Xochitl Gonzalez got me with the dek: “Yes, New York is an exciting place, but it’s routine that weaves you into the city.”

I loved the idea of being woven into a city. You’re not just skating the surface; you’re part of the fabric. You could make an equally good case for trying new things, but as a creature of habit, I liked reading this article and having my behaviour celebrated.

Josh is an explorer. I am a stayer. He compromises by deeply exploring new things on our regular restaurant menu or trying new products in our regularly shopped-in stores. I compromise by straying from the known every once in a while (though the places found generally just become a new regular space).

The first place that works well becomes my place, even knowing there may be a better place out there. It’s because all other choices are pretty much a lateral move because I’m only going to pause and become a regular if I have a good experience, which means all other experiences are likely to be different by equal experiences. Is it possible that there is an even better choice out there? Sure. But it’s also possible that there is an even worse choice out there, and I would rather be happy in a consistently good space than ride the ups and downs of unknown spaces.

I loved this point from the article:

“From restaurants to, yes, even manicures, these transactions are now less about patronage and relationships than they are about participating in trends and getting a good pic for the’ gram.”

It does come down to patronage and relationships. I want to count on the places I love, and in turn, I want them to count on me. I will be the customer who keeps showing up, who remembers the small changes over the years, the stories we’ve told each other, or the information exchanged in passing. We’re in this together.

I read an amazing book recently, The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe, that I’ll highlight in my best books post next month. Like many Jonathan Coe books, it explores the conservative movement in the UK and the US (within a murder mystery frame), and how people are drawn to or repulsed by certain political ideologies.

But the best part of the book comes on page 168. The character is retelling a lecture he went to while at college where the lecturer makes a point about how famous pairings often stand in for society as a whole:

Here, in the comic interplay between a Laurel and a Hardy, or an Abbott and Costello, you had a microcosm of how all people interacted with one another: frustration, misunderstanding, getting in each other’s way, but also total interdependence and – in the case of the greatest double acts – real and unwavering love. Look at Vladimir and Estragon, he said – look at Laurel and Hardy; even look at Morecambe and Wise – and you see a pared-down image of a more-or-less functioning society. Human beings doing their best to get along together; unable to hide their impatience, sometimes, with the recalcitrant behaviour of their fellow earth-dwellers, but each one unable to do without the other.

The character — and by extension, Coe — continues to talk about how community has changed from that time after the Second World War to the rise of the first mobile phone:

I think people used to believe in a different kind of society. We had a model for it, back then: more or less organized, more or less functioning, held together by the belief that things should not be shared out too unequally. It was imperfect, of course, full of injustices and disagreements and bumps in the road, but above all it was cohesive: just like one of the great double acts.

Even if we didn’t always achieve it, we had a goal of moving together as a society vs. focusing on the individual and uniqueness, our personal needs, and our personal success. He traces the change back to the 1980s.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since reading the book; it’s hard not to as you watch the dismantling of pieces of society that were in place to keep us moving forward together with equity and what happens when society becomes so fractured that we can’t find each other again?

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Can you tell that we’re in high-distraction mode? The third game I started playing feels very close to a random guess-the-word game I used to play and stopped because it felt too hard. So I’m not sure how long I’ll stick with Betweenle, but I like that I’ve been getting the word in a few guesses.

It helps that it has to be a five-letter word vs. any random word of any length in the dictionary.

Leaving this here in case you also need a distraction.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

While Josh and I play most of our word and geography games in the morning (the list has grown so freakin’ long — from Wordle to Worldle and everything in between), we save the Minute Cryptic for after dinner and work on it together. We’re trying to get good enough at cryptic clues to do a full puzzle at some point.

Sometimes, we solve it, but we have no idea how we arrived at the answer.

Sometimes, we need to ask for multiple letters.

But every once in a while, we play the cryptic exactly as it is meant, figuring out the wordplay and getting the answer on the first try.

I like the Minute Cryptic because they have a short video explaining the answer afterward, so it’s truly a learning tool meant to get you ready to solve a whole puzzle.

When I grow up, I want to be my kids. They have much firmer boundaries with protecting their emotional health and sticking to them than I do. A case in point: when content on a social media site made them feel distressed as they scrolled, they signed out of the account. They need to log in via a computer to see their account, making it unlikely they’ll go on more than every few days. Enough to check up on people, not enough to get them upset.

They are the Michael Pollan of consuming creative content and information (consume content, not too much, mostly heart-filling things).

I noticed the same reaction, and all I did was check more. I would see something upsetting on the app that caused me to set down my phone and worry. But then I thought, “I must recheck the app to see if there are more upsetting things.” And because I mostly went on social media in the evening after work, I was also carrying those last things I saw into bed, worrying about everything in the dark.

I wish I could tell you that I took the twins’ lead and logged out of the app. I didn’t. Social media is how I stay in touch with many people. But I did start to ask myself if I needed to recheck the app, reminding myself that I had just checked it a few minutes ago and meditating on how the news makes me feel. My goal is to take my scrolling down to twice a day — two quick check-ins.

Let’s see if I stick to the plan.

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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 to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

And now the blogs…

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

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Hopelessly Infertile and Surrounded by Fertiles comes to a profound thought while reading a romance book that applies to the political landscape happening right now. She explains: “So many people spend so much time denying women’s feelings and experiences. I want a space where women’s experiences and feelings and choices are respected.” As she points out, it’s not that we can’t make mistakes or change our mind; but sometimes you sense the character is leading the way, and sometimes you sense the author is making all of the choices.

The Barreness breaks down the current landscape, bringing in the personal including what she is doing to get her voice heard. This perfectly summarizes how so many of us feel right now: “I have found myself on more than one occasion staring off into space. Trying to figure out where the ground is, as everything seems to be floating in zero gravity.” That ending to the post — wow.

The roundup to the Roundup: Cutting back on social media. 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 Feb 14 – Feb 21) 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.