670th Friday Blog Roundup

Last week, we went to the movies and the woman behind the counter seemed familiar.  I asked her if she had ever worked at a shop in town, and she immediately said, “Was I rude to you?”

I was taken aback, and I said, “No, absolutely not.”

But she kept repeating, “I probably was rude.  That’s just how I was back then.”  I kept reassuring her that I only had fond memories of interactions with her at the shop.  She wouldn’t look at me; she just kept smiling tensely at the counter between us and repeating her assertion that she had probably been rude.

I was thrown off because I couldn’t tell if she had been fired over interactions with customers and she still carried baggage from that situation, or if she had left by her own volition and was in a constant state of inwardly cringing at her past.  All I know is that my subconsciousness associates her with kindness and good times and happiness.  So clearly the way she remembers herself is very different from how I viewed her as an outsider.

I guess I’m saying this because I’m still thinking about it, and that it goes both ways.  That outsiders may judge us harshly without knowing our story.  And, at the same time, we may judge ourselves harshly whereas strangers view us as a source of kindness.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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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:

• “Breaking the Silence: Why I Stayed” (Just J.o)
• “Who is Sitting Next to You” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Cristy!
• “#Microblog Mondays: Baby Parade” (My Path to Mommyhood)
• “The Birth Plan: Pregnancy After Loss Style” (PALS)
• “Struggling” (The Road Less Travelled)
• “So, Why Didn’t We Just Adopt?” (Not So Mommy)
• “Advice Column Gets It Wrong” (Infertile Phoenix)

Okay, now my choices this week.

An Engineer Becomes a Mom has a post about the universe working in strange ways to bring the right thing at the right moment.  In this case, it was a telephone call last spring, and this old draft-post-pushed-live gives the backstory of the moment when someone from her biological father’s family reached out.  I found it incredibly moving.

NotMyLinesYet has a post about all the things missing: from her period to her willingness to interact with her own body.  It’s one of those important, must-read posts that give you insight into the world of infertility.  What we go through physically and emotionally.

Lastly, Anabegins has an eye-opening post about the FOMO that is built into Thanksgiving (and, frankly, every other holiday, too).  Either you feel the pressure to travel to be with people, even with the stress of traffic or high airfare costs, or you make something closer to home and deal with that stress.  Either way, it’s like the upside down of holidays: the part that Hallmark probably doesn’t want us to think about too deeply, but a really interesting question about how we set our stress and emotional-tugging limits.

The roundup to the Roundup: Sometimes we’re better than we think.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between November 17th and 24th) 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.