I’m finding it difficult this week to get any traction on work.  Part of me feels like it would be better to just let it go, stop stressing, release myself from any feeling of pressure and try again next week.  Part of me knows that it’s really a waste of time to not be getting work done AND to spend the time beating myself up about it.  That part of me knows that if I’m not going to get anything accomplished the least I can do is count it as a mental vacation and take the time to read a book or watch a movie.  De-stress.

But instead of doing that, I spend all my time arguing with myself about the fact that I don’t deserve a break.  That I’m an idiot for wasting time when I could be working.  I am really hating my internal voice right now.

I wish I could slap her sometimes.

Please tell me it was something in the air and not my own fault.  Did you have trouble focusing this week?

*******

I haven’t gotten a chance to see the book yet, but Michael Barr, a blogger, put out a book about infertility from the male perspective called Swimming in Circles.  From the book information on Amazon:

Swimming in Circles provides an all-access pass into the private life of a couple faced with situations ranging from the embarrassing to the absurd, and decisions that are impossible one moment and incomprehensible the next. This truly unique memoir is told from the usually neglected male perspective and is filled with gallows humor peppered in between the depths of disappointment and the peaks of possibility.

It just feels like there’s a real dearth of the male perspective out there, so I thought I’d put this out there.

*******

The Weekly What If: What if you could read, internalize, and have a complete understanding of any work of literature without having to actually sit down and read it simply by touching the cover?  You could only do this with one book.  Which one would you choose?

*******

And now, the blogs…

Baby, Interrupted had a post about an accident that was avoided though the residue of what could have been still remains.  I read the post with my hand over my mouth.  She writes, “If I had been looking down, changing the radio station.  If I had been reaching into the back seat to retrieve her teething ring.  If I had taken the moment to glance at my phone.  If, if, if…”  The post will make your heart stop.

Sugar Donor had a post last Thursday that I didn’t read until Friday about a horrible, irreversible mistake with the doctor’s office.  I sat on commenting because it was so raw that I couldn’t pull my thoughts together; and I still can’t now.  She calls it a small part of the whole, but it’s not just the mistake, it’s what it represents.  She writes so heartbreakingly at the end of the post: “I literally have nothing from this pregnancy, nothing. No pictures, no connections, nothing.”  It’s the repetition of all the times the letters N and O come together in those two sentences that makes me want to scream for her.  Losing that information is both part of the whole and its own loss.  And my heart just went out to her.

Flotsam often asks good questions, and this post is about drawing your personal lines.  She promises this question ties into a specific post, one that hints that her line has been pushed (perhaps I’m reading too much into that?), and says, “How much do you let others dictate what remains private and what becomes public?”  The discussion is interesting as well.

Lastly, The Road Less Travelled has a post that made me smile about the pregnancy of fictive kin.  Maybe it’s because she captured in words the love and fear and longing and hope and excitement that she feels about this impending birth.  About how it will change things.

The roundup to the Roundup: Absolutely no ability to concentrate this week.  Book about the male perspective with infertility.  Answer the Weekly What If.  And lots of great posts to read.

After I wrote the question for last week’s Weekly What If, it keep tugging at me mentally, would I want to be there for the beginning or the end?  The birth or the death?

What if you could either be transported to the first show or the last show of your favourite band.  Would you rather go see them before they became the polished musicians you know them to be; to catch that first spark?  Or would you rather go enjoy their last hurrah?

I was couching it in terms of a band, but I think (at least for me) what it really comes down to where is your comfort level with death.  With a few exceptions that come to mind, I think most people are excited to be there at a birth.  But how many of us would opt to be there for a death?

While there are many who would answer affirmatively, point out that they wouldn’t want to miss out on any time they could possibly have with the person, there are a great number of people, I would guess, who might want to be close by, but not actually in the room.  Or not even close by — there are plenty of people who are more comfortable remembering the person as they were when they were vibrant and don’t want their final memory to be that moment of death.

And I think all options are valid — a person needs to do what a person needs to do to feel comfortable.  There is no right or wrong way to say goodbye.  Or to not say goodbye, as it were.

*******

I would hazard a guess to say that we have fewer opportunities to be there at a birth than to be there at a death (with perhaps the exception of certain professions).  I’ve met exactly two people on the first day of their life and those would be the twins.  I’ve met some people a few days into life, but most people I’ve met months or years or decades into their life.  Isn’t that a strange thing to think about?  How few people you’ve known since the moment they were born when you consider all those important people around you?

This concept is thought about deeply in adoption circles, and people have written much more eloquently that I could about what that moment of birth means.  Missing out on a person’s birth is a loss — a deep loss that we can barely wrap our minds around, so we instead joke about it through movies such as Due Date — and yet the rational side of our brain knows that the best is yet to come.  It’s exciting to be there for the beginning, but is simply seeing a person exist more exciting than seeing them walk for the first time or ride a bike or graduate high school or get their first job?

Birth sort of feels like the beginning of a band, where you can sense that you like the music, but you have no idea what the band’s full potential is during those first few chords.  I’m not sure it would be that exciting to see my favourite bands when they were pimply teenagers barely able to strum a few chords.  The music certainly wouldn’t sound like the music I know and love today.  Whereas there are milestone concerts along the way that I’d love to have been at.

And while I don’t like the idea of saying goodbye to something or someone I love, I think I would opt to be there at the end, to have known as much as I could about the journey.  It takes time for love to full entwine itself around your heart as much as it can wrap itself fairly tightly at first sight; at first knowledge.  I would rather be loving that person (or in the case of our what if, band) with my whole heart, having that love in every single one of my pores as I say goodbye, having all of the knowledge that comes with being part of something or someone.  I never want to say goodbye; I am terrible at goodbyes.  But I think I would rather miss out on a birth than ever miss out on a death.

Which is to say that, of course, I’d rather be at both.  I’d rather be at neither.

*******

Which leads us to our next logical thought — what about when the beginning is the end?  When the birth is the death?  When they come in quick succession or when death precedes the birth?  When the two are wrapped so tightly into a single package that they become inseparable.  The birth is the death.  The death is a birth.

Just writing that paragraph made me cry.

*******

We recently got to the part of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone where Harry encounters the Mirror of Desire and sees his parents.  The ChickieNob had turned her body so her face was pressing into the back of the sofa because she was scared of Professor Snape (who almost bumped into Harry in that scene).  The Wolvog had his head bent over the arm that held the book, half looking at the page, and half resting his forehead and just listening.

And then I noticed that my arm was wet.  The Wolvog had been crying, thinking about how Harry’s one desire was to see his parents and how he had grown up in life obviously missing their birth, but also not consciously there for their death.  He talked about it in terms of Harry, how it would be so sad to say hello and goodbye at the same time, seeing them for the first time in the mirror, but also knowing that it’s not real, it’s just a reminder of a goodbye.

But, of course, what he was really talking about was this knowledge in the back of his mind, the one too terrible to actually think about too deeply yet, is that one day his own parents wouldn’t be here anymore.  That everyone dies.

And seeing him process that book was seeing this premonition of how my own children would possibly grieve my death in the future.  That I am going to bring this pain on to them one day; it’s unavoidable.  I am going to devastate my children by dying.

And that absolutely gutted me.

We take such care not to yell at them.  Not to tear down their self-esteem.  We beat ourselves up when we snarl at our kids because we’re having a bad day.  And yet, we are going to do something unspeakable horrific to them in the future and there is nothing we can do about it.  They’ll do this to their own children.

And that thought, that there will one day be a goodbye, one day be an end of the band, one day be a choice of whether they want to be there for the end of my life — that is what gutted me.

The quiet is explained and order comes back to my world.  Some are ready to rumble, some are not ready to rumble, and others are totally cool with other people rumbling, but it’s not their thing.

I appreciate all the feedback and all of it is valid.  I work from home, so it’s easy enough for me to click on a sound player or video — the same wouldn’t be true if I was still teaching.  If you aren’t out to people about your infertility, it would obviously not be a great idea to link to that post because you would have some explaining to do.  And I too like to find new music and such and find it difficult now that I’m out of the college/commuting world.  I see it akin to making friends — I can certainly still do it, but it’s harder to meet new people as you get older.

And I appreciate most of all the point May brought up about this being an infertility blog and an online weekly concert is decidedly not about infertility.  It’s not, and I think that point deserves an explanation.

I think some of it comes from how we define this space.  It’s my personal blog, reflective of my world, but it’s also a community space.  It has an overwhelmingly ALI-slant, and I’d even go so far as to define myself as an infertility blogger.

But I think it helps to know that while other people see this as an infertility blog, I don’t.  I see myself as a general diarist with an infertility slant; a small difference in definition, but I think an important one.

I’ve never kept a journal on a single topic, changing journals as my focus changed.  My dating journals also charted where I was career-wise and my friendships and travel.  I would say that from 1999 — 2001, I was very focused on the fact that I was single.  I wanted to be married.  I wrote about that a lot.  And I would even label those journals “the post-graduate school  dating years.”  But they never solely contained my feelings on relationships.  They were overwhelmingly about being single, but they also reflected everything else that traveled through my life at that point.

The same goes for my early marriage journals and my infertility journals.  I wrote about treatments, I wrote about losses, I wrote about my frustrations and self-hatred.  But I also wrote about my high school reunion and trips we took and interactions with family members.  The point is that I’ve never kept to a single topic in any of my journaling — even if a single topic overwhelmingly defined my day-to-day world — and therefore, I’ve never actually done that with this space.

I mean, literally, look back.  I write about everything here.  I’ve never had a point where 100% of the posts in a week had to do with infertility.  I write a lot about blogging and social media and community.  I write sometimes about the twins or our travels.  Mostly, I write about things that affect me, that cross my mind, that I notice.  And all of that is done with a brush that has been dipped in infertility.

It is impossible for me to divorce my outlook from my experience.  It is also impossible for me to contain myself solely to a single topic.

What I am extremely mindful of as I write in this space is the audience I know. (There is a much larger audience I don’t know simply because they’ve never spoken up and told me anything about themselves, though I can see they are reading.)  There are things you’ll rarely to never see here, such as pictures of babies.  It doesn’t bother me when I encounter them on another person’s blog, but I personally don’t post pictures of babies.  Some of that is a lack of desire to have that on my site.  Some of that is a mindfulness that while it doesn’t bother me, it bothers some other people quite a bit.  Which brings us to the fine line.

This is all a long way to say that I start from a place of trying to be inclusive and not offend, but along the way, in order to be myself and to have this space be a reflection of me, there will be people who will inevitably feel excluded or offended.  It’s just not possible to please all people all the time; at least, that is the case if I’m ever going to state an opinion.  And even if I don’t state an opinion, just the mere fact that I’ve written about a certain topic sometimes offends people — they just don’t want me to be effusive or supportive of a group of people, for instance*.

So I walk a fine line.  Sometimes, my knee-jerk reaction to defining this space is an internalization of that Doug character from MTV’s The State, “What are you going to do?  Send me up to my room and take away my music?  I’m Doug and I can’t be locked in a cage like some sort of mannimal.”  BUT even if that is my knee-jerk reaction, I really do need and like to be challenged or hear what you have to say; how you process your world where it meets mine.

So after I got the Doug out of my system, I looked at the idea and whether I needed it, and the answer is yes.  Right now, I’m distracting myself from larger issues by taking guitar lessons.  It has become this focal point for the week and practice has become a focus of my day.  Concert on the Blog is an extension of that — of wanting to connect with others who want to have the same (or similar) distraction.  It’s also giving something I can give to something I want to support (artists).  Not everything I schedule for it will be something I love, and I don’t expect that everything I schedule will be something you’ll love.

I suspect that a few things will resonate with you, most will be forgettable, a few things may even offend you or make you roll your eyes.

At the end, there are no changes to this site beyond the natural changes that occur as a person or place ages and grows.  The core of the site remains the same — it aims to be inclusive,* it has a clear infertility-focus, it is a reflection of how I see the world and what is important to me at any given time.  And more than that, I want non-ALI readers because I think taking the message out of community has been what I’ve also been about since the beginning (and part of that is an extension of being very out about infertility in both the online and face-to-face world).

Whether it’s taking the message to the Hill and talking about infertility to congresspeople, or building a bridge between a non-ALI reader and an ALI-reader, I have never wanted this space to be a self-contained sphere — I’ve always wanted it to be an amorphous blob.  I want people to pass in and out of it, expecting that those affected by infertility will be mainly who is here (after all, don’t we gravitate towards our own?  About 95% of the blogs I read are by others in the ALI community), but also welcome anyone who comes over from BlogHer or the other places I live on the Web.

I want them to connect with me, learn about infertility, and walk away from here with a different understanding than what they are getting from the mainstream media:

That we’re not desperate or baby-crazy or selfish.  That we’re merely people with a disease, trying to treat it or circumvent it in order to build our family.

It’s the reason I open things like IComLeavWe to everyone in the blogosphere with the hope that connections are made.  That I learn about something non-IF related, and they learn about something IF-related.  And at the same time, I still keep things such as the weekly Friday Blog Roundup or the Creme de la Creme (I swear I am going to finish the list soon) to ALI-only.  Because we need our own stuff too.  And frankly, if I mostly only read IF blogs and the Roundup is a reflection of what I read that resonated with me, you’re going to get IF blogs too.

So… I hope that this makes sense.  It’s not anything I haven’t said before, but I thought it best to respond on here rather than privately.  Because I wanted everyone who weighed in to know I had heard you, I sat with the thoughts after I got the Doug out of my system, and if I ultimately decided to still continue on, I owed you a reason.

And an enormous thank you to the people who challenge me, who make me think — if this space grows and changes, it’s because you’re the force that moves me instead of leaving me to stagnation.

*Though it has been pointed out to me numerous times that in order to be inclusive, I am, by definition, excluding people who feel uncomfortable about the people I’m including — see what I mean about a fine line?

…Or in the case of what has already been scheduled, bliss out or laugh out… No, really are you?  Because y’all are awfully quiet about this idea.  I feel like I ran into the room and screamed, “let’s get ready to rumble” and everyone sort of turned to listen, so I know they heard, but just stared right at me.  Mouths straight.  Limbs unmoving.  Not really ready to rumble at all.  Though also not not-ready-to-rumble.  Sort of in rumble limbo.

So are you ready to rumble?  Or are you sort of like, “whoa, I’m not really ready to listen to music or see short films or encounter a comedy routine.  In fact, I don’t like performances at all.”

Or are you somewhere in the middle like me — I like to be exposed to new music, film, art, and such, and either I walk away wanting more or I feel like it was two minutes decently spent even if it didn’t resonate with me.  And I always like the idea of interacting with artists — even if it’s just to give them my opinion.  In other words, are you interested or dreading Concert on the Blog?

Do you sometimes wish that I had fewer bloggy ideas?  Trying to make sense of the quiet.

And to go about this backwards — what do you like to listen to?  What type of music or specific bands?  This will help me in doing outreach to bands and scheduling as well as perhaps introduce me to new paths.

Can you tell that I’m excited about this?  And the artists are excited.  So are you?  And what do you hope to hear?

We were due, right, for another bloggy idea?  My blog ideas seem to always come around in the spring, just as sure as animals copulate and flowers bloom.  And this one is fantastic…

…an online performance series called Concert on the Blog.

The idea came to me from three directions.  One, I am considerably blessed in the blog traffic department.  I get a lot of opportunities due to this space, and I often feel the need to pay it forward and let others use it too.  Two, Josh and I have been starting to cement which concerts we’ll attend this summer, and it struck me that I often prefer to watch concert DVDs than go to the live show.  Something about the ability to hit pause, not have to travel, and no lines for the bathroom makes them incredibly appealing at times.  Three, it is very hard to do fine art publicity and being an online pollinator is one thing I do semi-well.  It all comes down to using my blogging powers for good instead of evil.  So… the Concert on the Blog series was born.

Every Thursday morning, a new post will go up that will showcase a particular musician, film, theater performance, comedy routine, etc.  Towards the bottom of the post is the “virtual lobby” where visual artists and photographers can have their work showcased.  All viewers/listeners will be able to leave messages for the featured artists in the comment section.  Hopefully, if the music, film, or art strikes you, you will pay it forward by supporting the artist or telling other people about their work via your own Twitter feed or Facebook status.

Music and movies will not play unless you click them (just in case you were semi-horrified at the idea of being accosted by music every Thursday if you click over).

If you would like to be included (and artists will range from those who are trying to make a living via their art to those who are just starting out) or you know someone who could benefit from this, please read on or pass word along. I’ve compiled the instructions in a permanent post that will also contain the archives for older performances.  But basically,

• Anyone can submit their work.  You do not need to be a regular reader of this blog.  In fact, please pass along word of this concert series to any friends or family members that you know could benefit from the publicity.  Each performance will potentially initially reach 25,000 people (though, of course, not all will watch, listen, or click over to learn more about the artist.  Though I hope YOU do).

• There are no limits on the type of performance: any type of music, any type of film, any type of theater, any type of comedy routine… the options are endless (The answer to all possible questions is yes).

• Musicians/actors/directors should send an email with COTB in the subject line containing the following information:

1. Title of the band or piece.  In other words, how you wish your name to appear and have the piece labeled.
2. Background information viewers might want to know.
3. Links that you’d like included such as a band website, Facebook page or iTunes store.
4. Any message you want to communicate with the viewer.
5. The url for the video uploaded to YouTube, Vimeo or another embeddable service — OR — an MP3 sound file (please do not send video files).

• Visual artists/photographers should send an email with COTB in the subject line containing the following information:

1. Title of the piece as well as how you want your name to appear.
2. Any background information about your work.
3. Links that you’d like included such as to your website or a place to purchase your work.
4. Any message you want to communicate with the viewer.
5. A JPG or PNG file of the image.  If it is already hosted elsewhere on the Web, please give me the full url for the piece.

• Everyone will receive an email back within the week.  If  you are chosen for the series, you will also receive a date for when your performance is set to air.  Everyone is eligible to submit again in the future — both people who aren’t accepted as well as those who have already performed.

• You do not need to do anything after you submit your materials.  I will be doing the layout and publicity via my blog, Twitter, and Facebook for your online performance.  After your performance date, return to read the comments left for you by viewers.  Feel free to add your own or answer questions that are left for you.

• Still have a question that isn’t answered here?  Email me with COTB in the subject line.

So, that’s basically it.  Any weeks that I don’t have a performance scheduled will be filled by a music video Josh or I curate from YouTube.  The ChickieNob and Wolvog have been put in charge of curating art if we have a week without photography or visual art scheduled.  So there will be something every Thursday starting April 7th.  It’s just up to you (“you” being the collective mix of artists, musicians, actors, directors, performers out there) whether blog readers are entertained by a performance they’ve never experienced before (and therefore learn about new music, films, or theater) or whether they are subjected to watching a YouTube video of a middle school performance of Les Miserables.

I already have the first few performances lined up, so go put April 7th on your calendar for the kick-off to the series.  I originally conceptualized this as a summer series, but I realized that the desire to find new music or see a good video isn’t limited to the summer.  And unlike outdoor venues, an online performance series doesn’t require good weather.

So yank out your classical music, your rock and roll, your jug band.  Send in your digital short or that cartoon you made.  Go film yourself performing your one-woman storytelling show in your living room.  In other words, get your art on.  Or simply come here to listen and view every Thursday morning.