There is a popular blogger I read who responds to every single comment she receives.  Sometimes it’s just a quick message such as “Oh! I hadn’t thought of that!” and sometimes it’s a longer, more thoughtful response.  I am somewhat amazed since responding to comments takes up a lot of time.  The defensive side of me (which is also a little jealous of her master response skills) thinks that time has to come from somewhere — either she reads fewer blogs than she could or she leaves fewer comments on other people’s blogs than she could.  Or she is just much better at using her time wisely (I, on the other hand, often get sucked into jumping from blog to blog to blog via the comment section on posts and lose hours of my life).

It is easy to judge how someone else uses their online time, and this post is not meant to be a judgment (nor, frankly, do I want my own practices judged).  Though I am interested in a discussion.  The difference being that it’s unhelpful to state that how I do things is the best way and all others who don’t do it my way are not doing it correctly.  Whereas it’s interesting to hear how different people approach receiving comments and what they do once they’re in their comment box.

You have probably noticed that I am not consistent with my comment responses.  Every once in a while, I add a comment to the thread below the post.  I usually do that when the answer could apply to a bunch of people with the same question or thought.  Sometimes I reply directly via email, especially when the person asks a question or when they have changed the way I’m seeing a situation.  Other times, I say nothing at all (though I read every single comment left on the blog).  Again, not consistent.

A lot of that lack of consistency has to do with time: sometimes I’m just plain busy with work or the twins have something going on or I’m trying to master shoulder stands in yoga.  Sometimes I’m reading the comments on a mobile device and it’s a pain-in-the-ass to write something back in the moment, and by the time I get to the computer, the thought is gone.

The other side of the time issue is that if I have an hour to be on the computer, I’d rather use my time reading other people’s blogs and leaving comments there rather than responding to comments that people left me.  And I realize that it’s sort of selfish — my attitude.  It would be like saying I’d rather go and buy other people presents than write thank you notes for the gifts that people just gave me.  Because while sometimes it’s tit-for-a-tat, other times, person X leaves a comment on my blog, but then I go leave a comment on person Y’s blog.  So, yes, I realize it’s selfish, but the alternative is to not read other people’s blogs (and yes, more often than not, even if I haven’t commented, I have been on your blog reading if you’ve commented here).  And where would that get me?  I learn so much from reading other people’s point-of-view.  Or I could not write Stirrup Queens.  Or drop the LFCA.

I thought it would be interesting to hear what other people think and how other people do things.  There is no right or wrong answer.  Things that you may find extremely rude another person will find completely kind.  And vice versa.  In other words, the point of this discussion is not to make you feel guilty for not doing things a certain way nor is it to encourage you to do things differently.  If your commenting routine works for you, I say go with it.  Got it?

1. So, do you respond to your comments?
2. If yes, do you respond directly back to the person via email, or do you leave a message in the comment section?
3. And do you, as a reader, ever return to the comment section of a post to see if the writer has responded to you?
4. And if you don’t respond to comments, what do you do instead with your online time?
5. Would you rather have someone respond to your comment, or would you rather have them read your blog and leave you a comment?
6. As a comment leaver, do you expect to receive a response?  Does knowing that someone is not responding simply due to a lack of time vs. a lack of care change your expectation?
7. Are there certain times when you deem a response necessary and other times that you do not?

Do not feel obligated to answer all of my questions — just the ones that speak to you, where you feel you have something to say.

One side note, I am majorly not a fan of auto-reply comment responses.  It’s just clutter in my inbox.  I sort of figure that unless I’m flaming someone (since, you know, even with my general kumbayaness, I sometimes like to do a 180 and get my troll on*), they are appreciative of the fact that I’ve left a comment.  On the other hand, I’m not really appreciative of receiving an email from a machine.  People are free to disagree with me, but I only like receiving responses that have been sent directly from the person; not from a commenting program.  So I’m not counting those emails as a comment response.

* For some reason, I feel the need to point out the facetiousness of this statement.

Before you ask, I’m not doing anything for Valentine’s Day.  Because you were going to ask.  Because everyone seems to ask that.

Wait, that’s not entirely true.  In a fit of romantic passion, I asked Josh if he would rather I defrost the vegetarian chili in the freezer or continue with the original plan to eat a tofu and snow pea stirfry for dinner.  See, I love the boy.

I’m not anti-Valentine’s Day; I’m just not pro-Valentine’s Day.  I think of it in the same way as Arbor Day — a holiday that exists on the calendar, but I don’t do anything to mark it.

The twins are in those sweet Valentine’s years when everyone needs to give a valentine to everyone else in the class.  Every child receives the exact same number of valentines and the exact same cupcake and the exact same pink plate.  I think fourth grade was the first year that people could give valentines to just the people they wanted.  I got a totally average amount of valentines, but the cutest boy in the class had to have two decorated paper bags to hold all his cards.  I knew that we all thought he was the cutest boy in the class, but I didn’t realize quite what that meant until I saw those two bulging bags of valentines next to my completely average single bag of valentines.

Then we got to high school, and no one delivered those little cards anymore.  Instead the cheerleaders sold roses as a fundraiser, and they delivered the roses to your classroom during the day with a note attached to it.  So instead of bulging bags of valentines, the visual cue was a rose.  People who were dating someone usually got one rose.  Some girls received full bouquets from their boyfriends.  Pretty girls who were single received what amounted to a full bouquet from random guys — the equivalent of the bulging bag of valentines.  My best friend and I always sent each other a rose to be safe — so we’d have at least one.  And I could usually put my best male friend up to it by explaining that if he was going to marry me if we were both single at 30, the least he could do was suck it up and buy me a $1 rose right now.  So again, completely average.

And then I got married, and I decided that I never had to stress about Valentine’s Day again.  I’m not a fan of flowers.  I don’t eat chocolate right now.  I definitely don’t wear perfume.  I get cards from Josh randomly throughout the year.  I sort of wish I did like Valentine’s Day more, but I don’t, and I can’t really figure out a way to celebrate it that makes me happy and doesn’t remind me of that boy’s two bulging bags of valentines or stressing out over rose buying.

What are your memories of Valentine’s Day from childhood?

Photo Credit: Barbtrek.

Last night, I watched the Grammys with my eyes closed, so I got to imagine what Nicki Minaj’s dance looked like and sometimes I had no clue who was presenting.  Actually, I only half-listened.  I was thinking about how Foo Fighters will probably still be at the Grammys ten years from now, and Lady Gaga may be at the Grammys ten years from now, but many other artists in that room most definitely would not be at the Grammys ten years from now if history is any indicator of the future.  Maybe that’s why I was watching it with my eyes closed — I always get a little squeamish about award shows for that reason.  They come with enormous highs that inevitably lead in the future (for most musicians) to enormous lows.

For instance, I was so happy for Adele.  She deserves every one of those six Grammys. (Actually, I can’t say that because I only caught the last two Grammys that she won and I have no idea if she was deserving of the first four, but let’s go with that assumption.)  Last night must have felt incredible.  And for awhile, she will be able to ride the excitement as people give her opportunities through the media to keep reliving it.  But at some point, the attention will peter out, and then she will be faced with millions of eyes staring at her with the unspoken expectation of “what are you going to do next?”  Or, even worse, no expectant eyes on her at all because they’re all focused on the next shiny thing, and she will need to wiggle into the center of the room again by producing something equally noteworthy.  Which is very difficult to do.

I went to a panel last year at BlogHer on viral posts.  The speakers were asked if it was difficult to return to 20 hits after receiving 20,000 hits, and while none particularly wanted the emotional turmoil or time suckage that accompanies a viral post, most voiced that it was a bit of a letdown to go from that level of excitement to the now seemingly-mundane 20 hits.  Whereas before it happened, they were fairly content with their 20 hits.  That’s what I was thinking about last night as Adele won — that human craving that comes once we receive good attention to want more good attention, to want the good feeling to continue or come back again.

*******

I knew a girl when I was much younger whose parents would never let her do anything, though her two brothers were involved in all sorts of activities.  One day, we were playing in her front yard by running around a tree — this was the sort of excitement we could have at her house — and I asked her why she wasn’t allowed to ride horses with the rest of us.  I grew up in a very horsey area, and it was unusual to meet someone who had never been on a horse.

She told me that it was because her parents only had one girl but they had two boys.  If anything happened to one of her brothers, they would still have a son.  But if something happened to her, they wouldn’t have a daughter.  In my ten-year-old mind, this sounded stupid and I told her so as we ran around the tree.  I said that if she died, they’d be devastated because they had lost their child, and the same would go for one of her brothers.  They wouldn’t be okay with a death just because of the sex of the deceased child.  She just shrugged and told me to ask her dad about it, which I told her I would do and then didn’t because he was sort of a formidable man.

When I was a child, I chalked it up to the simple sexism you saw all over the place where boys were signed up for sports while the girls watched on the sidelines.  Now I wonder if there was another story there, something my friend didn’t know, something her parents never told her.  Why were they so scared that something would happen to her?  What was the story behind the story I could see, the one that made them hold their daughter so close?

*******

I realized over the weekend how much I had drifted apart from an old friend and became incredibly sad about it, though my instinct wasn’t to reach out and drag her close again.  I was complaining to Josh about it, and in doing so, realized that she was never a very good friend at all.  She was the sort who was always there when she needed you, but only returned the support when it was convenient/mindless to do so.  She was never someone I particularly trusted, and when I started to think about the sorts of things I told her, they were things I wouldn’t mind telling the cashier at the grocery store.  I didn’t confide in her, and that — for me — is the biggest sign of how deeply I need the friendship.  Nor did I do any activity with her that I don’t still do now with other people.  Nor did I have more fun when she was around.

So it was sort of crazy to be this upset over realizing that we were no longer friends.

Is it really a loss if the person wasn’t that good a friend to begin with?  If I couldn’t count on her to be there for me?  What am I mourning?

Once, after a negative beta when I was buying hats to cheer myself up, there was a basket of silver hearts and Josh bought two.  From that point on, whenever we’d have an appointment or a procedure, we’d place the hearts in our palms and hold hands so the two hearts were touching.  It became a new superstition — if I went alone to a blood draw, I held the heart, and if we were together for a procedure, we held the hearts, and I started to believe that if we didn’t have the hearts on us at all times that all hell would break loose.

The hearts were in addition to a rock that I always carried in my pocket for good luck and the red string bracelet from Rachel’s tomb that a friend brought back for me from Israel.  After we became pregnant with the twins, I became even more superstitious.  We had known what their names would be for years, having chosen two boy’s names and a girl’s names, but we never used their names.  Even with each other.  I wouldn’t have a baby shower.  And then the twins were born, and I brought more red string from home and tied it around their incubators.

Despite all my rationality, I have always been a superstitious person.  It speaks to my internal “what ifs.”  I pinned Druze blue glass into my wedding dress hem to ensure a good marriage.  We sleep under a blue hamsa.  I never remain in the room for Yizkor during Yom Kippur.  I rationally know that blue glass or a hand symbol or leaving a sanctuary can’t stave off terrible things from happening.  And yet I still do it.  Because what if.

It makes me feel better in a tumultuous world that is entirely out of our control even though I know that carrying certain items or not saying certain things can’t control the world.

Josh sent me an article from Tablet magazine about common Jewish practices in pregnancy and how they have no basis in actual Jewish law even though many Jewish women commonly do them.  There were two quotes in the article that stood out to me:

“Whenever you have a situation where there’s a lot at stake, and you’ve done everything you possibly can to make sure there’s a happy outcome but there’s still a lot of uncertainty, it’s a perfect circumstance for superstitions to emerge,” Stuart Vyse, a professor at Connecticut College who specializes in the psychology of irrational beliefs, told me. “Establishing some kind of ritual or lucky thing you do makes you feel better, because it gives you the illusion of control.”

“A lot at stake” is practically in the definition of every cycle when you’re infertile.  There is always a lot at stake.  Every choice you make leads to 1000 what ifs because so much more is invested in the cycle than what the average person goes through to create a child.  It is more time-consuming, more painful, more emotionally-fraught, more expensive — all of which raise the stakes and in turn make me a superstitious mess.

Then I remembered something Vyse had told me. “Superstitions are intuitive and based on the psychology of feeling good,” he said. “There are psychological incentives for people, even though they know intellectually that it doesn’t matter.”

The only person who is affected by my superstitions (beyond perhaps annoyance) is me.  I like to think of my superstitions as insurance.  Having insurance doesn’t protect you from death or fire or accidents — it literally can’t prevent anything.  And yet we feel safer having that insurance.  It goes beyond the monetary protection and enters into something more akin to magic — that if we plan for the future, that future won’t happen.

So I’ll continue to sew blue glass into the hem of people’s wedding dresses and carry my silver heart to all family-building appointments and sleep under a hamsa and not say the names aloud that we’ve picked out if we have another child.  Because it makes me feel good.  They’re my psychological incentives and I’ll take anything I can get.

Are you superstitious?  What are things you do or don’t do based on your superstitions?

Interesting lesson learned at yoga class — in two of my classes this week, we practiced pranayama, which is breathing in and out of alternating nostrils (I know, the description sounds sexy).  You close your left nostril, breathe out your right nostril, breathe in your right nostril, close your right nostril, and then breathe out your left nostril, so on and so on.

The first time we did it, the teacher commented that at every point in the day, one nostril is clearer than the other.  I can wait a moment — check it out.  Which one is stuffier for you right now?  For me, at the time of writing this, my right nostril is more open.  Our nostrils are on an hour and a half cycle, switching stuffiness throughout the day.  At least I think it’s one and a half hours.  At the moment she was telling us this information, I was turned around to make an orgasm joke to my friend behind me, so I may have misheard her.  Though I have no regrets — the orgasm joke was pretty damn funny in the moment.

She told us that there are certain activities that are better to do when your right nostril is open vs. your left.  For instance, eating is perfect when your right nostril is open because it aids in digestion.  And creative thought is better when your left nostril is open.  Hence why this post is going to suck since I’m right-nostrilly at the moment.

Since I have heard this information, I have been (1) acutely aware of which nostril is more open and (2) also aware that I rarely do the correct activity at the correct time.  I was cursing myself during yoga class for being on the mat when my left nostril was open and I should have been writing.  And then my left nostril opened right when it was time to eat breakfast.  Now that I’ve told you, you will probably be cursed with these same thoughts.

You’re welcome.

*******

I learned two new terms on Thursday, and I need you to teach me one more so I can have the completion of three (because don’t we all learn things in threes?  No?  Am I the only one with this particular neuroses?)  The first also came during a new yoga class.  The teacher was greeting me since I had never been in her class before.  As I was saying hello, I had a big yawn, and when she asked me how I was, I replied, “tired.”

“Oh,” she said, in this totally normal tone of voice.  “Are you a dirty stayout?”

I had to ask her to repeat the term since this yoga teacher could not have called me a dirty stayout, but indeed, I heard correctly.  I needed this explained — a dirty stayout is someone who parties all night, comes home to sleep for an hour or two, and then goes into their day.  Unless you call one berry cosmopolitan consumed around 10 pm a dirty stayout, I was not eligible for this moniker, but I loved it enough that I quickly jotted it down before the class started.

After class, I ran to the grocery store on my way home.  I was chatting with the cashier (who told me that it totally looked as if I had lost weight.  I love living in a small town where you know the backstories of the cashiers and the cashiers know your backstories) and she said to another employee, “Dave is out looking for dead heads.”

Again, I thought I might have misheard, so I asked what dead heads were.  They are the insider’s term for merchandise that customers pick up in one part of the store and ditch in another instead of walking it back to its proper place.  For instance, when I went to grab a carton of butter (my mind immediately going to the poor butter-less Norwegians — I will never be able to look at a carton of butter again), there were a bunch of Amazon gift cards that someone had left in the refrigerated section rather than take back to the gift card rack.  It’s someone’s job at the food store to go “deadheading” — walking up and down the aisles and returning everything to its proper place.

So now I know dirty stayout and dead head.  Teach me one more term I may not know.

*******

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:

• “Backward” (Just Being)
• “It Happened Again” (Simply Not Conceivable) *read the next three posts in this order
• “She Has No Children.  She Has Nothing” (No Kidding in NZ)
• “She’s Not a Mother.  She Has Nothing” (Real Life & Thereafter)
• “The Saddest Chapstick Story You Will Ever Read” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you!
• “Woman vs. Woman” (From IF to When)
• “When You Are Not a Viking, What Do You Do?” (Too Many Fish to Fry)
• “Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow” (The Smartness)
• “The State of the Uterus” (Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed)
• “Validation” (MoJo Working)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Something Out of Nothing has a post about her neurotic behaviour.  She admits, “I obsess over Hubby’s fertility treatments, about next steps, about my own fertility or lack thereof (not that I have done anything about this, as I’m too worried there might actually be something wrong), about the money it will take to get there, about what we’ll do if it doesn’t work, or if it works too well and we end up with twins.  These thoughts never leave me.  While I’m working, while I’m falling asleep, while I’m watching TV, driving, eating, breathing.”  But moreover, she writes about how blogging plays into that equation.  It’s a really good read.

Life’s Little Reflections has a post about how being part of the ALI blogosphere has influenced her thoughts now as a mother, namely, her fears.  She worries about her son if he ever sleeps beyond a certain time and asks if the thoughts she has are normal.  She writes, “I’ve never had a child die – that I could see as an explanation of why I worry about this. Yes, one of the dangers inherent in being involved in the AIL blogosphere is knowing that shit happens. That children die in all stages, for any number of reasons.”  It’s that realization that the most important things are out of your control, and the fear that accompanies that.

Too Many Fish to Fry has a new post up in her Faces of Adoption/Loss/Infertility series featuring a blogger with a run-of-the-mill adoption story.  The point to this series is to provide balance to the mainstream media’s coverage of infertility issues.  Instead of focusing on the Nadya Sulemans, she’s presenting the common woman experiencing infertility — how she feels and what she does.  I would really love to see this series exit our community and reach the mainstream — perhaps hitting some of those people who read the New York Times and have their understanding of infertility shaped from those articles.  Anything you can do to help spread word: Tweet it, Facebook it, Stumble it, Google+ it, Pin it, blog about it, send it to your mother.  Just help get these posts out there.

Lastly, IF Crossroads has a post about the exhausted place she finds herself in from being her own advocate for way too long.  A therapy session brings her to a realization of how long she has had to take care of herself and others.  She states, “There are days when I don’t want to get up out of bed. I’m so tired. So tired of fighting. So tired of making decisions. So tired of worrying if I’m going to let someone down in the process.  I’ve lost myself along the way. I don’t even know what makes ME happy anymore because I’m so focused on everyone and everything else in life.”  No deep reason for why this post spoke to me beyond the fact that she made me wish I could reach my arms through the screen and hug her.

The roundup to the Roundup: Which nostril is stuffier?  Please teach me a new term.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between February 3rd and February 10th) 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.