “Your fish is about to have babies.”

“Really?” the ChickieNob breathed, breaking into a smile.

“Really?” I asked, doubtfully.

“Oh, yes, this has happened to me all the time.  Sometimes, when a fish is about to give birth, she just lies down on her side like that, very still, for two or sometimes even three days.  And then, one morning, there will be another fish in the tank.”

“Really,” I repeated, my hand on my phone.

“It’s going to be great.  You guys, you’re about to get a little baby fish!”

Were we.

So I sent the kids downstairs to have a snack and then crouched in my bedroom’s bathroom, the farthest point in the house from the kitchen.  I closed the door and called my friend, Brenda’s mother.  “What’s up?” she asked immediately since I had just texted her moments earlier to tell her that pick up had gone fine and we were in my house.

“I have a fish situation.”  I explained Galadriel’s state to her and what her daughter had said.  There was a pause and then my thoughts were confirmed.  “Mel, your fish is dead.  I mean, do you know how many times we’ve replaced her fish?”

“That’s what I thought,” I hissed.  “Are you meaning to tell me that you go out and replace the dead fish and then get a bunch of babies?”

“Oh.  No.  Not always.  Sometimes the mother fish eats her babies so it’s just the mother fish replaced.”

“How the hell am I supposed to find a goldfish with these markings?” I asked.

“You don’t.  You just get any goldfish.  And then tell the kids that pregnancy changed her.”

I hung up and called Josh.  “We have a fish situation.”  I filled him in on the state of Galadriel as well as the fact that our kids were currently in the kitchen eating nilla wafers to celebrate the impending birth of their new fish babies.  “We can go two ways.  We can lie and replace the fish tonight, but you’ve got to do this tonight because I don’t want a dead fish floating in the house all day tomorrow.  Or we can just give them the cold hard facts of life.”

We opted to ruin their little worlds and make them mourn the death of their pet.  Not because we’re too lazy to go to the pet store (though, I have to admit that this was not the week for a pet store run) but because they needed to learn how to deal with death.  It’s a part of life.  And we didn’t sugar coat it for them when both of their great-grandmothers died.  We told it to them straight.  They not only deserved to know the truth about their pet, but as a pet owner and a pet lover (I mean, kids who love pets; not people who make love to pets), they needed to know that the love didn’t have an end point.  Love is not only about celebrating moments in life, but it is about remembering in death; about still holding the person — or fish — in your heart after they’re gone.  They needed to experience this stage of the life cycle too even though it meant our evening was going to suck.

“You need to say kaddish,” I told Josh.  “My dad used to say kaddish over my fish before he flushed the toilet.”

“No one prepared me for this,” Josh told me.  “This was not in the parenting handbook; kaddish over fish.”

I told him that I was going to wait to tell them until Brenda went home.  So I gave them two more hours to enjoy the idea that they were about to become the parents to many fish babies (“You may even get up to 10 babies!” was overheard) while I simultaneously planted the idea that something might be very very wrong with Galadriel.  “Let’s wait and see.”

Which meant that I needed to send the Wolvog upstairs to practice his guitar next to a dead fish as if nothing was wrong.

(The Wolvog, many years in the future: “And there was this one time, when I was eight, when my mother totally knew the fish was dead but she still made me go practice my guitar next to it.  She’s a monster.”)

I’m sorry, you guys.  And by you guys, I mean the ChickieNob and Wolvog reading this in the future.  I’m sorry I let you believe Brenda even a little bit, but I also didn’t want to say anything in front of her and ruin her world.  I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you once I was certain that Galadriel was dead.  I’m sorry that I didn’t replace the fish and buy you a few more days/weeks/months/years of innocence.  But mostly I’m just sorry that I had to break your hearts and tell you the awful truth.

Because death really is an awful truth.

Rest easy, Galadriel, our fishy friend

The Wolvog was having trouble sleeping, and I could tell that he was on the verge of tears.  We climbed into the glider so we could talk quietly while we rocked.  He finally admitted that he was now scared of the dark because of Zork.  You see, he was frightened that he would be eaten by a Grue.

“Well, Grues don’t exist,” I told him.  “The makers of the game made them up.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

“Because I’m an expert on magical creatures, like I sort of have a PhD in magical creatures.  So I know which ones exist and which ones are totally fake.  And Grues are fake.”

“Oh.”

What I didn’t tell him was that unicorns are so.totally.real.

*******

If you could have one imaginary creature as a pet, which would you choose and why?

Even though I’m fairly anti-bird, I think I’d go with a phoenix.  I don’t do well with goodbyes, and I would never have to say goodbye to a phoenix because it would keep regenerating after each combustion.  Plus, our living room is red, and I think a phoenix would look pretty in there against the red walls.

So I’m still trying out other RSS reader options.  Netvibes would be great if it consistently pulled in my feeds.  I’m holding off judgment for right now since I’m sure they’re swamped and weren’t prepared for the deluge of new users.  I’m also trying out Feedly, which pulls in feeds as quickly as Google Reader BUT I’ve only used it on the phone.  Currently the app pulls in the feeds via Google Reader, though they say the site will switch over to their own replicated RSS feed grabber once Google Reader closes permanently.

I’m glad I’m not alone in still caring about blogs.  I like Twitter and Facebook, and they definitely fill a niche.  But blogs fill a very different niche, one where I like to spend the bulk of my online time.

More than one person wrote to ask if the closing of Google Reader would affect producing the Friday Blog Roundup.  Hells no.  There will still be a Roundup week after week after week.  It’s not going anywhere.

*******

I knew this was going to be a fairly stressful week, workwise, so on Tuesday, I picked up the kids from school and drove toward the city in order to restock my stash of Canfield’s Diet Chocolate Fudge soda.  There is one store in the area that still sells it, a place I’ve nicknamed “Island of Forgotten 1980s Food.”  I’m not sure if they are selling food that has been there since the 1980s or food that is still being manufactured and yet no other store has carried it since the 1980s, but I figure that either possibility is fine when it comes to diet soda.  That stuff doesn’t rot, right?

So we drove about a half hour under the pretense that we were picking up other things at the store because who wants to admit aloud that they’re driving that far for chocolate soda?  Still, when we entered, the twins said, “so we should probably get the big cart so you have space for all your soda.”  And then I pretended again that we were there for things other than soda.  And they repeated that we should get the big cart for all my soda.

We entered the soda aisle and it was CRAMMED FULL of Dr. Brown’s.  Dr. Brown’s were EVERYWHERE.  It looked like a virus.  There were six-packs of Dr. Brown’s cherry soda on top of the Diet Cokes.  And there were big bottles of Dr. Brown’s root beer blotting out the Orange Crush.  Everywhere you turned, tucked into every crevice of the aisle, choking out all other soda, were three billion extra bottles and cans of Dr. Brown’s.  Listen, I like Dr. Brown’s as much as the next woman, but you couldn’t see any other drink due to the Dr. Brown’s that was choking out the beverage selection.

I started taking apart the aisle, pulling out the Dr. Brown’s to see if my soda was hidden behind the towering wall of cream soda cans. (I swear, the six-packs were multiplying while we were there, building a soda wall as if we were in Minecraft.)  But the store was completely out of Canfield’s Diet Chocolate Fudge.  And when I asked an employee about it, she told me that maybe I wanted to try something from the Dr. Brown’s selections instead.  They must be popular, the woman told me, because there were so many of them.  This was right before she was crushed by a swelling wave of Cel-ray.

If I am cranky, it is because I am without my soda.

Because someone over-ordered Dr. Brown’s and now they don’t have room for my drink.

We didn’t need the big cart.

What food/candy/drink do you miss most from the 1980s?  I bet you that this store carries it.

*******

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:

• “Infertility Junk Bingo” (The Smartness)
• “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” (A Separate Life)
• “Let’s Make a Documentary” (Silent Sorority)
• “The 10K Surrogate Abortion Scandal and the Angles Missed by the News” (The Smartness)
• “Talking to Children in Our Family about Adoption Part 1: The Booklet” (Funny Little Pollywogs)
• “A Story that Begged Me to Write It Down” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, St. Elsewhere!
• “Tired” (Project Progeny)
• “Forgiving the World” (Lavender Luz)
• “The Heart of Life is Good” (One Thousand Single Days)
• “Our Eulogies to Ree” (Jump Over the Rainbow – It Won’t Rain Forever)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Torthúil has a post looking forward to this upcoming year.  Her workplace asks her to fill out an intention form for the next year, and her post explores the far-reaching side effects of infertility.  She admits, “I want to be a parent and I’m willing to take on ART and its risks, and whatever else the journey might bring. I’m not going to change my mind about that. But still, when it comes down to actually saying that my professional life is no longer priority number one, I feel some discord.”  It’s a situation I know a lot of people in the community have struggled with; how to balance family building with all the other parts of life affected by the schedule and emotional drain of treatments or adoption.

An Unwanted Path has a beautiful post about a baby she lost four years ago.  She writes, “Whenever I mention my losses, it happens. People tell me to move on, remind me how lucky I am, or they ignore my mention, or worse — they get silent as if to say, “You’re not over that yet?”  No. I’m not over that yet.”  It is a post about balancing the idea of life continuing on without forgetting the past.

A Woman My Age has a very moving post about the process of losing her mother.  I cried when I read, “I’m back to that space when she first had a stroke and the first thing on my mind in the morning was her and the last thought I had before going to sleep was her.”  She captured this familiar thought so perfectly, that bookending.   It’s a really important read.

Lastly, The Great Big IF sums up her current state in one word: sad.  It begins: “I am surrounded by good news and other people’s hope. It should wash over me like a contagion and I should revel in the fact that new life is being celebrated everywhere I turn. Except that I am not in the mood to celebrate. Not anymore.”  It contains the vivid image of her 50-pound heart, the simple truth of sadness.

The roundup to the Roundup: Still trying out Google Reader replacement options.  What food/drink/candy do you miss from the 1980s?  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 8th and March 15th) 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.

Last night felt like march of the Google Reader zombies, as blog readers went out into the vast Internet in search of RSS feed reading brains.

I have to admit that when I read the news, I thought more about the subtext than the actuality.  I mean, listen, I’ve already switched over to Netvibes.  It took all of 5 minutes to download my Google Reader this morning and move it over there (though I couldn’t get it to work last night due to the insane traffic).

Feedly looks like a good option too, though I worry since they have built their site around a functioning Google Reader (even though they say there will be a seamless transition).  Plus I didn’t want to log into Google within another site since that gives access to my entire Google world.  Newsblur turned out not to be such a great option for me because the free version is limited to 64 blog feeds.  I looked into reading blogs via MacMail (you can’t anymore) or Outlook (was going to be more trouble than it was worth as well as limiting).  If push came to shove, I would go back to what I did before I started using Google Reader which was that I had a big list of blogs that I read, and I clicked down them once a day, opening each to see if there was a new post.  With that method, I was planning to drop anything that wasn’t a personal blog with the exception of Mental Floss and BlogHer.

So, you see, I knew that I would keep reading blogs.

The question was, would you?  And if you weren’t reading blogs, would you still write one?

That’s what I mean when I say that I was more focused on the subtext rather than the logistics.  I felt the message closing Google Reader sent was that Google believes no one reads blogs anymore.  Or few people read blogs.  That most people consume content via other sources, and if they read blogs at all, it’s through links on Facebook or Twitter vs. having blog loyalty where you read every post (mostly) on a site.

It felt very much like this one year in childhood when all of my friends announced that we weren’t going to play with our Playmobil figures anymore because Playmobil was lame.  It was for babies.  I wasn’t anywhere close to being ready to give up Playmobil, and one of my friends secretly wasn’t either, so we moved our epic games to our two houses and I continued to play Playmobil for a little while.  But I went from Playmobil 5 days per week to maybe once a week.  But then she folded to the pressure too, and now I was in this limbo state of wanting to play Playmobil very badly (after all, I had the knight set with the pure white horse!) — of NEEDING imaginative play — and no one would play Playmobil with me.  I had to choose between being with my friends or being alone and playing Playmobil and feeling like crap about myself because I had been told that what I wanted to do was babyish.

Last night felt as if Google was the alpha kid telling all of us that blogs are lame.  And I knew that a large chunk of people would follow the alpha kid and agree, blogs are lame.  And some of us would be like my single friend who stuck by me for a bit in the sense that a few of us would still be reading and writing blogs, though fewer than before.  But just as I needed the imaginative play of Playmobil and couldn’t get that creativity-stretching workout from playing video games or hanging out at the mall, I also knew that I needed blogs.

I needed to write my own and I needed to read yours.

There were the immediate fears — no one is going to write or read anymore.  There were the long-term fears — what will happen to all my friends who use Blogger as their software since it sounds like that could one day be on the chopping block too.  There were the even longer-term fears — all social media options out there could disappear in a puff of smoke at any time, leaving the users with no ground beneath them.

The reality is that as much as we treat the Internet like a brick-and-mortar social space, it really isn’t.  We are building relationships in spaces that are virtual, and their virtuality means that they don’t really exist hence how they can be removed at any time.  You can amass 3000 connections on Twitter, but if Twitter decides to close your account or end their company, those connections disappear.  The same with Facebook.  The same with every social media site.  I’ve connected with hundreds of bloggers in my Google Reader, built relationships with most of those blogs that I read.  Google Reader disappearing has the potential to end those hundreds of relationships that I’ve built over 7 loyal years of blog reading.

Isn’t that a scary thought?

I went to bed feeling depressed BY my reaction to the closing of Google Reader.  I was upset with myself for caring so much.  And I was upset by the message sent by the closure because it’s the truth: people are consuming information faster and shallower.  So many are moving towards Twitter or Facebook as their primary form of communication, using it to replace blogging.  And it’s a shallow form of communication — it’s the difference between people calling out to each other as they run past (Twitter) and a sit down conversation (blogs).  And as I thought about the direction we’re heading, walking around with phones in our hands and glass on our faces in order to consume more and more and more, faster and faster and faster… well, the whole thing just made me slip into a Holden Caulfield-like depression.  That moment when you step back and examine humanity and don’t really like what you see.

What I am really worried about is impermanence, the fleeting nature of the Internet.  I don’t read blogs with my brain; I read them with my heart.  I care about the people who write them.  I don’t want the threads tying us to each other to be snapped just because a company decides to discontinue a product.  But that is what will happen on some level.  Some of us will continue on to NetVibes or Feedly or however you choose to consume blogs.  And some people will take this as a sign to jump ship in terms of reading and writing, just as my friends did in my youth when someone declared Playmobil lame.  I wonder how many more people really needed that imaginative play too but denied themselves it just because of that message given by the alpha kid.

And today it’s blogs that the alpha kid is declaring lame.  Tomorrow it could be Facebook or Twitter or whenever you’ve built those relationships.  We’ve built all those relationships not in sand — even sand feels more stable than this — but in the ether.

We’ve literally built castles in the air.

Now that I’ve experienced this connection, I’ve come to need this connection.

Because I can admit this freely: I need to read and write blogs.

Dear Google:

I am one of those loyal users you wrote about when you made the announcement tonight that you’re closing Google Reader.  I check it about… well… let’s be honest, I waste a lot of work time so I probably check no fewer than 20 times per day.  Sometimes I leave it open and jump back to it to see if anyone has posted.  Sometimes Google Reader is the hour I look forward to at the end of the day where I can catch up on my friend’s lives.

Closing Google Reader down hasn’t taken away those friendships; but you’ve made communication that much harder.  The Blogosphere is not like a brick-and-mortar town where we can walk between houses easily and look out our windows to see if someone is home.  We rely on RSS feeds to let us know that someone has posted a blog update.  If not, their words often float away into the ether, unread.

RSS feeds have let me know that someone’s child has been born or that someone’s child has died.  It’s been the way we’ve known to celebrate with a blogger or circle the wagons.  It is the fastest way to know that someone has said something, and in this community, that update tends to be important.  At least, it is to us.

And yes, there are other ways that I intake blogs — Facebook links or Tweets or random surfing — but none of those exist on my time schedule.  If I don’t log into those sites — those sites that move too quickly sometimes — I miss those blog updates.  But Google Reader was always ready for me, sitting there waiting until I was ready to read.

I have several hundred blogs in my Reader.  I have several thousand blog posts bookmarked.  I have 2,200 subscribers to my blog.  I know that you’re looking at all that as just numbers — you’ve made it clear that Google Reader just isn’t where it’s at financially for your company so you’re dropping the dead weight — but those aren’t numbers to me.  Those numbers are just placeholders for actual people who are actual writers, recording their feelings and life’s ups and downs.  I really want to connect with them.  I want to hear them, and I want to be heard.  In a world that is growing increasingly fragmented, that is so important.

Please don’t take this away.

Sincerely,

Melissa

Lifehacker has already outlined how to move your feeds, and I’ll do one of these options this week.  If you have another service you can recommend, please let me know too.  I would love to hear what people use beyond Google Reader.

I can promise you this right now: I am not going to stop reading you just because Google Reader is closing down.  Please don’t stop writing.