Many years ago, Josh and I started a tradition of buying a new ring every time I complete a large project or reach a milestone, and I wear it until the next new ring.  We celebrated our 11th anniversary last weekend by stealing away for a few hours, during which time, Josh bought me a ring to celebrate the new book Taking Seconds (he told me that I couldn’t have the ring for The Other Man until I finish the manuscript in June).

It’s made out of an old, used Winchester bullet casing. (I know, not exactly the most obvious choice for a pacifist, but I like that something potentially destructive was repurposed into something pretty.)  The word “mischief” is stamped around the side.  And then on top (upside down in the photo above), there is an antique button with an interlocking monogram spelling out BLS with a crown above it.

If you know what BLS stands for, I’d love to know.

And if you don’t know what BLS stands for, I’d love an amusing answer I can feed people whenever they inquire about the ring.

Best answer wins.

Josh — I love you.

Equal to the feelings I get when something is missing, I cannot stand hearing a song somewhere and not being able to place how I know it.  My current obsession is with a commercial for the Silver Linings Playbook — not the one that has “Ho Hey” from the movie in it, but the one where they play a popular sports tune in the background (the one you hear punctuated by shouts).  What the hell is the name of that song?  I’ve been watching late night television with Shazam ready to go, but of course, it hasn’t been on again for days nor has anyone uploaded a version of this commercial to the Web.

Um… do you know what song I’m talking about?

Shazam was made for a person like me, a person who used to walk around humming bits of a song for various people, begging them to figure out how I know said song.  I did that once at a rest stop.  It was a few bars from a Shins song, and I was so desperate to know how I knew the song I had heard playing in the bathroom (why were they piping the Shins into the bathroom?) that I first asked other people at the sinks and then asked random people standing by a vending machine in the lobby and finally figured it out by myself once I got to the car, much to my relief.  Shazam removes all the awkward interactions of yesteryear and replaces it with a simple head nod in the frozen foods section of the food store when you hear a muzak version of Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus.”

What I really need is a person-based version of Shazam, one in which I could discreetly point my phone’s camera at a person and have it tell me how I know the person.  It could just connect to their Facebook page, and based on knowing their name or where they grew up or where they went to camp, I would be able to figure out how they fit into my life.

I know what you’re thinking: why don’t you just ask the person why they look so familiar?

Because the person currently in question is this random woman I saw at Rosh HaShanah services, and she looked at me with absolutely no recognition and then got swept up in the crowd several feet ahead of me chasing her child.  It would have been odd (even odder than humming a few bars of a Shins song to strangers standing by a vending machine) to scream out to her, “how do I know you?  I have a strong memory of field hockey tied to you but that’s iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.”

I have no clue how I know that woman, but I am positive that I know that woman.

I didn’t even do a Poor Man’s Shazam — discreetly snapping a picture of the woman, and then showing it to someone who might know her name.  Which would be anyone Jewish based on the laws of Jewish geography.

So if anyone could design said app, a Shazam-like product that would allow people to immediately remember how they know one another or where their lives overlapped in the past, it would be great appreciated.  Extra points if you could peruse the database sideways; meaning, once you find the person and have identified them, you usually suddenly remember all these other people from that time in your life that you’ve forgotten about.  It would be fantastic if you could then look them up and see how they’re doing.  Sort of like Facebook… actually…

What half-forgotten group of people (or person) would you love to see in a database like that?

Samantha Brick, who was vilified this year for her article announcing her beauty to the world had a new article in the Daily Mail this week recounting her struggles with infertility.  She is — if nothing else — deeply, brutally honest, holding nothing back, which sometimes is the way things need to be said in order to make the point heard.  I was struck by this passage:

In the meantime friends continued to get pregnant, and their gleeful news – these days emblazoned all over social media networks – is unutterably difficult to witness. You acquire a poker face when friends ask how things are going. I learned early on that when they inquire, they’re not actually that interested in the answer. If they’re fortunate enough to be a mother, it is awkward for them if you dare share the feelings of longing and inadequacy that dog you through fertility investigations. If they are staunchly child-free, then any talk that is too emotional or sentimental compels them to change the subject.

The comments are what you’d expect on the article (hint: don’t read them) and the end of the article veers very sharply into territory that feels snatched down from a vision board.  (Before you spear me for knocking positive thinking, I am a fan of reframing how you view an event or the world as well as how you process information.  For me, that work comes after the fact vs. beforehand.  But you should know that I’m also fairly pessimistic in general so feel free to ignore me.)  But the middle of the article unpacks the way infertility affects friendships.  I thought it was an interesting read.

*******

Once again, it’s Black Friday and once again, nothing I buy is on sale.  Is Jon Ronson’s new book massively discounted for the day?  Is there a special price for the final House DVD so we can finish off the series?  Are my favourite bands offering their songs for half price on iTunes?  No?  Then Black Friday, I dismiss you.

I really do wish that Kindle would do a 24-hour book frenzy where every book in the Kindle store would be $2 and you could purchase as many as you want.  I could see myself developing a finger injury from all the button pushing if that ever happened.

*******

I found my dream house on Hooper’s Island.

*******

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 Holidays” (Happiness at the Core)
• “Would it Be Worse If He Was Older?” (My Bubba)
• “The End” (The Future Fords)
• “The Roller Coaster of IVF” (Nuts in May)
• “Coping with Infertility, Loss, and Winter Holidays” (Resolve)
• “Sometimes? Life is Hard to Define” (Too Many Fish to Fry)
• “How Can We Educate the Public about Infertility?” (Too Many Fish to Fry)
• “Creating Family” (Serenity Now!)
• “Untitled” (Infertile Myrtle)
• “Work Sucks (I Know)” (Dear Finley)
• “Transfer Day” (The A.R.T. of Baby Making)
• “Private Pain in the Public Sector” (Still Standing Magazine)

Okay, now my choices this week.

If You Don’t Stand for Something has a moving post about death and the way each family deals with loss.  She writes, “If someone apologizes to me for “my loss”, I feel like a fraud because it’s really Chris’s loss. Honestly, it’s my loss by proxy, by marriage. It’s like being thrown on stage for a play but you don’t know the lines and you are left standing there awkwardly center stage under the hot lights. There was this moment where I didn’t know what to do because I don’t know how their family deals with death.”  In other words, she knows how her family mourns a death, but when you partner with someone, you sign up for mourning a death on their family’s terms.  I thought it was enlightening.

Scrambled Eggs has a post about how infertility silently affects her marriage that has a deeply frank ending, “But I know I’m too insecure to do that. And he is to kind and loyal to leave. And so we continue to go through the motions and pretend everything is ok, night after uncomfortable night.”  It is a gorgeous, wistful post.

Lastly, Telling a Different Story has returned to tell her story.  She’s an old blogger with a new space, and she travels through time with a recent post writing about the joy of discovering she is pregnant and then moving to the next page: “Pregnant at least 7 times I could tell this story 7 different ways.  All with the same ending.  I do not become a parent at the end.”  It’s an amazing post; a really powerful post.

The roundup to the Roundup: A post about infertility by Samantha Brick.  I wish e-books were discounted for the holidays so I could buy myself gifts.  I found my dream house.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between November 16th and November 23rd) 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.

I’ve never really understood the impulse behind telling people what you like in the way that Oprah shouts about her favourite things.  Why should I care that Oprah likes it?  I mean, I’m not Oprah.  Perhaps if I was Oprah, it would make sense to know what Oprah likes, but I’m Melissa and unless she’s doing an episode called Melissa’s Favourite Things, I can pretty much tell you that 90% of the stuff she’s talking about will not interest me in the least.

And yet here I am writing a post about cool shit I found and things I just plain like.

I thought it would be fun to round-up a list of things that people love as we all (well, all of us in the US) drive and sit through Thanksgiving.  So if you’re looking for a distraction during the meal, feel free to jump into the comment section and peruse other people’s favourite things.  Or add your own.

So here are mine.

Mary McCartney’s Food

I am so in love with this cookbook that I’ve considered sleeping with it, tucking my arm around the cover and dreaming of her English pea soup.  The best books always come into your life by kismet.  We had gone into Books for Cooks to see what they were serving in the cafe, and as I was passing a shelf, I pulled a random book out to illustrate some point for the ChickieNob.  But it turned out to be a vegetarian cookbook!  Signed by the author!  With at least 3/4ths of the recipes looking like something I’d want to eat.  So we’ve been cooking our way through the book.  I think my favourite so far has been the Hearty Quinoa and White Bean Soup (Mary posted the recipe here).  I substituted stelline for the quinoa, but I’m going to try the grain in a future batch.  If you’re looking for a cookbook for a vegetarian, you should check out this one because it’s gorgeous.

Robbie Boyd Band

So we were walking Portobello Road, looking for thimbles (please don’t ask), and we heard this guy playing.

And though the ChickieNob and I usually like our music to be just on this side of noise, we were absolutely smitten with the song, dropped money in his cup, and took his card.

When we got home, we bought two of his EPs on iTunes and put them together to create one disc (Autumn’s Flown and Spring Generation).  And now we play this disc non-stop.  Adore is too small a word to convey the feeling in our kitchen on a Friday night, when the three of us are cooking dinner together before Josh gets home, and we have “Spring Generation” blaring and we’re all dancing and dropping sprigs of parsley on the floor (well, the dropping springs of parsley part perhaps is not loved).  Their music makes us so happy.  For the ChickieNob, it’s the first band she’s fallen in love with since the Beastie Boys.  Though she cannot bring herself to use the term “my boys” choosing instead to refer to the Robbie Boyd Band as “my jangly guitars.”

And if I had to choose a song to convey the feeling of Taking Seconds and The Other Man in musical form, it would be “I Won’t Let You Go.”  In fact, I’ve been listening to it in the morning before I start writing.  This was the song that he was playing on Portobello Road which made the ChickieNob and I fall in love with the band:

Mighty Optical Illusions

Who doesn’t love optical illusions?  Pretty much the only type of people I can think of who don’t are zombies.  So if you aren’t a zombie, you’ll probably love Mighty Optical Illusions too.  No?  Then perhaps you are part of the walking dead and you just didn’t know it yet.  If you “like” MOI (that’s Mighty Optical Illusions for those in the know) on Facebook, cool optical illusions pop up in your news feed.  Makes me so happy.

Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling

I know there are some who haven’t loved her new book, but I thought it was incredible.  She manages to take a cast of dozens of unlikeable people and make you care about each and every one of them.  It’s a deep exploration of cause and effect, with each action leading to the entire community coming down like well-stacked dominoes.  It was a book I felt like I needed to own vs. borrow from the library; meaning, I will re-read this one again.

The Marrying Kind by Ken O’Neill

The Marrying Kind is unique in that it makes me laugh hysterically and in the next moment, without any schoolmarmish qualities, it makes me think.  “Laugh hysterically” is sort of an understatement.  I tried to read a section of it to Josh while I had tears steaming down my face, and all the words came out as gah gah gah and he had to keep calmly saying, “Melissa, I can’t understand you.  You need to calm down.”  And that’s a pretty amazing book if in reading it, you can’t calm down.  If I had to compare him to someone, it would be David Sedaris (especially the era of the Fuck-it Bucket) meets Carrie Bradshaw and they have a neurotic love-child.

Special K Cereal

I feel the need to qualify the brand “Special K” with “cereal” just because I wouldn’t want you to think that ketamine is my go-to meal.  I feel like it’s a cereal that few think about, that the eye passes over as it travels the shelf in search of Cheerios or Rice Krispies or Chex.  But Special K deserves another look.  It is so delicious and high in protein.  I eat it at least once a day.  It feels sad to admit that.  But it’s true.  And it makes me happy.

Our Groceries

Our Groceries is a free app for the iPhone where you can have the same shopping list on multiple phones.  Our family is obsessed with it, and the twins know to add anything they see we need to the list (and to capitalize each word as if they’re writing a title because I like the list to look orderly and it doesn’t look orderly if some people write in all lowercase and some people capitalize).  We have ours broken down into sections of the grocery store, and when you put the product (such as Special K) in your basket, you tap the entry and it gets crossed out.  And when they’re all crossed out, you tap “clear all” and the list is blank.  Plus, before opening the app, you can see how many items are on the list.  So if it’s zero, you don’t need to stop by the store.  But if you see a 1 or more on the app icon, you can click on it to see what we’re out of and whether it’s worth swinging by the food store.  Plus, it shows up on my phone AND Josh’s phone at the same time, so I can literally watch him walk around the food store and put stuff in the basket and then text him creepy messages such as: “couldn’t help but notice that you just put some sweet potatoes in your cart.  Heavy breathing.  Heavy breathing.  Heavy breathing.”

Martha Stewart Notebooks

If a person could fall in love with a notebook — and I think it’s possible — I would be in a relationship with this orange Martha Stewart notebook from Staples.  The only problem I have is that I thought it would be great to have lots of orange notebooks.  But perhaps I should have gone for a wider range of colours because now I can’t tell the notebooks apart and I don’t want to mark up the covers.  Still — perfect sized notebooks for individual projects.

Kalso Earth Solar Shoes

I have no idea why they’re listed at $130 because I paid under $40 for my pair in the store.  Most comfortable shoes ever.

What are your favourite things?  It feels so good to list them.  And who knows, maybe you’ll tell me about a new band or book or app I would have never found otherwise.

[Melissa clinks on her glass in order to get everyone’s attention and then begins to speak.]

Welcome back everyone.  I am so glad that you’re here at the fourth annual virtual ALI Thanksgiving meal – an online meal that is a yearly tradition before we scatter to our respective actual Thanksgiving tables.  Is it held during American Thanksgiving week instead of Canadian or another country’s thankfulness celebration?  Yes, and I apologize for that, but at least I didn’t hold it on American Thanksgiving so hopefully everyone will feel comfortable participating regardless of where you live.

[Polite laughter from the non-American contingency while they secretly think about how Americans flood the Internet with Thanksgiving posts this week.]

The Thanksgiving myth is that people who had nothing more in common than simple humanness stopped looking at each other’s differences on this day in history and sat down at the table together for a meal.  It’s a meal about survival; about going into the winter knowing the odds are stacked against you and still pausing for a moment to think about the here and now.

And truly, what better myth to describe our own virtual Thanksgiving table, where donor gamete bloggers are sitting next to those living child-free after infertility, and the adoption bloggers are seated next to those starting their first IUI.  We have nothing more in common than our humanness and a desire to build our families.  Some have crossed the river and are standing on the opposite bank with the families they struggled to build.  Others are still wading in the water.  And some are left on the original bank, not able yet to move ahead or deciding to stay out of the water.  We are straight or gay, old or young, men or women.  And yet, we place aside our differences – wait, not place aside: we learn from our differences, we utilize our differences – to create community.  We all have the means to support one another.  It is as simple as a word, a kind gesture.

I would like to start off the festivities by making a toast: to thankfulness.

I say this every year, and I’ll say it again: I will always be incredibly grateful to this online community, a community that has grown to more than 3000 people currently, not to mention those who have slipped away from our community over the years.  It is difficult to put into words how it feels to know that there are people around the world connected to you emotionally.  You are tied to their story and they are tied to yours and together, those threads intertwine to make a web strong enough to hold all of us who walk over it.  It’s not a spider web meant to ensnare; it’s more the netting below the trapeze, there to catch you and cushion your landing in case you fall.

I asked all of you to bring a dish to this multi-culti potluck meal – there is no need to stick to traditional Thanksgiving fare when you have such a diverse table spanning the entire globe.  Please share with everyone at the table what you brought and why.

This year, I brought mushroom stuffing.  I make it with a crusty French bread that I learned how to make when we were in our first round of treatments and Josh hinted that I needed to get a hobby to distract myself.  So I’m placing my dish of stuffing on the table.  Feel free to dive into the main dishes or nosh on the appetizers or skip all the healthy stuff and head straight for dessert.  There are no rules here. 

So what did you bring and what do you want to say to the community?

And please, start eating as everyone is introducing their dish.  We don’t want the food to get cold and there are so many of us at this table.  Thank you so much for coming, and I’m going to carry the warmth of this meal with me for the rest of this week.  In fact, I just might print out this post and the comments below and carry it with me in my pocket to my actual Thanksgiving meal to have all of you there and feel free to do the same if you need the fortification or simply want the company of a few thousand bloggers at your table.