Would it be cool if I started a blog about you?  I won’t give your name (though I’ll provide enough identifying pieces of information that everyone will know it’s you).  In this blog, I talk about how awesome you are.  I talk about your accomplishments at work, or I’ll tell funny stories such as the time when you thought a dog biscuit was a cookie and you ate it.  Sometimes I’ll post pictures of you and other times I’ll post videos, just funny things that I capture with my phone.

The thing is that you don’t blog, so if I didn’t do this, no one would know just how incredibly awesome you are.

I mean, sure there are assholes who come by and write crappy things about you in my comment section to be hurtful.  But that’s just the Internet.  I mean, those trolls don’t know you; they can’t see that you are just twenty kinds of fantastic.  So you shouldn’t let those comments bother you because those people can suck it.

Back to you.  And this blog.  About your awesomeness.

Okay, I’m not going to start a blog about you, but that was all I could think about when I read this article from CNN that Esperenza sent me.  We were both drawn to the same quote:

On the most basic level, we want to be able to tell our story about our lives. But, in the case of our children, a permanent and public story has already been recorded about them before they have a chance to decide whether they want to participate or even whether the narrative is true to their own vision of self.

And I guess that caps off everything I was trying to say in those last few posts about why I don’t post about the kids (part one and part two).  About the concept of ownership; and whether thirteen is too young for them to truly comprehend what it means to put your information out there on the Internet, whether that information is in the form of a story or facts or pictures.

It goes back to that phrase “the chance to decide” — and taking away that choice from someone else.  I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing a blog about you without your permission, and the reality is that I can’t really get permission from the twins because they don’t really know what they’re agreeing to.  But it goes beyond pleasantries or control for control’s sake.  It brings in the reality that we don’t know how other people use that information.  What assumptions are made about the kids based on what I wrote or what pictures were uploaded vs. what the other person observed on their own.  What sort of people to you understand the twins to be… before you’ve ever met them.  And good qualities may be equally damaging as what we perceive to be bad qualities.  What if they don’t see themselves in the same way?  What if my vision limits them or puts pressure on them?  What if other people start having expectations for them not based on their own interactions with the twins but based on things I write?

I think the exact same things — by the way — in writing about Josh or writing about myself.  I think about it in terms of celebrities or other public figures.  Or people who become public figures because they’re thrust into the media due to circumstance.  I think about this shit all. the. time.

Many commenters on that article missed the point: the authors were pointing out that adults want control over their privacy.  We want to have control over our data.  We freak out when we perceive others trespassing on our privacy.  We would be upset if someone out there was writing about us and posting our personal stories.  So really, it doesn’t make sense when we write about others; including children. When we post stories about others people or pictures of other people; especially when we can’t really get permission.  Even if it’s an amazing picture that we know others would enjoy looking at, or a really funny story they’d enjoy reading.

Lest you think that I am better at circumspection, I just want to point out the numerous stories I tell about the twins.  They’re all ones that they’ve approved me posting, and I stay away from their hard limits (oooooh, all fifty shades of them).  I step over the line.

What brings me back on this side of the line is the thought that the twins could turn around one day and start a blog about me.  They could write a blog giving me a funny nickname so my name wouldn’t be Google-able, but you’d know it was me.  And they’d post about how awesome I am.  They’d talk about the new book I’m writing, or tell you funny stories such as the time I forgot to pack pants.  And sometimes they’d post pictures of me or videos.

And yeah, the same trolls might come by and write terrible things about me in their comment section, and I’d have to read them and swallow hard and think about how I wouldn’t have to deal with those types of comments if my kids weren’t writing about me.  And sometimes they’d post stories that would make me really anxious to know they’re out there.  And sometimes they’d post photos that they love but I find really unflattering.

Knowing that there is the possibility of payback keeps me on this side of the line.

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop. MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings, though you can read them or participate any time — the comment section is always open for people to post a link to their work or ask a question. You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.” If this is your first time in “class,” you may want to jump back to the first post in the series in order to understand how things work, or peruse all of the past lessons as well as a glossary of terms by reading the MFA Sunday School Glossary and Course Archives.

I wanted to work on self-editing your own writing today, but realized with the holiday weekend that it may be better to hold that for a week and do something more concrete such as another poetic fixed form.  If you like puzzles or brain-teasers, the villanelle is the perfect form for you.  It’s complicated, but once you understand the format, it becomes a writing exercise akin to a crossword puzzle that makes you stretch your brain and think about how words fit together.

The villanelle is a French form shaped by two rhyme sounds, a fixed meter*, and repetition. One of the easiest poems to look at in order to understand the form is Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” from 1952’s In Country Sleep. In order to understand the form, all we need are the first two stanzas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Before we get to the rhyme scheme — which is the best-known aspect of the villanelle — let’s look at the meter, or the rhythm of the line. Just like music, poetry can have a set number of “beats” to a line, which is why poetry teachers often read poems aloud, having their class clap out the words to hear the inflections.

Villanelles and sonnets are written in iambs which are an unstressed beat coupled with a stressed beat: or ba-BUM. With the words “do not” in the first line, the “do” is soft and unstressed, whereas the voice lands harder on the word “not.” But the line obviously is longer than one iamb or two beats. It actually has five iambs strung together, which is why we say it is written in iambic pentameter. Iambic refers to the foot — the way the words are stressed — and pentameter is the length of the line: penta means five.

So now clap out that first line as you read it aloud, and you’ll hear the meter:

This story, about how her blog domain got hijacked and how she got it back?  Freaked. Me. Out.

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Speaking of which, I am working on a tutorial for self-hosting; the freaky post above notwithstanding.  I look at self-hosting as an insurance policy for your blog.  Which it usually is.  Freaky situations aside.

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It was my Bat Mitzvah-versary this week.  My 25th anniversary of becoming a woman (in the non-menstrual sense).  By which I mean I chanted from the Torah 25 years ago.  One of my best friends shares the same Bat Mitzvah-versary as me so she called me on the day to remember our Torah portion together.  Which I can still sing.  And I’ll do it for you if you can get me drunk enough at BlogHer.

It made me feel really old to think that 25 years had passed.

Happy Bat Mitzvah-versary to meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

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We went to see the Nats play last weekend.  It was such an amazing game.  They started out three runs down with some of our favourite players injured.  And then Jesus Flores hit a home run.  And immediately afterward, Stephen Strasburg hit a homerun.  And we were on our feet and screaming like crazy, and I literally wanted to go run home and bake a cake for my boys to celebrate (but I didn’t want to miss the rest of the game).  I was just so incredibly proud of them.  I was so proud that Bryce Harper is on our team.  That Clippard is such an amazing pitcher.  I still can’t get over how much I love our team.

And then they had this little boy who came out to do a contest between two innings.  He had thirty seconds to run to second base, switch out the base with a new base, and take second base back to the finish line.  So the little boy runs out to second base and fumbles a bit with the base in trying to pry it out of the ground, so he has under 15 seconds to get back to the finish line, which is a ribbon held by two people.  So he’s trying to get back, and you can see he’s losing energy and the clock is running down, and the adults start running the finish line towards him.  And you will understand completely when I tell you that I got my period the following day, but I started bawling for this child.  I was so happy for him that he won the contest as well as the fact that these adults so subtly moved towards him so he could achieve that.

So… yeah… I was a big hormonal mess.  But I really do love the Nats.  As their superfan.

P.S. If you Google “Nationals, superfan,” I come up on the first page.  Which I believe means that I really am a superfan.  Isn’t it only really real when Google confirms your superfandom?

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Nobody Likes Me, Everybody Hates Me…” (Unglamourous)
• “All the Things that are Left Behind” (Mrs. Spit)
• “Warrior Eli is a Hoax” (So Close)
• “What Was and Will Be Lost” (Mommy Odyssey)
• “To All the Mothers…” (Courage and Curls)
• “The One with that River in Egypt” (Mommy Odyssey)

Okay, now my choices this week.

The Stork Diaries had a post last week that I didn’t find until after I wrote the Roundup.  So I’m including it because it’s that good.  In “A Barren Woman,” she heartbreakingly states, “I am not merely grieving over another failed cycle.  I am grieving because I realize that hope is nothing more than my own fabrication.  It only exists because I created it.”  It is about finding yourself at the end of the line with the final answer, and staring at it with the intensity of all your grief.  It’s a must-read for anyone hoping to understand infertility.

Follow Every Rainbow has a fantastic post about her Granny Sam.  It’s a story of loss and love, of a granddaughter learning from her grandmother’s story.  It’s just such a gorgeous recording of a history.

Lastly, Adventures in Infertility-Land has a knee-jerk reaction to a comment followed by a more measured answer: “If he is the villain, then I am the victim – it is much easier role to play, in my opinion.  But, I am losing a big part of the story here.”  I think the pivotal moment in the situation is when she gave him an out… and he didn’t take it.  And hopefully that speaks volumes to finding that middle ground between angels and demons.

The roundup to the Roundup: Freaky tale of a hijacked blog.  Working on a self-hosting tutorial.  It was my Bat Mitzvah-versary.  Effusive moments at the ballpark.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between May 18th and May 24th) 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 decided to read a few pages of 50 Shades Darker while I ate my morning yogurt, and I had an epiphany for why shows such as MTV’s 16 and Pregnant exist.  If grown women who HAVE CHILDREN do not understand how human beings procreate, then what hope do we have of squirrel-brained teenagers (apologies to the non-squirrel-brained teenagers who just believed for a moment that I was lumping them in with the others and calling all teenagers “squirrel-brained teenagers”) understanding how babies are made and therefore avoid having them?

While this is just a tiny scene within the book, stop reading if you don’t want any spoilers at all.

Okay.

So the gynecologist who makes house calls shows up to give Ana her Depo-Provera injection because she stopped taking the birth control pills she was on.  She asks Ana when her period began.  It is currently Sunday in the book, and Ana says that her period began two Wednesdays ago.  For those keeping track at home, this means we’re on CD12.  The doctor has her take a pregnancy test because Ana stopped taking her birth control pills a few days earlier.  She tells Ana that she could be pregnant (“You could be pregnant,” she says matter-of-factly).  On CD12.

I want to explain to EL James how babies are made and how pregnancy tests can be used.  Actually, let’s just skip to how pregnancy tests are used because I’m fairly certain that she has the sex thing down.  Until implantation has occurred and the body starts producing enough hCG to have the hormone spill into the urine and trigger a positive pregnancy test, there is no point in peeing on a stick because it will never tell you whether or not you are pregnant.  If a doctor truly wanted to be responsible and check for pregnancy prior to giving a Depo-Provera shot, she would draw blood which can alert the doctor to hCG levels in the blood stream.

I’m not asking for people to be knowledgeable in all stages of embryonic development.  I’m not asking for writers to understand the function of pinopodes.  I’m just asking for some good, old-fashioned understanding of timing.

Ovulation occurs mid-cycle, perhaps even around CD12.  And then implantation occurs anywhere from 6 to 10 days post-ovulation.  Hence why you couldn’t use a pregnancy test immediately after having sex and know anything (and you certainly couldn’t use a pregnancy test before ovulation occurs).  In fact, it will take days after implantation occurs until there are enough mlU of hCG in your urine to trigger a positive test. (Each test has an hCG sensitivity threshold with some tests turning positive at 25 mlU and others waiting until 40 mlU to turn positive.  Hence why doctors would want a blood test since urine tests don’t give them a number — it just lets them know if there is enough hCG in the urine to get over the test’s threshold.)

I guess I don’t understand why Ana and Christian are trusting a gynecologist who either (1) doesn’t understand how the menstrual cycle works or (2) loves to waste pregnancy tests.

And beyond that, she gives the Depo-Provera injection on CD12.  While I’ve never taken Depo-Provera, I do know that almost all hormone-based forms of birth control are timed to certain parts of your cycle.  My understanding of Depo-Provera is that it is always given within days after your period begins, and doctors will wait until your next period to start that.  I’m giving EL James a pass on that one for the moment because perhaps there are doctors who begin it mid-cycle who can chime in to say this is kosher…

There were so many simple ways for EL James to introduce a pregnancy scare.  For instance, the doctor could say, “I’m going to start the Depo-Provera, but before I do, just to be safe, I’m going to draw some blood and test it to make sure you’re not pregnant.  You can never be too careful.”  There.  Done.  Makes sense.  You get Ana to freak out over the possibility to being pregnant, and she gets to watch Christina pale when she passes on the news to him.  And teenagers everywhere are not fed misinformation about women’s health in the process.

By this point, it is so clear that Ana will become pregnant by the third book that I don’t understand why Vintage didn’t just have the author leave handwritten notes in the margins of the books saying things like, “do you notice how often I’m bringing up birth control?” or “did you just see how Christian reacted to the idea of a pregnancy?” or “I want to leave nothing subtle: please notice how often I am bringing up these plot points so you can predict that Ana will become pregnant in book three!”

Of course she will become pregnant despite being on numerous forms of birth control because Ana is soooooooooooooooooo fertile that Christian simply has to look at her and she falls pregnant.

I imagine that somewhere in an alternate universe there exists Characterland, and Ana from 50 Shades of Grey and Bella from Twilight are having lunch (by which I mean picking at their salads because neither slender girl likes to eat — and if you ever forget that, the author reminds you in the next paragraph.  Somehow they both get by on 30 calories per day) and clucking about how fertile they are.  Ana is moaning about how easy it is for her to get knocked up, and Bella is mentioning how she knows she wants to have a summer baby next time so they’ll just have sex in September.

And somewhere, at a nearby table, Clare from the Time Traveler’s Wife is trying not to cry into her napkin as she listens to their conversation.  Because while she’s happy that those characters all get pregnant and deliver a live child, all she has to show for her struggle to procreate with the love of her life, Henry, are numerous miscarriages.

I’m going back to my yogurt now.  All I want to say is that when I rule the world, pregnancies in books and movies are going to get a whole lot more realistic.  None of this fudging of science facts in order to create a plot point.

Photo Credit: Jef Nickerson via Flickr

Updated at the Bottom

Okay, so continuing yesterday’s dissection of various social media platform’s terms of service (TOS), a bunch of questions or comments came up about Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or Pinterest (or really, pick your social media platform — they all have similar TOS) that I’m going to attempt to answer.

Before we begin, I want to preface this by saying I use other social media platforms.  I think they’re wonderful tools of communication.  I just use them with this knowledge in the back of my head, and it colours the decisions I make about what I post.  But I just want that clear: I do post on Twitter, Facebook, et al.

So now let’s talk content since we discussed images and video yesterday.

Go back to the TOS samples I posted yesterday.  You are granting the same rights to your words whenever you post words on those sites.  So that totally amusing, pithy saying you came up with?  They can use that.  The tag line you have for your blog that you also post as the tagline to your Twitter account?  They can use that.  That clever slogan you came up with for Jif peanut butter while you were joking around with your friends?  They have the right to sub-license that slogan to Jif, collect the money for it, and not pass any of that money on to you (royalty free!).

Now, do I believe that this is likely to happen to you?  No, but it could happen to you.  So you just need to know that in order to set your comfort zone.  And again, this is about giving permission.

You still own your content, which means that YOU can also take your pithy statement and slap it on a t-shirt.  It means that by granting them these rights, that you are not losing your rights.  And that’s all well and good.  But you’ve also given any of these sites the right to use your content in that manner as well.  If you are comfortable with that possibility (and I am often comfortable with that possibility in the same way that I am often comfortable posting pictures of myself but not others), you should post that content.  If you are not comfortable with that possibility, you should post it elsewhere or not post it at all.

Which brings us to two different topics that meet at a central point: protecting your content.

If you read those TOS (and the TOS of pretty much any social media site), they have the right to close your account without warning.  Unlike a self-hosted blog that you pay for, free sites are allowed to wipe away your work.  Therefore, if you care about that content a lot, I would keep a copy.  It’s easiest on Twitter: just use a service such as All My Tweets to see them on one page, and then cut-and-paste a copy onto a Word doc.  Simple.  It’s also pretty easy on Facebook.  You can follow their instructions on downloading your content.  I am less familiar with how to do this on other sites, or whether the possibility exists.  When I post on sites other than my own, I always save a copy of my post as a Word doc.  I would lose the comments and such if they chose to delete my work, but at least I would have my thoughts.

The other side of protecting your content is investing yourself in sites that are under your control.  It doesn’t fit my personality nor my preferences on the Internet to invest a lot of energy into building huge followings on Twitter.  Twitter is lovely, but it’s also outside of my control.  They can decide tomorrow to erase my account and all of my followers are gone.  Same with Facebook.  Which freaks me out a little bit.

The same goes for free Blogger and WordPress accounts.  I think most people should start with a free account to see if they enjoy blogging.  But once they’ve determined that they do enjoy blogging and they plan to keep going with it indefinitely, they should switch to a self-hosted account if they can afford to do so.  Again, this only matters if you feel strongly about your content.  Some people look at their blog as they do a sandcastle — something fun to build or beautiful in the moment, but if it washes away, they’re okay with that too.  Other people look at their blog as something more akin to a concrete statue and they want a promise that it will be there in the future.  Self-hosting does that.

In between are the people who don’t need it to be concrete but would be sad if it washed away, and those people should simply do a poor man’s blog backup continuously — you will always have your content, but you can release your fears of losing your space.  Because the possibility of losing your space is built into the TOS as well.

There is two things we’re talking about here: (1) permanence and (2) rights.  The permanence part is clear: if you self-host, you control your space.  As long as you continue to pay for it and you don’t trespass on your host’s TOS, you have your space.  The same is not true for free WordPress or Blogger sites nor for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or Pinterest accounts.  You own the content, meaning, you hold the rights to it.  If you want to publish it in a book, you can.  If you want to create photocopies of it, you can.  But THEY own the site, the space online.  And they graciously give it to you for free.

So I think the important thing to think about is whether you are more of a sandcastle person or a concrete sculpture person, or do you fall somewhere in between where you neither need the permanence of concrete but you don’t love the impermanence of sand?  And in knowing that about yourself, are you making choices on the Internet that fit your preferences?

I know that I lean much more heavily towards concrete than sand — the numerous boxes in my storage room saving artifacts from childhood are a case in point — so self-hosting not only makes sense, but it is the best choice for me once I look at the TOS of various free blogging platforms.  I put my greatest efforts into my blog, and less of an effort into other social media platforms just because I like the amount of control and permanence the blog affords me.  It’s also about ownership: I like to own the words I like.  Which is to say that I also don’t mind placing my words elsewhere (comments, other social media platforms, even guest blogging), but I am picky about which words I give to others and which ones I keep for myself in terms of giving away the rights of usage.  I don’t expect other social media platforms will use my words, but I also don’t want to give them permission to do so.

Are you more of a sand person, a concrete person, or — like me — do you fall somewhere in between while leaning more towards one end than the other?  And more importantly, do your choices online reflect those preferences right now?

Photo Credit: Hendricks Photos via Flickr.

Updated:

If people are interested, I can write up a tutorial on how to move to self-hosting.  It’s not that difficult to do.  I sort of see it as an insurance policy for my blog rather than the ability to utilize all the cool things self-hosting includes (such as hosting sound files or video).