Updated at the Bottom

I noticed a discrepancy on the restaurant bill after my credit card had been charged and the slip signed.  The owner came over and asked if I could be reimbursed with cash in order to not have to pay the fee for an additional transaction.  No problem; in fact, it would help me because I had little cash in my wallet and it would save me the trip to the bank.  I was owed $8.50, and the waiter returned with $8 in cash and wished me a nice day.

I didn’t say anything because (1) we frequent this restaurant a lot and I wanted to keep the atmosphere comfortable and (2) I am sometimes a pussy when it comes to these things.

I walked out to the car talking to myself: It’s just 50 cents, not a big deal.  But it was the restaurant’s mistake, and it cost me 50 cents whereas they gained 50 cents by messing up.  I wonder why he rounded down instead of up.  For the love, Melissa, you need to let this go.  It was just 50 cents.  But if I lost 50 cents every day for a year, it would add up to $182.50.  That’s a lot of money.  Enough to buy a Kindle (I think).  But I didn’t lose $182.50, I lost 50 cents.  It’s 50-fucking-cents!

Welcome to my internal monologue.

*******

I fell into a conversation with a woman on the Metro.  She had a baby who was sleeping in his stroller.  She was a stay-at-home mum, not working in her career field for the moment.  Her husband had fully supported this change months earlier, but he had grown resentful when her stay-at-home motherhood didn’t match what he envisioned.  He was angry every time she dropped off the child with her mother so she could attend an exercise class and he was pissed the times when he came home and dinner wasn’t made.

“He said that he asks so little of me, I should be able to have dinner made.”

But there is not a marriage or partnership in the world where the person doesn’t ask an enormous amount from the other person.  Is loyalty a small thing to ask for?  Constant support?  A promise to make decisions together?  To love each other?  To never break your vows?

I don’t ask that from many people.  In fact, I don’t ask that from anyone other than Josh because they’re all enormous things to ask for.  When this husband said that he didn’t ask for a lot from this woman, I’m not sure he was seeing just how much he was asking of her; that we all ask of our partner if we have one.  Making meals?  Doing stuff with the baby?  Those are small things.  It would be like asking someone for $20,000.32 and focusing on the 32 cents.  She gives him the $20,000 daily by being a loyal partner.  By loving him.  By not breaking her vows (yes, I am making a lot of assumptions about their marriage).  All that he can claim he’s not getting is the 32 cents.

*******

My second favourite song in A New Brain is “Change” (my favourite is “And They’re Off” — how can you not cry when he switches to “and he’s off!”).  The homeless woman sings:

People walk by me with glee.
I am what they’ll never be.
I don’t ask you to tip your hat.
I don’t ask that you notice what I’m wearing.
I could care less for things like that.
All I’m asking for is change!

The change, of course, that she’s asking for is both the monetary kind as well as a change in her life.  The smallest thing — pennies — and the largest thing — a different existence.

Most people don’t hold their change that tightly.  We drop it in tip cups, we round up to the nearest dollar (except for that restaurant!), we toss it into fountains and make wishes.  The character points out how little she is asking for — just the spare change that is jingling around in your pocket, probably annoying you due to its weight.

I wonder why we care enough about people to passionately argue about political ideas, to get involved in that manner, but then when it comes to actual people, we give them what we don’t personally consider of high worth.  The woman doesn’t ask for dollars, knowing probably that most will balk at hearing that word.  She asks for change, something she knows people will give her because they don’t value it.  If you really dissect this, the way we show care is to give someone something we don’t value?  Isn’t that bizarre, when you think about in those terms?

But that’s not the point.

Who sets that line of worth; where change is fine to pass along to another person, but a dollar is the line?  There are plenty of individuals who will give another person a ten-dollar bill without a second thought when they see someone in need, but the vast majority of people give coins, change, the money that doesn’t equal up to a dollar.

I think nothing of giving away my spare change, but when it’s taken from me in the case of the restaurant, I can fixate on that exact same 50 cents that I would have given someone freely, believing that it cost me close to nothing, even if I added up that I give up $182.50 over the course of a year if I do that every day.

I have plenty of invisible lines of worth.  I’m trying to figure out why I set them at a certain level; whether it’s possible to erase them.

*******

Those invisible lines of worth pop up in various places.  With the woman on the Metro, her husband devalued the most sacred parts of a partnership and focused only on valuing the minutiae of daily tasks.  With the homeless, it’s apparently the difference between 99 cents and a dollar.  I’ve heard people devalue their friendships because they didn’t think they had enough of them or devalue their blog because it doesn’t cross the threshold of an invisible value line for readership.

Isn’t the $20,000 of blogging the peace of heart that comes from finding the words to explain how you feel; even if no one reads those words, as they often don’t in my case because I only publish half the posts I write.  Isn’t it that one good friend you would have never met otherwise if not for your blog?  Isn’t it the day when you felt so alone and disconnected in the face-to-face world, but five people confirmed your thoughts in the blogging world and it was what made the difference?  Isn’t everything else that may or may not come with blogging the 32 cents?

It’s interesting to look at all the spaces in life where we draw these invisible lines of worth and devalue everything that falls underneath it.  I know I’ve done it before in the number of friends I have or in the house I have.  I’m just not sure why I do it, especially once I recognize that I’m doing it.

*******

So which is it?  Should the change be the focus or should it be the point where we let go?  Should I care if the restaurant keeps 50 cents or should I let it go, knowing that I’ve had many delicious meals there and would miss it terribly if it closed.  Does it have to be an either/or?

If we’re getting the major things in a marriage — unconditional love, emotional support, someone who always has our back when the rest of the world is kicking us down — should we allow the spare change of a relationship (the dishes left in the sink or the meals not made) to determine its worth?

And how can we both look at change as something to toss aside and hold up the same word in such high regard when it comes to bettering ourselves?

Update:

Driving home from yoga, I thought of one more place where I do this.  I’ve lost 14 pounds in the last few two months… and I still keep reminding myself that regardless of that, I still have more to lose.  I keep focusing on the 32 cents — the number on the scale — instead of the $20,000 which is the fact that I’ve taken control of my completely out-of-control eating.  The number on the scale is fairly meaningless, especially without the control.  I could get myself down to the magical invisible line, but without the control, I’ll never maintain it.  So the control is the more important thing, but I never congratulate myself on that.  I just remind myself over and over again that I have weight I need to lose, that I’m carrying too many pounds on this frame.

I’ve been reading a bunch of articles about Jason Russell’s breakdown following his viral Kony 2012 video.  The reason given for the reactive psychosis was the onslaught of attention coupled with the public backlash.  Separating the person from the video (or blog or book or movie or whatever medium goes viral because Russell is hardly the first person to experience a spike in attention), my heart goes out to Jason Russell and others who have been swept up in the unexpected.  It is not easy to put something of an emotional nature into the universe, have it be received by many, held to the heart by some, stamped on the ground by others, and have the entire thing play out on a public stage.  I think I was the most disappointed in people like Jason Biggs who mocked Russell’s breakdown.  I guess I don’t see something amusing about a person in emotional pain.  It’s very different to mock, dissect, or discuss an amorphous group; it’s another thing to pinpoint and spotlight an individual.

I can think of many people who have experienced what Russell experienced in a very small dose in the blogging world.  You do not even need your post read by millions to be slammed by an attention wave.  Simply take that time that you felt hurt that people misunderstood your words or slammed you for your thoughts or mocked you in your comment section and then multiply that by 85 million.  Think of how it made you feel during your day and then intensify it 85 million times.

Blogging is a lot like sex.  The simple answer is that if you are putting your words and ideas out there, they have a possibility to going viral or attracting trolls or being stolen or misunderstood and dissected elsewhere or in your comment section.  There are things you can do to protect yourself — slapping on a blog condom so to speak — such as making your blog invite-only or password protecting posts.  But that is not fool-proof, and even the smallest, most private bloggers have the possibility of facing a wave of attention — positive or negative — due to their words.  Truly, the only way to make sure that you are not emotionally affected from backlash of your ideas and words is to not blog at all.

And many don’t.

Many great writers never work on another book once they get bad reviews.  Many bloggers ditch their site once they feel that reaching out to others and connecting in a positive way doesn’t outweigh the negative moments.  I’m not sure if Russell will return to make more films or do the work he has been doing for Invisible Children once he has had time to think.  I think we forget sometimes how fragile humans are in actuality.  How deeply we can affect one another.

We talk a lot about safe sex, about ways to reduce the spread of infections or the chance of pregnancy.  Some schools and parents preach abstinence-only, since it is the only way to ensure — barring a violent event — that you don’t end up on MTV’s Teen Mom.  But in this digital age, I think we also need to talk about safe blogging and by extension, safe social media.  It isn’t very realistic that people aren’t going to go online whether it’s on their blog or Facebook or Twitter or thousands of other social sites.  Nor do I think Internet-abstinence really teaches people how to utilize a great medium responsibly.

Before people post, they need to think about the reality of a thought or piece of work going viral.  Of what it means to possibly have hundreds or thousands or millions of people see something you created.  And even on a smaller level, before posting, people need to think about what it means to have people dissect your words.  To put something you are emotionally attached to out there and not have it well-received.

Before people respond or write about someone else, they need to consider the impact of their words.  There’s a big difference between writing critically about an idea (Kony 2012) and writing critically about a person (Jason Russell).  There is also a difference between a private email conversation and posting on Twitter; in one, you allow the person you are discussing to be unaware, and in the other, there is every chance in the world — no matter how remotely connected you are to that person — that they will read your words.  There is, after all, a chance that Jason Russell will read this post.

I personally think that mindfulness serves as the best contraception.  Not fool-proof; no contraception is.  But the best thing we can use to protect ourselves and each other as we utilize the Internet.

These are the benefits and the drawbacks of living in the blogosphere.  The chance for fantastic, life-changing connections.  The chance for terrible, life-changing connections.

Josh sent me an article from the Forward titled IVF Babies Denied U.S. Citizenship.  It is specifically about Israeli-American women applying for dual citizenship for their Israeli-born children (in other words, the women are Americans living in Israel, their children are born in Israel, and they are trying to get them dual citizenship so it will be easier to travel in and out of the US to visit family), but I assume it’s a problem that is experienced by women living in other countries as well.  The article quotes the regulation:

The regulation states: “A child born outside the USA to an American cannot receive citizenship until a biological link with at least one parent is established.” Children who are legally adopted are specifically exempt from the rule, but IVF babies from donor eggs are not.

The article goes on to point out the bizarre inverse of this rule, stating that if this is true, it would be equally possible that two French citizens could fly to America, use an American woman’s gametes during a donor egg cycle in a US clinic, fly back to France, and apply for US citizenship for their child simply because the gametes are “American.”

The value is placed on the egg or sperm over the actual people raising the child.

The whole thing made my stomach twist.

*******

If you have a WordPress blog, you may have noticed that I’ve been using a different email with my comments.  About a week ago, I tried to leave a comment on someone’s blog and got a message that the email account was associated with a WordPress account and I needed to log-in in order to use it.  But I don’t have a WordPress account.  So I put down a different email address (which does get to me).  This has solved the problem in the sense that I can leave a comment, except I can’t leave one under my normal email address.  Has anyone found a solution to this yet?

*******

On the this-is-what-I-get-from-reading-blogs front: book suggestions.  Family Building with a Twist wrote this week about a book called MWF Seeking BFF which sounded good.  So I got it on Thursday and just started it.  Liking it very much so far.  I’m very much in a memoirs-by-women mood.  Like Isabel Gillies’ Happens Every Day or Claire Dederer’s Poser.  I’m also in a chicklet-set-in-America mood such as Emily Giffin, Candace Bushnell, Laura Weisberger.  Have anything else on the memoirs-by-women/chicklet-set-in-America front?

*******

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:

• “The Beginning” (Stinkbomb)
• “The Controversy of Breastfeeding” (ANDMom)
• “Explaining Evolution to First Graders” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you!
• “Half Truths Come in Pretty Packages” (Jack at Random)
• “Hey, Can I Be in Your Club…” (J.osh, Nake.d)
• “I’m Not Single” (MissConception)
• “Mental Infertility…” (The Smartness)
• “How Your Level of Emotional Infertility Affects Your Support Needs in the ALI Community” (The Smartness)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Kmina’s Blog has a post about the ways she has changed over the years.  Personally, I think her post would make a good meme (and make sure if you do that, that you link back to her).  Think of yourself ten years ago and now today: are you more patient?  Do you no longer crave chocolate?  Do you not finish books that aren’t holding your interest?  What have you learned; but more important, what has changed you?

The Infertility Voice has a post about D-day — Diagnosis Day — and the way this day has changed in her mind over the years.  Namely, how she feels on the anniversary.  It is about both forgetting about the wound itself as well as recognizing the scar and the story it tells.  She writes, “I’ve learned to live so much more fully in the moment that I spend less head space thinking about the past and how I’ve been wounded by infertility and more about how to move forward: to live with my infertility and not in spite of it.”

I love Something Out of Nothing’s post about affection and effusiveness.  It’s a glimpse into another person’s life.  I especially was struck by the beginning: “It doesn’t rain here often, but when it does, it always reminds me of the code my parents used, long before I was born, when my dad used to travel for work.  He would call my mom from the road, and at some point during the conversation, one of them would say, ‘It’s raining here,’ instead of ‘I love you’.” As well as the end (but you’ll have to click over and read the whole post to get that).

Lastly, the Adventures of MissOhkay has a post about her daughter’s birthplace, Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Did you know there are two countries we shorten to Congo?  I didn’t until I read this post.  I loved understanding how she came to choose the DR of the Congo for international adoption as well as more about her daughter’s place of origin.  This post is one in a series of posts about how her daughter came into her life.

The roundup to the Roundup: Article on donor egg babies and citizenship.  WordPress commenting problem.  Book suggestions?  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 16th and March 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.

About a week ago, I received an email from my editor at BlogHer: could I go to the White House for a meeting on Tuesday?  I checked my calendar, sent in my security details, and spent the weekend reading up on the issues surrounding the Affordable Care Act.  I had another big project I was putting to bed at the same time, so perhaps my attention was focused on finishing that, but I didn’t feel nervous at all.

Until Monday.

I woke up with my stomach flip flopping around.  Tums-munching-yoga-can’t-help-this flipping around.  I put my other project to bed around 10 pm that night, and without a distraction, the flip flopping only increased until it felt like I had a trout at the end of the line inside my stomach, dying frantically on a pier.

On Tuesday, I woke up, the fish still strongly fighting his swim to the bright white light. (I have to assume that while humans walk into the light when they die, that fish either swim or flop there.)  I went to yoga, came home to have a yogurt, read some last documents I wanted to get through, and then headed downtown.  If you recall last time, I had to pee quite badly AND was nerve-wrackingly late.  This time I left an insane amount of time to get down there so when I hit Meridian Hill and saw that I had almost two hours until the meeting, I said to myself, “this is what it feels like to not be strangled by your clock.”  It was a strange, wonderful feeling.  I wish I were better about time and could experience that more often.

I hung out at Josh’s office for a bit and then he drove me over to the White House, by which I mean he dropped me off by the park and I felt like a little kid getting out of her dad’s car on the way to the party.

As I went through security and grabbed my visitor badge and headed past the guard into the West Wing, I kept saying to myself, “these people are just people.  They are human, just like me.  This is their job, I do my job.  But at the end of the day, they are all simply jobs and we are all simply people.”  It’s a nice little mantra.  The reality is that while I’m a Juddhist in practice (you know, a Jewish Buddhist), I am a Quaker in mentality.  I don’t believe in elevating people in importance any more than I believe in demeaning people (aren’t they just two sides of the same coin).  Though sometimes I forget that and get all ga-ga, like… you know… being around people in the White House.

I sat in the waiting room with the ten other women and thought to myself, “this building is just a building.  It is no different sitting in your home or sitting in the dentist’s office or sitting in the West Wing.  They are all simply buildings made of the same materials such as concrete and brick and mortar.”

This mantra didn’t really work.

Actually, do you know who it was nicest to see there?  Sarah, who works in the Office of Digital Strategy.  It was more meaningful to me, personally, to see her.  I believe that if Dorothy had the chance to go back to Oz, she’d want to see the Scarecrow ten times more than she’d want to see the Great and Powerful Oz.  I mean, yeah, the wizard was cool (okay, so he turned out to be not so powerful, but you know what I mean), but the Scarecrow had been with her on the journey.  And last year at the Women’s Summit, Sarah was the person who was with us the entire day, who communicated with us beforehand and afterward.

So one of my favourite parts of the day was talking with Sarah before the meeting.  I told her that the Wolvog had played President Obama in the school play last month, a parade of famous Americans spanning about 400 years of history all coming together for a ball at the White House (please don’t ask how Betsy Ross and Michelle Kwan could both be at the White House as the same time).  I discovered the night before that he had outgrown his button-down shirt, so the Wolvog’s Barack Obama was casual in a navy blue polo shirt.  The ChickieNob wanted the part of Michelle Obama, but it went to another girl, a fact that she will be thankful for years from now when she realizes how creepy that would be to be married to her brother in the school play.

And then it was time to go inside the Roosevelt Room.

I loved seeing the East Wing last time, but maybe it was more special to be in the West Wing because it’s generally not accessible to the public.  Or because it’s a space of action; where policy is discussed and created vs. the other side of the building which leans heavier towards entertaining.  My heart was pounding entering the Roosevelt Room, a room that comes with an enormous history in tow.  It was the former presidential office.  Think of the meetings that have happened in that place.

Our name cards were already set up around the table, and my seat was directly in front of the door which was directly across from the Oval Office.  Meaning, the brown door opened into the hallway and on the opposite wall of the hallway was the white door of the Oval Office.  I was about twenty feet away from the Oval Office the whole time.  Heady!

But think about all the people who have sat in those chairs.  All the presidents.  All the staff members.  All the visiting heads of state from various countries.  Think about what has taken place in that room, the enormous moments.  I know I said it’s just a building, just like every other building, but it was as if my inner teenager was holding her hand over my inner Quaker’s mouth, silencing her for the moment.

Being in that room was like stepping into the Sistine Chapel.  I was obviously in the Vatican to see the chapel, knew I would encounter it at some point as I walked through the building, but when I stepped inside and tilted my head back to stare at the ceiling, I was dumbfounded that I was in that space, seeing it with my own eyes.  That I was across the world, standing under the hand of G-d.  And that was what it was like to sit down in the Roosevelt Room.  I knew that was where we were ending up for the meeting, was well aware that I would encounter it while in the West Wing, but I sat down dumbfounded, not believing I was seeing that space with my own eyes.

That sliver of door frame behind me?  That’s the brown door through which you can get to the Oval Office.

The topic for the roundtable discussion was the Affordable Care Act, a topic near and dear to my heart both as a health writer (I think after writing Navigating the Land of If and a bunch of articles, I qualify as a health writer, right?) and as an average US citizen.

We watched an episode of House last week (we’re on the second season!) where House told a patient without insurance that he was dying, but he wasn’t going to put down the diagnosis in his file because it would be a pre-existing condition stopping him from ever getting insurance.  The boy ran out of the examination room to go get insurance before returning for the diagnosis and treatment (though, House, that trickster, lied to him because he wanted him to get insurance.  The boy only had a cold).  My thought as I watched that episode: Americans no longer have to live like this.

We no longer have to freak out that our insurance is going to drop us or refuse to cover something because it’s a pre-existing condition.  In the future, we’ll no longer experience discrimination in the form of gender rating, the practice of charging women more than men for the exact same insurance when they have similar profiles.  We have free preventative care.  It’s an amazing leap forward from what we had before.

And it’s a law, not a pu-pu platter, which means that even if you don’t like everything within the law, we can’t pick and choose what we want out of it.  It saddens me when people throw out the baby with the bathwater when it comes to the Affordable Care Act.  45 million American women had access to preventative care last year.  That is a major accomplishment.  How many problems were found in their beginning stages so they could be treated with less expensive and invasiveness?   Some people are so focused on protesting the coverage of contraception that they fail to notice the coverage of breastfeeding support which all comes with the law (“employers to provide reasonable break time and a private, non-bathroom place for nursing mothers to express breast milk during the workday, for one year after the child’s birth. The new requirements became effective when the Affordable Care Act was signed into law on March 23, 2010”).

There are really really good things coming from this law including access to health-saving measures such as mammograms, and frankly, I’m worried about the upcoming election and the possibility of losing the gains that were made.  I don’t think many of us can stand to lose the gains that have come with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  I know that I can’t.

Deputy Chief of Staff Nancy-Ann DeParle and Deputy Assistant to the President for Health Policy Jeanne Lambrew hold a roundtable discussion on the Affordable Care Act and how health reform is benefiting women with representatives from leading women’s online publications in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., March 20, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Sonya N. Hebert)

On a totally vain side note, that’s me in the bottom left corner.  You can see me ardently taking notes.  With my orange iPad out to record the meeting.  Hey, I said it was a totally vain aside.

I unpacked more of the logistics of the meeting over on BlogHer.  I hope you’ll go over there and tell your story.

When the meeting was over, Jesse walked us through the West Wing, so we could see the offices (though the door to the Oval Office was closed) and photographs.  We walked outside, past the cherry blossoms on the lawn.

Then we stepped into the press briefing room.  We were snapping pictures when someone said we shouldn’t take pictures.  So I slipped my camera back into my purse with an apology.  Then he said, “you shouldn’t take pictures until we turn on these lights!” He lit up the stage, the reporters waiting in the room totally bored as we all went up to the podium and snapped each other’s picture.  Jesse was patient and amused, as if this was the best part of the job: seeing what a mushy, happy mess we became as ordinary citizens entering this extraordinary space.

Now you see me…

Now you don’t…

And then it was time to go.  We had to wait by the White House gates for an additional few minutes while the Irish motorcade went through.  And then they opened the gate and we passed back into the normal world with all the other people milling on the sidewalk, part of school trips and tourist groups.  A few of us stood around talking for another few minutes.  A little boy climbing on the gate was yelled at by a guard, and the four of us all had the same parental protective reaction, especially once we saw the tears starting to well up in his eyes.  He was excited.  Listen, while I may have enough self-control to not climb the gates, internally, I was climbing the gates while I was inside the White House.  I was giddy to be standing inside history.

I crossed the park and decided to walk all the way back to Josh’s office because the sun had come out and it was now a balmy 75 degrees with a light breeze carrying the scent of the ubiquitous, Washingtonian cherry blossoms.  I almost never go downtown when the cherry blossoms are in season; it’s too crowded and they’re just a bunch of flowers, right?  But then I found myself down there, seeing these gifts that came from across the ocean, and I wondered why I let myself miss this year after year.  This is the Washington I love, the white marble buildings; the fact that any one of us can end up in the White House — either behind the Oval Office desk or as a visitor in the Roosevelt Room; the motorcades; the cherry blossoms.  And I walked the many blocks to Josh’s office deeply in love with my city.  I literally just fell in love again with my city.

After deep breathing through yoga today, after a yogurt and an hour to read some documents, I got in the car and trekked on down to a little house on Pennsylvania Avenue… that is white…

I got invited back to the White House for a roundtable discussion in the Roosevelt Room (yes, that one next to the Oval Office in the West Wing) on the Affordable Care Act.  Eleven women got to talk to Deputy Chief of Staff Nancy-Ann DeParle and Deputy Assistant to the President for Health Policy, Jeanne Lambrew.  Stories and pictures to come once I can untangle my brain and eat something.

I seriously have one of the coolest jobs in the world.  I never stop thinking that.