489th Friday Blog Roundup

Proving just how enormous and scattered the ALI blogosphere is, I had never heard of the Wiegands until they released the trailer for
American Blogger, though the wife of the filmmaker — Casey Wiegand — started her blog after her miscarriage.  The women in the film are all Casey’s friends from the blogosphere, but I don’t recognize any of them.

I am going to be completely mortified if one of you writes and tells me that you were in the film.  Actually, no wait, I’m not going to be mortified.  You’re bloggers.  I pay attention to your words, not what you look like.  Excluding the people I’ve already met, I can only identify a handful of you by sight if I bumped into you in the grocery store, and that’s with staring at your Facebook picture in my newsfeed.  Most people don’t look exactly like their picture anyway.

It works both ways: you likely wouldn’t be able to pick me out of a crowd.  I’ve only be recognized once.  And it was in an airport bathroom.  And it was only because the person had been reading Life from Scratch and had the book closed and facedown in her lap during the flight, so she was staring at my picture for awhile.  And then I was washing my hands in the same airport bathroom.  How trippy is that?

Do you guys know who is in this film?

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I have fallen deeply in love with Newman’s Own Cinnamon mints.  I’ll admit that I avoided buying them for years because the tin exclaims in bright red letters HOT.  And I wasn’t so into the idea of putting something in my mouth that visually proclaimed itself to be so spicy that it made tigers growl.  And then on a whim, I bought a box.  And ended up eating the whole thing in a few days.  And then purchasing two more boxes: one for the purse and one as a back-up.

They’re not that spicy.  They have a great taste of cinnamon.  They’re sort of like a red-hot without cringe-y ingredients like confectioner’s glaze (otherwise known as an excretion of the lac bug).  And they’re always now in my purse if you want one.

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And now the blogs…

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

• “Breathing Is Hard: Thoughts On Crying And Singing” (Schrodinger’s Catbox)
• “On Grief: The Quiet Moments” (My Cheap Version of Therapy)
• “Scars” (Sweetest in the Gale)
• “Late for the Party” (Mine to Command)
• “It’s a Hike” (Conceptionally Challenged)

Okay, now my choices this week.

An Engineer Becomes a Mom about releasing her anger.  It is an incredibly powerful post, and the author lets out a loud roar, especially to the people who make armchair judgments while her heart is in the middle of the fray.  “It’s hard to own up to this anger that as an adoptive parent.  We are supposed to say and do the right things, think child-centric, be compassionate to the parents, and sometimes to let ourselves get hurt during the process.  Because we do get hurt during the process.”  It’s a must-read.

A Half-Baked Life has a post about losing the house they were about to buy that reminded me of house hunting in the middle of treatments.  She draws her own analogy between miscarriages and buying a house, as well as pointing out the ways these two life experiences diverge.  It’s a great post, plus you get the villanelle “One Art” to boot.

Lastly, Silent Sorority has a post about the concept of “healing” and whether it’s an accurate term to ever use in regards to suffering.  She talks about a recent David Brooks piece, pointing out that “We’re reminded daily that it’s bad form to remain too long in a negative state. Society is uncomfortable — plain and simple — when the iconic happy face is not front and center.”  I absolutely love this line: “There’s nothing quite so dark as seeing yourself at your worst and then discovering your heart is blacker than you might have imagined.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Who is in American Blogger?  Love Newman’s Own Cinnamon mints.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between April 4th and April 11th) 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.