Kimberly Hirsh

In her article, How To Balance Being Online With Mindfully Logging Off, Stephanie Fallon says,

It can be so tempting to start over in some romanticized revamp of a 90’s childhood summer.

She’s talking here about the temptation of a radical digital detox but I read this and immediately thought, that sounds super fun! I want a 90s (or 80s!) childhood summer!

So I’m asking myself, what does that look like?

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

• Participating in the library’s summer reading program
• And thus maxing out my borrowing privileges (50 books at a time)
• And spending hours and hours reading
• Hanging out at the pool as much as possible

If I want to go mid-to-late-90s, I’d add in participating in one or more theatrical productions and doing some hobbyist web development.

As an educator who only works 10 months out of the year, I think I can get pretty close to this. I’m thinking about how I want to meld it with having my kid at home with me for many weeks, too, as he’s only doing a few camps this year.

What would your nostalgic romanticized childhood summer look like?

Finished reading: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton 📚

A great time and at its most interesting in the places where the movie departed from it.

💬📚📝 “I offer up the idea of the safety of a sentence for you right now, the possibility of a place to put yourself, to put your heart. A place to rest for a while from these feverish days.” Jami Attenberg, 1000 Words

💬📚📝 “How do I cut through all the constant buzzing around me and capture the simple truths? With the slash of a sentence.” Jami Attenberg, 1000 Words

🔮📚💬 “You don’t need to push or clear away your humanness to sit with the numinous.” Lindsay Mack, Tarot for the Wild Soul.

🔮📚💬 Lindsay Mack, Tarot for the Wild Soul:

…the Tarot cannot reliably tell us when something will end or how something will turn out. It doesn’t consistently fix, heal, or tell us precisely what will happen or when it will happen. But it can be medicine in the face of deep pain. It can help us come home to and stay with ourselves, no matter what might be arising.

I’m doing a couple of qualitative action research projects at work and, as one does in qual research, have collected a huge amount of data (mostly student work samples) and now have to figure out how to analyze it. 📓

🔖📚📝 Read A Deaf Manifesto on Motherhood (Electric Literature).

A great interview with Sara Nović about her book Mother Tongue, parenting, and writing.

I didn’t publicly mark the fifth anniversary of my dissertation defense back in April because things were so busy. Dr. Katy Peplin is celebrating 10 years of having a PhD and wrote a great blog post about ten things she’s learned in ten years of having her PhD.

📚 Trying out a re-read of Jurassic Park since we’ve been enjoying the movies and I haven’t read it since I read it when the movie was first released.

Crichton’s introduction laments the infiltration of commercial interests into university scientific research, focused on individual greed and failing ethics. It doesn’t mention the interplay of university research funding and patent law that led to a push for commercialization of research and tech transference in the 1980s, the era Crichton is talking about here.

Reading Jurassic Park is different as a lapsed academic than it is as a middle schooler.