Many months ago, I teasingly told Kristin that I was going to serenade her at BlogHer, though in the end, I didn’t schlep a laptop much less a guitar.  But that does not mean that I can’t mortify her AND myself by serenading her from afar.  I told her that I would do this when she least expected it…

So Kristin, pretend that we are standing in the hallway of the lovely Marriott, perhaps by that Golden Gate Bridge made out of Twizzlers, and I am on one knee, holding Bob Jackson.  I am wearing cords, my Superman t-shirt (but with a long sleeve grey t-shirt underneath because it’s cold in here!), and my chucks.  I have somehow carried not only a guitar but an amp down to the lobby.  And there you are — so I start to warble.

[audio:https://www.stirrup-queens.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/good2.mp3]

Forgive me for choosing “Good Riddance” — it was the last song I “mastered.”  I use air quotes liberally there because I think we can all see what I mean by “master” by that performance.  I also apologize for the sound quality — Josh’s computer was acting up. And I was trying not to laugh while I sang.  Just in case you were wondering, I am embarrassed about my singing voice, but I figured that you already heard it before so you can’t actually be shocked by it.  Plus, the beauty of doing this online is that I don’t actually need to see your face, to process the horror spreading over it as you listen.

I’d also like to take this moment to apologize publicly to my teacher for not practicing as much as I should.  I know it must annoy the crap out of you when I show up to the lesson and admit that I still haven’t really mastered the song we’re working on because I haven’t given it my all.  I’m saying I’m sorry, but I need to temper this with an admittance that I’ll probably do it again.  Though I hold the kids to a totally different standard when it comes to practicing for their music lessons and then tell them that I practiced at night while they were in bed.  So I guess I’d also like to apologize to the kids for fibbing because while I do that sometimes, I don’t actually do it all that often.

*******

This is the absolute last call to contribute a prize to the 2011 Creme de la Creme (scroll down to #5 on that post).  No prizes will be accepted after October 19th at 11 pm EST.  For a prize to be included, you need to add it as a comment on that post.  In doing so, you’re making the commitment to come through with that prize.  Have no idea what I’m talking about?  Click over and read that post because the Creme de la Creme list for 2011 opens on October 20th.

*******

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:

• “Goodnight, Steve Jobs: a Hero’s Goodbye” (Stirrup Queens) — thanks, Kathy!
• “Rock Your Moxie” (Aiming Low)
• “The Past I Don’t Speak About Here, and Why” (Too Many Fish to Fry)
• “The Silent Struggle” (Adventures of Endo in the Arctic)
• “Perspective: a Rant” (For We Are Bound By Symmetry)
• “Introverted” (Here We Go Again)
• “Falling Away” (Everyone Shut Up But Me)
• “People Plan, and G-d Laughs” (Single Infertile Female)

Okay, now my choices this week.

My Pathway to Motherhood has a post about Yom Kippur, jumping between three Yom Kippurs.  I loved meandering through these three different memories, especially since all three had a very different flavour.

I love The Road Less Travelled’s post about going online for the first time 15 years ago.  It is such a great trip down memory lane — punch cards, Intellivision, dot-matrix printers.  I remember the first time I heard about email when I was 16 — I didn’t believe the boy because it sounded too strange to be true (letters?  That could arrive moments later on someone’s computer?  Over telephone lines?).  Sort of crazy to think about today when hundreds of emails come and go from my inbox daily.

Lastly, Better Full Than Empty has a post questioning why she stepped back on the trying-to-conceive path again when she thought she had escaped it.  She explains: “I want another baby, and this renewed insurance is my chance to make that happen. I have tried all my life to live so I will have as few regrets as possible. When I was rethinking my life’s plan, back when we still didn’t want kids, I came to the conclusion that parents don’t regret having children, but that I would most certainly regret NOT having them.”  Yet trying again means putting herself emotionally back in the throes of IVF again.  She finishes the post with a question, one that many could apply to themselves and their own, personal double-edged sword.

The roundup to the Roundup: Embarrassing myself and Kristin in the process.  LAST CALL FOR CREME DE LA CREME PRIZES.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between October 7th and October 14th) 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.

As organized as I am in many facets of life, my work desk is somewhat of a disaster area — a sea of post-it notes and… more post-it notes and stacks of papers, unused calendars of baby zoo animals (uh, thank you, National Zoo, once again), and invitations.  Buried somewhere on the desk is the computer as well as an unbent paper clip that I often play with while thinking and the ubiquitous penny whistle that I use to annoy everyone in the house.  Next to the desk is a stack of white yaffa blocks that originally came to college with me.  There are haphazardly pushed-in drawers and stacks of books and stacks of book covers (because I don’t like to keep them on the hardback book).  The whole thing is a freakin’ mess.

And it’s the first thing you see when you walk through the front door because the opening to the living room, which is where I have my “office” (I like it in the middle of things so I can be up in everyone’s business in the house… I mean, so I can cook at the same time as working), is down the front hallway.  And my mess is directly positioned in the eye-line of the opening.

My friend and I went to IKEA to buy a new desk.  We had a set of semi-bizarre requirements (which is a whole different story in and of itself) which left us with two options.  One was fine.  One was pure love.

The Jonas is a secretary desk that closes up, locking all of my post-it note piles out of view.  For anyone walking in the house, it looks like I have my shit together.  Pair it with a aspvik file cabinet and you have a brand new home office.  Plus, a file cabinet means that I can engage in my love of colour-coded filing.  Up until this point, important papers were dumped in one of the yaffa block drawers, never to be seen again.  In cleaning up the living room and filling the file cabinet, I found the family tree I created with my grandmother many years ago (it goes back five or six generations), the words I read at her funeral, my book contracts, a short story from grad school with my reading notes included, AND a detention slip that Josh took from a fellow teacher’s desk and filled in for me (as in, I had detention).

We also decided in the same trip to replace the light fixtures in the kitchen.  I have hated our light fixtures for many years, but I’ve never found one better.  But on this trip, my eyes went to a light fixture at the very same moment as my friend pointed to the same light fixture (she knows my tastes well).  I decided immediately to get it, but the icing on the cake is the Swedish name: Fartyg.

We are now referring to all lights as “farty-gees” (as in, “can you turn off the farty-gees if you’re coming upstairs?”), which brings me endless amusement.  Sometimes no one has even said it in hours, but it passes through my mind and I burst out laughing.  Josh commented that my sense-of-humour is like being married to a 10-year-old boy.

Less IKEA-tastic is when one piece broke for the new file cabinet, and I had to drive back to IKEA and spend about two hours trying to get the part.  Which meant that three hours of my day were used up on a broken IKEA piece.  BUT the kicker was that they gave me the wrong replacement part.  So in addition to a more-organized office, I also have a broken drawer that is still waiting for a small piece of plastic.

*******

I once had a boyfriend who commented that I looked tense when I drove because my hands were at 2 o’clock and 10 o’clock on the steering wheel.  He said it in this judgmental tone, one infused with a secondary meaning that I am an uptight bitch OR that I am a terrible driver.  One or the other.  For a long time after he said it, I was self-conscious of it and placed my hands anywhere but 2 and 10.  I would drive one-handed with my fingers curled around the 6 o’clock spot.  Or I’d move them down to an uncomfortable 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock.  Or a completely insane 7 o’clock and 4 o’clock combination.

I still think about this often while I’m driving.

*******

Josh started a new Twitter account, @OldPeopleMag, based on the fact that we are notorious for having People magazines from pre-2008 lying around the house.  Which means that in our world, Brittany and Federline are together forever!  And Bennifer has a real future.  And… er… when we read People magazine, it’s digesting all the news within the frame of knowing how their relationships turned out…  Favourite recent tweets:

If you ask me there’s only one way to describe Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer: A-D-O-R-A-B-L-E! I think Jen hears wedding bells!

NBC announced it will bring it’s sexy, new drama “Playboy Club” to prime time in the fall. It’s the next Mad Men for sure!

Tony Romo and Jessica Simpson look so happy together. A great quarterback and a great entertainer together forever!

Does Bristol Palin have what it takes to win Dancing With the Stars? Will her mom run for President? #dwts

*******

Josh had an inspired parenting moment this past week.  The ChickieNob woke up around 11 pm, disoriented and upset, insisting that Josh wasn’t allowed to go to sleep and needed to check on her every minute.  He had bent down to hug her while she was crying, and she had his neck in a death grip.  We went back and forth with her for about 10 minutes, trying to tease out what was upsetting her, insisting that she needed to sleep, and that it would be unhealthy (and insane) for her father to forgo sleep so he could open her bedroom door and peek in once every 60 seconds.

He asked her to reach into her heart and hand him her worries and promised that he would keep them in his pocket so she didn’t have to have her worries in bed with her at night.  I thought that idea was fantastic, though the ChickieNob touched her chest, touched his hand, and then went back to bawling.

He was standing up to leave the room, and she had reached hysteria proportions, screaming and crying as if he had just announced that he was putting all of her stuffed animals through the shredder, when he took off his white t-shirt and handed it to her.  “Why don’t you sleep with this?”  It was still warm from his body and had his smell.  She stopped crying, curled back up in the bed, and went to sleep clutching it.

It’s what we used to do when we first separated the twins from the same crib.  She couldn’t sleep without her brother and would sob, so we started putting her to sleep with a burp cloth that he had soiled with his smelly special formula vomit and drool.  And we’d give him one of her soiled burp cloths.  And they’d both curl up with the other one’s smell (their heads also only three inches from each other since the cribs were in the same room) and go to sleep.

Sometimes we just need a reminder of the other person with us at all times.

What is your favourite smell memory?  What smell brings you comfort?

About ten years ago, my car gotten broken into while it was parked near Josh’s apartment.  I used to leave for work around 6 am to get there on time, which meant that it was usually dark and the streets empty.  As I walked towards my car, I could tell that something was wrong.  There were cassette tapes on the front passenger seat and the glove box was open.  I couldn’t imagine how the glove compartment could pop open like that on its own nor how the tapes could be projected onto the seat simply by the glove box coming open.  As I got closer, I saw that there was shattered glass across the backseat, so I started walking backwards away from the car and ran back up to his apartment.

He came downstairs to inspect the damage, which was fairly minimal.  The back window had been smashed open.  Someone had taken a handful of change that I used for meters.  They had left the dollar bills in the glove box.  They had left the radio.  They had taken a few mix tapes.

The car smelled like the person, and it was clear that while he or she wasn’t there now, they had spent some time sitting in my car, going through the items in there.

I drove home bawling, unable to articulate why I was so upset from it.  No one was hurt.  The window itself cost under $100 to replace.  The person took less than $2 in change though there was probably $20 at the top of the glove box.  It’s the reality of city living; it happens all the damn time.  And it sucks when it does, but you fix the window and move on.  It’s not worth dwelling on beyond the initial tire kick of frustration.

And yet, here I am, over ten years later, writing about it.

I still can’t articulate what bothered me so much about having my space invaded except that it bothers me to have my space invaded.  I think it bothers most people to have their space invaded — different cultures like to literally keep varying circles of physical space around each person.  I perhaps had a stronger reaction to the event because I had been violated in a different manner years before that and perhaps transferred the powerlessness I felt in that situation to this one, but still, if you knew that someone had been in your house, touched your things, took nothing and left, wouldn’t you still have your stomach twist like a wrung towel?

And can you explain to me why?  When no one is hurt, nothing of value is taken (neither sentimental nor monetary).  Why do we cling to our privacy, when our privacy doesn’t really have that much value.  I mean, consider your life — it makes sense to fight to protect your life.  But what about protecting your privacy or your figurative space (which is comprised of your physical space and your intangible space)?  Why do we fight so hard to keep information to ourselves, especially when nothing truly horrific could come from other people knowing that information?  What could possibly happen if you knew how much money I made or what music I listen to or where I shop?  How could that possibly affect my life except that it does in the same way that I can’t really explain how that person sitting in my car affected my life.

Maybe it is due to age, or maybe it is due to the far-reaching hand of the Internet, but I can feel myself cocooning over my figurative space more and more.  Every new privacy change roll out on Facebook makes me consider deleting my account.  I used to be quick to try out new software or social media sites.  Now I start by looking at the terms of service, then read up on the site, and then, once I’ve spent more time considering it than any site is probably worth, I decide whether or not to make that account.  I miss out on things I’d really like to try simply because I think they take too big a bite out of my figurative space.

For instance, Spotify.  I’d like to try Spotify mostly because one of my friends told me about Spotify and then we could hear each other’s music (thank you, Magpie!)  But I don’t want to download software or set up yet another account or link it to Facebook in order to try it.  Sometimes more is simply more.

Opening Internet accounts reminds me of the warnings I got about how opening a lot of store credit card accounts could hurt me.  They entice you with the discount, but unless you honestly shop at that store regularly enough to reap more than the initial 20% off your purchase, opening all of those accounts harms your credit.  Which is a trade off that will affect you enormously when you go to do something important such as buy a house.

And I think having too many Internet accounts and not being a bit discerning does the same thing.  You’re enticed with the promise of something fun, but unless you’re going to keep it up to make opening the account worth it, you’re going to find that having all of those accounts will affect your emotional well-being, especially in regards to feeling cluttered and overwhelmed.  Many of them send out constant reminders to use their site (yes, Facebook, I’m talking about you).  When there’s too much noise in your life it harms your life credit score; that one that tells you whether you have the emotional bank account to afford weathering stressors.

A friend told me recently that she needs to go to an ashram to calm her body from information overload.

I would totally join her.

Because the Internet is beginning to feel like a boulder somersaulting down a hill.  Too many new sites pop up daily, dividing people’s attention.  Sometimes I open Twitter only to shut it again because it feels like 140 people are all talking at me at the same time.  And then there is the reality that we’re being told that our lives should be more like open books, we should visually show all of our connections.

We should mash all of our friends together into one big pot of friend soup on Facebook.  We should like businesses and show where we shop.  I open the Washington Post and I can see which of the people I’m connected to via social media sites have linked to an article.  I can see what music my friends listen to, where they’ve physically been, who we know in common.

And does it really matter?  Does it matter, as Josh asked me, if people know that I listen to a lot of Green Day? (Okay, that’s a lie.  What Josh actually said when we discussed this was, “it’s interesting that you are fine telling the world that you have wonky ovaries, but you draw the line with letting the world know that you love Wham.”)

Maybe the difference is that I choose to tell the world about my wonky ovaries.  This is my space and I have the ultimate control over it.  I can decide what I write or what I don’t write.  Maybe my discomfort is in turning over access to my figurative space and allowing another person to control it.  They are deciding if people know that I listened to “Careless Whisper” on my iPod, not me.  Except… er… that I just told you.  But that’s not the point.  The point is that when I go to someone else’s site, they have control over my privacy.  And while I can’t articulate why it bothers me, I know that it does bother me.  And shouldn’t I follow my gut on that one, even if my gut is irrational and can’t prove anything and swims against the Internet stream of sites that other people love?

I am hoping that this isn’t making me sound like a crotchety old woman pouring over TOS contracts with a yellow highlighter.  Because there are the sites that I embrace, that I use regularly, that feel worth the trade-off.  I give them some of my privacy, and they give me back an excellent distraction.

The world is moving towards more transparency, more lack of walls between inside the house and outside, even if the people in the world kick and scream a bit about it.  We’re encouraged to post more, admit more, connect more — especially bringing together the various places we frequent, the people we know.  The more that is expected of me to reveal, the more I become circumspect, desiring privacy.  I’m not sure I’m completely ready to live with a glass wall on the front of my house, which is a strange thing for a person who writes about her wonky ovaries to say.

It’s nothing I need to hide, but it’s also not things I need everyone to know.

And maybe the Internet is different because it feels more permanent.  Once privacy is breached on the Internet, it never truly goes away since nothing disappears completely from the Internet.  That person in my car was a single person entering my space without my implicit permission.  But the Internet — with all my various connections — is like finding hundreds of people entering my space without my implicit permission.  I expect anything I put here is fair game; I’ve invited you to know it.  The tangential information that comes from social media sites — such as who we know in common — is an uncontrollable side effect from using the site.

My privacy means very little to me when I hold it up against things that do mean a lot to me.  And yet I am dragging my heels with social media sites, with shopping online, with partaking in new software.

And I can’t help but think about that person who sat in my car.  Who took very little, but obviously imprinted something into my skin by their actions, something I can still sense over ten years later even if I don’t have the words to describe it.

Do you feel the same way about your figurative space in the world (both your physical space as well as the intangible, online, information-based world)?  Can you explain why we value our privacy so much, and what is our privacy anyway?

Josh pointed out that we’re going on holiday soon-ish, and when he said the words, I felt my heart drop a little, almost like my muscles fumbled for a moment.  I don’t want the holiday to get here, not because I don’t want a vacation — I desperately do want a vacation — but because I love still having it in front of us.  Once we go, it will mean that we’re one step closer to having it over.  And then it will actually be over and we’ll have to deal with that down period that comes after a long-awaited trip or event.

I like to call this time period my pre-disappointment.

I felt this way about my wedding too.  I sort of didn’t want the day to arrive because then it would all be over, and I’d have to jump back into regular life.  And add to that my Bat Mitzvah, I didn’t want that to start either. (Though that may have had more to do with the fact that it was the year of the cicada, and I had all sorts of fears of going from the car to the shul with my hair down — a perfect nest for catching flying cicadas.)

And then I think about the things that I want now, that I’d rather be in the moment doing it, even if it means that at some point, I’ll have to move to having memories rather that still have it before me: I felt that way about college.  I was nervous to go, but I wanted to already be living the first day back when I was still in my junior year of high school.  I obviously feel that way about children; I want them here.  I want to be experiencing them now.  I don’t want to be working towards a time when I have a baby.

So I sort of don’t want this trip to start because that will also mean that it’s also close to being over, and I am going to be so down after this vacation ends.

Am I the only one who gets this way?

A very simple roundup today to bring order to a very chaotic, emotion-filled week.

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:

• “On the Night of my 33rd Birthday” (Mrs. Spit)
• “The Limits of Empathy” (NYT)
• “Waiting and Ready” (Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed)
• “2 1/2 Years” (Caring for Carleigh)
• “Dear Embryos” (I’m Very Far Away)
• “Good Enough” (The Oregon Tail)
• “Mexico Here We Come!” (Starfish Kitty Dreams)
• “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the REs Office” (A Single Journey)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Family Building with a Twist has a post about her fear of the passive Internet Shut-up, which is essentially, the Internet Ignore.  How does not having your words read or commented on affect how you write, how you express yourself?  Does it seep into the face-to-face world and how you communicate — or stop communicating — with others?  It’s a beautiful post about choosing to write and tuning everything else out.

I Lost a World talks about that desire to keep your child from sadness.  She writes, “I hurt for the fact that she was born into this particular sadness, into the loss of a brother, and that I can’t protect her from it. I can try to help her come to an understanding that works for her, and I can be honest, and I can try to create a sense of safety so that she can tell me how she feels and can ask questions as she has them … But I can’t bring him back for her, can’t erase what his loss has done to us or the fact that it’s helped shape who we are as a family.”  It is a gorgeous, aching post.

A Fertile Mind has a post about people craving the happy ending.  Listen to this brilliant observation: “We have inadvertently joined a club and those who were unwilling to hear of our struggles previously are now ready to listen to the story of how long it took us to have a baby.  Even though the baby isn’t even here yet.  Our story now gives them hope that things really do turn out alright in the end.”  Or this incredibly powerful statement: “I think I just wish that people had listened to our story when I needed them to.” Which begs the question: what do people do who don’t have the happy ending in sight?

Lastly, Battlefish has a post about feeling like a broken record in discussing her mother’s death.  I think this is a powerful post because it’s a reminder of how we don’t know what is happening in another person’s head.  She writes, “I am finding it hard to believe that no one seems to notice how sad I am on my really down and melancholy days. Am I really that good of an actress that no one sees it?”

The roundup to the Roundup: No big wrap-up needed; just lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between September 30th and October 7th) 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.