Those discussions a few weeks ago were so enlightening.  I thought Josh and I were on the very cold end of the house heat spectrum, and we’re definitely not.  I had a feeling the world contained sock-wearers and sock-endurers just because I knew that if I loved socks, chances were that there were people out there who couldn’t stand them.  But who knew the breakdown?  The specifics?

So I have more curiosity for you raised by these discussions of what is going on in our individual worlds.  Once again, this one comes from our home renovations.  Our next task is to redo the kitchen.  We were given the advice by more than one person to take our time with the decisions.  Go visit other people’s kitchens and take notes.  Clip out pictures from magazines.  Get a lot of estimates.  Spend time in various kitchen cabinetry stores.  What did we want in our dream kitchen?

We did not take said advice.  Mostly because I realized that we didn’t have a dream kitchen.  My dream kitchen is simply one with functioning appliances and nothing slowing me down or thwarting me.  I’d like some counter space.  I’d like a very good air filtering system.  I want people to hang out in the room.  Other than that, I don’t have strong feelings on anything.

We feel that way about most rooms in our house.  We don’t have a dream house in mind, unless you count the dream apartments that are all chosen due to location.  We have no strong desire to change our house around to make it our “dream house.”  We like things to be comfortable.  Pretty much nothing matches.  The decorations are almost exclusively provided by the kids.  I’m more concerned about things being neat and clean than being pretty. (A friend commented recently that my kitchen was awfully white and bleachy.)

We don’t decorate for holidays.  As much as we look at other people’s spaces and think they look great, we’d never hire an interior designer to provide some… design… to our space.  Everything is about function and comfort.  And while the two are not mutually exclusive — you can have function that is also very pretty and put-together — we’ve opted to only focus on the function.  So our house is very functional and comfortable.  But it isn’t stylish.

And our beds are unmade.

Part of me would like a house that looks put together, but I know that I wouldn’t really want it for myself but instead to appear stylish to other people.  I wouldn’t really be fooling anyone.  Plus I really hate the idea of wasting furniture or leaving it in storage.  If we own it, I want to use it, even if it doesn’t go together well.  And, again, there is that comfort thing.  I wanted a sofa that people could plop down on.

There is obviously a wide range of non-decorating to decorating, but if “one” is mismatched furniture and no art on the walls and “ten” is used an interior designer (or you are one yourself), where do you fall on the decorating/not decorating scale?  How much do you try to make things look put together and stylish?  And do you change the decorations to reflect the seasons/holidays?

The new book, Measure of Love, is coming out in April… so I can finally start giving you guys a few heads up on what you’re going to find on the pages. So we’ll start with a brief excerpt.  I placed the full excerpt on the book site because it was getting long, so there’s a link below.

MEASURE OF LOVE
by Melissa Ford

I roll over in bed and let my hand rest on one of the creases in the sheet, a tiny mountain that my fingers curl over like the legs of a giant. I am alone, so it doesn’t matter if I gather all the blankets over my body or grab the second pillow on the other side of the bed. This is one of those benefits of being single, Rachel, my body purrs silently.

Wait. Except that I’m not.

My brain slowly swims closer to consciousness, taking in the fact that light is streaming in through the uncurtained windows. I am wearing a T-shirt—several sizes too big—that advertises some pizza place in the Hamptons as well as a pair of cotton briefs that I picked up three-to- the-pack at a warehouse savings store that looked semi-sexy in the packaging but not so much in actuality on my body. The other side of the bed has a small dip in the mattress, the memory of the body that occupied the space minutes ago. And there is water running from the bathroom shower head, a light sound like paper tearing.

I open my eyes and look around the room, still half-expecting to see my familiar loft apartment, but instead find myself staring at a door. With a knob. And luxurious-by-New-York-standards plaster walls as opposed to the screen I used to wrap around my bed to create the illusion of a room. The closet door is half open, exposing the bins that line the wall holding the yoga pants I prefer to wear while I cook or write. On the floor, kicked casually into the corner of the room, is a pair of men’s jeans and size 11 lace-up black oxfords. Remnants of the pre-sex shedding of clothes.

The water in the bathroom turns off, and the sound is replaced by some off-key whistling. The sort of mindless whistling one does when they’re excited for the day, when they’re actually happy that they have a functioning alarm clock. It’s a whistle I’m currently familiar with because I’ve done it myself as recently as yesterday morning, making my way through a few bars of “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” while I made toast. I didn’t mean to do it; I just suddenly realized that the sound that resembled something off a Wham! album performed by birds was coming out of my pursed lips. Which is a long way to admit that, at this moment, my life is okay. Actually, it’s better than okay. It’s pretty damn good.

Continue reading this excerpt on the book site (but then get your bum back here because there’s more to tell/show you.)

So, if you clicked over and kept reading, you now have a sense of what has happened since you last saw Rachel.  I’m still hanging out with Rachel daily as I finish the third book, but I’ve missed sharing her with you.  Because she’s sort of ours.  I mean, yes, she exists in my brain, but Rachel is sort of the everyblogger.  And she’s friends with all of us.

So… wanna see the final cover for the new book?

I am a little giddy over the idea that I don’t have to keep these moments of Rachel Goldman’s life a secret anymore. Hopefully you will enjoy the book’s three weddings… or not weddings… not going to tell you who makes it down the aisle and who doesn’t. But I can tell you that the book explores love, friendship, and what you owe your blog readers (especially if you’re a divorce blogger who is now getting married). More little details to come soon.

So what do you think? Cringing with excitement and nervousness.

Shout out: Huge thank you to Amy Elaine for uploading it to GoodReads!

I was talking to this person who didn’t know me very well, and he started to tell me about fertility treatments.  Not his own experience, but we were talking about medical issues and the Affordable Care Act, and the topic came up.  He started telling me about fertility treatments even though I gave him the scrunched-up-nose-yeah-I-sort-of-already-know-this interruption a few times, nodding my head and trying to interject that those robot kids you see behind me are actually products of the process that you’re currently trying to tell me about.

I didn’t feel as if I needed him to know that I did fertility treatments; this was information for his sake and not mine.  But as he bulldozed over the fact that I was trying to let him know that I’m very familiar with the concept of superovulation, I stopped doing the head nodding and just listened as if the fact that women inject themselves with hormones, can you believe that, into their stomach shocked me into silence.

It was only going to get awkward if I encountered this man down the road, and somehow the topic came up again, this time giving me the space to clearly say, in song and dance, that I did fertility treatments to conceive my kids.  And even then, it would only be awkward if he remembered this conversation and asked pointedly why I didn’t do a better job of interrupting him.  Because, you know, it would have saved us at least five minutes of unnecessary explanation if I had just screamed out, “I did it!  I did it!  In the bedroom, with the syringe!”

Given him a Clue.

*******

The Smartness recently had a post about her box of sad.  I have a box of sad like that, and it’s currently in the Wolvog’s closet mostly because I don’t want to clutter my own.  It contains, amongst other things, the filled sharps box that I never turned in.  I didn’t turn it in at first because it seemed like hubris to act as if we were actually going to have these children and not end up back in the clinic.  Then the twins were here and it seemed ridiculous to schlep two children and a sharps box across town to get to the clinic and turn it in.  Then I got emotionally attached to the box.  Then it felt like it wasn’t doing any harm existing in the Wolvog’s closet, I mean, until he starts poking around in his own closet and I hear him say a long, panicked, “Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuum, why are there a bunch of dirty used needles in my closet.”

What?  Whoa!  How did those get in there?  We must have a very neat and organized drug addict burglar visiting our house… constantly.

I figure I have many years before he’s tall enough to reach that top shelf and wonder what is in that cardboard box.

Two years ago, I wrote about the time when someone needed a picture of hCG and syringe, and I was able to come to the rescue and snap one for them.  The most interesting thing was the person did not ask why I had a used bottle of hCG and a syringe in my house in the first place.  They didn’t know me well; we’re simply on a listserv together.  They mentioned they needed this picture.  I wrote them and said that I could take said picture because I have a sharps box that contains used syringes at home.  And the person said, “thank you so much!  That would be great.”

It didn’t strike me as odd at the time, in fact, I felt relieved that no questions were asked and I didn’t need to give my long or short version of my fertility history to this stranger.  But now that I reflect on it, it’s sort of odd (oddly polite?) that the person didn’t question it at all.

*******

For all the times that I’m frustrated when someone doesn’t ask or makes an assumption or doesn’t want to hear me talk about my uterus, there are equally times when I’m relieved that I’ve gotten through a conversation where the twins are just any two kids (and the person isn’t coyly asking, “oh, do twins run in your family?”) and my ovaries are the last thing on the person’s mind.  Sometimes it makes me feel like a spy in the land of the fertile, but other times, I’m just happy to be a regular woman with what others assume to be two regularly functioning ovaries and a regular uterus.

As the kids age, I blend more and more, with only the occasional new person encountered asking if the twins are natural (uh, didn’t you just hear me refer to them as robot children?  They’re as natural as Cheetos).  I don’t feel badly when I don’t reveal how they were conceived or the state of my reproductive organs; at least not when it comes to people passing through my life.

There are times when I want to use my mess as my message, as people sometimes says, and other times when I don’t really feel like talking about my mess at all.  It only gets awkward when it comes up later and people have to think back to everything they’ve said to me, wondering if they’ve slipped up and truthfully admitted how they really feel about those people who play G-d and use fertility treatments.  That?  That’s aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawkward.  But it was sort of funny too, the one time that happened.

I know there are people who never talk about their infertility at all, but for those who do, do you feel a responsibility to speak about it openly with everyone you encounter?

*******

I promise that I really didn’t choose the title solely for the way it shows up on the Twitter/Facebook RSS feed.  But once Jen told me how my titles show up with the “More Thoughts on Quitting” post, I couldn’t help but smile when I thought through, “Please Don’t Ask Stirrup Queens.”

I have been going through a distracted phase.  That’s a kind way of saying that I sit down at the computer with good intentions to get work done, and then start Googling things such as “Pitfall, Intellevision.”  And then I waste 14 minutes watching videos on YouTube of Pitfall.  I follow that up with a downloading-sample-chapters-off-of-Amazon chaser.  And reading blogs.  And writing a pointless blog post such as this one.  Truly, no one in the world is dying to read these words.  They will not change anything.  But still, I write them.  And then I notice that in 20 minutes, I have to pick up the kids from school so there’s really no point trying to get any writing done.  I might as well just play a game for 20 minutes.

And the cycle renews the next day.

I decided that I needed a goal.  5 pages a day.  20 pages a week.  You may notice that it doesn’t add up.  That’s because I’ve designated one day to be a catch-all for my Googling as well as any other small tasks that pop-up during the week.  If I write 20 pages per week, I will be finished with the book I’m writing in two months.  And if I am done in two months, I have a nice chunk of time to edit before the manuscript is due.

Telling myself to write from 9 to 3 everyday wasn’t working, but telling myself that I only have to complete 5 pages has made me hyperproductive.  In my first week of trying this, I hit 26 pages by Thursday.  I record my progress on a virtual post-it note on the left side of the screen so I can’t ignore the fact that I have something to do every day.  Just 5 pages.

Not so bad.

*******

I looked up how many blog post drafts I have.  245.  If I spread them out a bit instead of posting every single day, I could have a year’s worth of posts.  I could set them up to run and walk away from the blog for a year and still have content on here semi-daily.  That is a bizarre idea.  It’s like frozen dinners that you make before surgery so you’ll have something to eat while you’re recuperating.  Except I have no planned surgery.  Just a freezerful of frozen dinners.  I almost feel like I should invite others over, tell them to take what they wish out of the freezer.  I mean, just sitting there, those posts will get frostbite at some point… right?

*******

Mental Floss had an article recently about how many languages it’s possible for one person to know.  In other words, do our brains have a limit? Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti held the most languages (of the people listed in the article) at 40 to 72 languages.  The article says,

He had 14 which he had studied but not used, 11 in which he could have a conversation, 9 which he spoke not quite perfectly but with a perfect accent, and 30 languages (from 11 different language families) which he had totally mastered.

30 languages that he mastered!  MASTERED!  Spoke perfectly with a perfect accent?  An additional 20 that he could converse in?

And he’s not the most accomplished polyglot.  The wikipedia page on the subject lists many people — alive or dead, some that you’ll know and some you won’t — who know six or more languages to fluency.  On that page, the good cardinal only got to claim 39 languages.  But still — STILL — 39 languages?  The most accomplished seems to be Emil Krebs, who “mastered 68 languages in speech and writing and studied 120 other languages.”  Other languages.  In other words, 188 languages total.

I’m not sure I could even list 188 languages much less learn them.  To show my limitations, I started constructing a list.  I got to 49.

1. English
2. French
3. Spanish
4. Portuguese
5. Italian
6. Latin
7. Greek
8. Hebrew
9. Arabic
10. Aramaic
11. Amharic
12. Xhosa
13. Afrikaans
14. Hausa
15. Yoruba
16. Igbo
17. Norwegian
18. Swedish
19. Danish
20. Finnish
21. Icelandic
22. Dutch
23. German
24. Russian
25. Ukranian
26. Romanian
27. Polish
28. Mandarin
29. Cantonese
30. Korean
31. Japanese
32. Hindi
33. Tamil
34. Urdu
35. Farsi
36. Swahili
37. Vietnamese
38. Lao
39. Tagalog
40. Thai
41. Estonian
42. Turkish
43. Serbo-Croatian
44. Czech
45. Hungarian
46. Yiddish
47. Quechua
48. American Sign Language
49. Braille

So I could only name off the top of my head 49 languages.  I know some of these breakdown further.  Some people count classic Greek and modern Greek as knowing two languages.  Due to a lot of Scandinavian studies classes, I know Norwegian has both Nynorsk and some other form of Norwegian.  Obviously there are many forms of sign language, and I only included American Sign Language.  I wasn’t sure whether or not to add Cued Speech.  Is that a language?  I know some people say it isn’t.  But you sort of learn it as you would learn a language.  I was really on the fence there.  So yes, if you forced me to delve a bit deeper, I could probably extend it beyond 49.  But certainly not to 188.

I have a translation degree, so I obviously know another language beyond English.  I also had to pass a fluency exam in a third language to get out of a language requirement in college, though I’d argue that their definition of “fluent” and my definition of “fluent” are two different things.

My knee-jerk reaction of coveting was that I wanted to learn 188 languages too, or at least have access to a paltry 39 – 72 like the cardinal.  To always have a word for everything; I mean, you have to assume that amongst 188 languages, all emotions and ideas are covered.  But then I wondered what was lost by knowing so many languages.  Is there such a thing as “too much” when it comes to words?  And what is the tipping point?

When does knowledge of words go from enhancing to detracting from your life?

And can you think up 188 languages?  Can we even collectively brainstorm the names of 188 languages starting from this jumping off point of 49 languages?

I paid the Wolvog $5 to build me a pretty new website for all of my books.  He subsidizes me because I pay for his computer classes and give him our old technology.  Click on the picture below to go to the site:

Isn’t it lovely? I’ll be uploading teasers and release information and book club questions over there now that the release date for Measure of Love is closer. As well as thoughts on constructing sideways sequels (harder than I thought), or perhaps a what-not-to-do about giving characters lives that you know nothing about. So far, in taking two side characters and making them main characters in the sequel — obviously something I hadn’t considered when I gave them careers and such in the first book — I have had to pick the brains of a producer at the Daily Show, the atelier designer for a fashion house, and two doctors in order to construct something believable.  Damn it’s been a lot of work.

And I also feel a little odd whenever I call someone to talk about a character as if they’re a real person.  I mean, all these people are cognizant that they are helping me with a novel, but it’s still embarrassing to talk about your characters as if they’re living.  It makes me want to constantly remind people that I’m speaking to that I know it’s make-believe.  Plus, it’s also a little embarrassing to be sitting and talking to two doctors knowing their job is to save people’s lives and my job is to make up stuff.

Isn’t that a weird job?  Hi, I’m Melissa.  I’m a professional maker-upper.

*******

As a side note, I ended up buying all of John Green’s books when I went to the bookstore last weekend.  I shortlisted everything by Cathleen Schine because she definitely fit the bill (but I was already buying three books at the time so she will have to wait a bit).  Later in the week, I added Daniel Handler to the to-read list because he also seemed sufficiently unfussy.  I put on Enders Game and a bunch of others… the list started to get very long, which is a good thing.  I also started looking down the Printz list, noticing that a lot of books that fit into this category also seemed to win the Printz prize (though not all books that win the Printz prize I would ever describe as YA, so that is interesting).  Just wanted to give you an update on my reading list just in case… you know… you also had been looking for unfussy, straightforward storytelling books.

*******

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:

• “We Found Our Son in the Subway” (NY Times)
• “I’m More Than Just a Uterus” (The Road Less Travelled)
• “A Dawning” (It Is What It Is (Or Is It?)
• “Taking Charge of My Infertility” (An Embarrassment of Good Fortune)
• “Book Stoppage” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Mina!
• “On Being Pretty” (A Really Good Idea)
• “Not With a Whimper” (The Smartness)

Okay, now my choices this week.

What They Never Tell You has a post about gaining perspective while on a hiatus from her blog.  She writes, “I’ve come to realize how different the world looks after IVF, after three failed attempts, after finding out that a loved one has cancer.  It would be easy to get down and allow myself to wallow in all of what has taken place.”  It’s about finding those quiet moments of goodness amongst all the hard ones, and then sitting in those moments to catch your breath.

By the Brooke has a post about how people believe that yes, babies may be born still, but they’ll be born to other people.  She writes of our optimism bias: “But once something happens to you that knocks your whole world off-kilter, once you witness how quickly your carefully laid plans can crumble into nothing, once you come home to an empty crib and you have no baby to put in it, well.  Your expectations are different.”  It’s a truthful, thought-provoking post.

Finding My New Normal has a post about reconnecting with a friend who left before the loss of her child and has returned still expecting the same person.  As she describes the person she used to know, friends who have only known the author since her loss were confused.  She writes, “As she was walking down memory lane, sharing stories about fun times and crazy moments I could see looks of wonder on the faces of my newer friends. I could tell that they didn’t recognize the ‘me’ that was being described in the stories. In a way, neither did I. That person seems so far away now.”  The loss of her son divides her life into a time before and a time after, and it’s a gorgeous post about what happens when those two sides meet.

Lastly, Serenity Now has a post about gratitude for the child she has instead of focusing on the child she doesn’t.  She says something very profound: “I’ve been so focused on how much it hurts that we just got lucky that I’ve ignored the fact we got really, really lucky in the first place.”  Isn’t that amazing?  I love her focus as well as the image she presents at the end of the post.

The roundup to the Roundup: New author site.  These are the books I got last week.  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 1st and March 8th) 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.