Our second week in the Netherlands has been quiet so far. Exactly a week after we got here, I came down with a cough that has developed into a pretty standard respiratory virus. The COVID self-test was negative. This wasn’t a surprise because the rate of infection here is vanishingly small. Aalsmeer has about 32,000 inhabitants. One of them has tested positive this week.

Meanwhile in Amsterdam, 13 out of about 903,000 people reported positive tests last week.

For the purposes of comparison, that’s 1.2 cases per 100,000 people over 7 days. At home, there were 153 new cases per 100,000 people last week.

I know ground water numbers are more reliable but I struggle to interpret them, so this is what I use to determine risk.

So, it’s probably not COVID given the low incidence of COVID here and the negative test.

I’ve still felt pretty crappy, so I’ve been sleeping a ton. ME, M, and I ventured out to the Grote Poel (the large pool) of the Westeindeplassen. The humidity outside really helps my breathing but I have to be careful not to overexert myself.

Today both ME & M are feeling poorly.

In the meantime, W has been into the city a couple times and loved exploring. I’m looking forward to getting the whole family there next week once we’re all back on our feet. It always takes at least an hour to get there from the village.

(When we booked the house, there was a bus that went directly to the airport train station but they changed the routes right before we came so it doesn’t run anymore. This adds one or two transfers to every trip.)

I guess people really want to know about what food you get when you travel. We mostly buy groceries and prepare our own food, so we haven’t tried anything extra Dutch besides stroopwaffels. Those are delicious.

The eggs here are super fresh and excellent. They have all the produce you might expect. They have a mix of Dutch brands and other brands. Froot Loops are Unicorn Froot Loops. We eat a lot of Nature Valley granola bars. There is, of course, immense variety in the cheese available.

That’s the latest here. I hope to be more adventurous soon!

In case you missed it: my husband, W, received a Fulbright award to study European & transatlantic copyright harmonization, especially with respect to fair use/fair dealing. M and I are accompanying him. My sister ME is here as well serving as a mother’s helper for the first couple of months so I can actually do my job. (After she leaves, W and I will trade off childcare time.)

We’re currently based in Aalsmeer, a town closer to Amsterdam than Chapel Hill is to Durham. (That distance means more to people from our hometown than it will to other people but I thought it might be a useful comparison.) The University of Amsterdam is Will’s Fulbright host. He’ll interview scholars there as well as in Maastricht.

Because his award is specifically a Fulbright-Schuman award, his research is international, so we’ll also be visiting Helsinki and Rovaniemi in Finland, Bonn in Germany, and Brussels in Belgium.

In March, we’ll leave Aalsmeer and travel the UK and Ireland so he can interview scholars there. We’ll finish up in Paris and head home before Memorial Day.

…….

We left the US Monday evening and arrived in Amsterdam Tuesday morning, then road a train and a bus and walked about 600 meters to the house where we’re staying.

…….

I already love it here. Harbor cities always make me happy. I’m delighted by all the canals.

Also, the roads: buses have a completely separate set of lanes divided from the car lanes and so do bikes. Aalsmeer is a very walkable town.

…….

Yesterday we briefly went into Amsterdam proper for our appointment with immigration. UvA is used to international scholars sticking around, so they’re following all their normal processes with us including getting us set up with Dutch identification numbers and everything.

…….

Because we are using public transportation, it takes us about an hour to get into town. I already feel disappointed that we haven’t explored more but I have to remind myself that we haven’t even been here for 72 hours yet and I was in immense pain after the flights here.

…….

More to come. For now, have a picture from the chocolate shop near our house.

In Austin Kleon’s paid newsletter post today, he asked his readers, to share how we begin.

I opened by saying, “I don’t know how I begin.” Then I proceeded to describe how I begin.

Because the biggest projects in my life have been scholarly writing projects, I thought about those. I thought about the most recent one, my dissertation, and the oldest one, my Master’s paper.

I realized that for both of these, I had a sunshine-soaked AHA! moment when I knew: this was the topic I was going to write about, this was the research I was going to do.

But then I thought about it, and that wasn’t the beginning for the dissertation. (It may have been for the Master’s paper. I don’t remember.)

In my PhD program, writing a comprehensive literature review that demonstrated our familiarity with the state of our research area was a major milestone. I went into this process with no clear research question or idea, just a set of topics that interested me. I don’t remember all of them, but they included makerspaces in libraries, gaming in libraries, and connected learning, among other things. I wrote two or three chapters of this lit review (one for each topic), flailing about, no research plan in mind, just getting familiar with the literature.

But this flailing was part of my process! I arrived at my dissertation topic by reading someone else’s dissertation and deciding to answer one of the questions she posed as a possibility for future research!

And yet, I had read her dissertation before that sun-soaked day.

What was different upon this reading?

What was different was that I had been living the night before, not working. (Work is a part of life but you know how it’s easy to forget to do all the parts of life that aren’t work? Or at least to berate yourself for not focusing on work all the time? If you’ve ever been a grad student, you know what I’m talking about.)

The night before my sun-soaked AHA!, I had gone to a concert. A video game concert. Where I saw cosplayers who inspired me. And it was putting together the dissertation I read with the inspiration I felt at that concert that led me to my dissertation topic: how cosplayers find, evaluate, use, and share information.

So these are the ingredients in my process:

1. Read what other people have written, especially keeping an eye out for interesting questions that I might want to anwer. What do I read? Whatever seems interesting.
2. Do interesting things that aren’t work.
3. Sit in the sun and think.

If I skip any of these three steps, I struggle to begin.

I’m taking Lindsay Mack’s tarot class called The Threshold. Here’s my reading for the year ahead. Four major arcana - huge!

This whole spread fits with what’s going on with me. We leave for W’s Fulbright on Monday and hoping to do a lot of internal work while we’re away, vibing with the Hermit.

One of the things I’m struggling with is feeling a sense of purpose. I feel like Judgment combined with the Hermit gives me big “Show Yourself” (from Frozen 2) vibes - “You are the one you’ve been waiting for all of your life.” I have to look to myself for purpose. All the career quizzes and analysis of my 10th house in the world isn’t going to get me where listening to the quiet voice in myself will.

In being invited to give up the Sun, I see myself letting go of the need for bright, external, paternal clarity. It’s time to dwell in shadow for a while, to live in the murky and liminal.

With Temperance, I’m moving towards integration, integrity, my whole self being welcome in every part of my life. I think this will be key for the work I’m doing with the Hermit and Judgment.

And finally, the Ten of Pentacles: a reminder that I already have an abundant life, and that this abundance can carry me through the quiet and seeking.

Deck is the Wayhome Tarot.

I don’t know if I’ll get to do all the year-end/new year transition things I’d hoped to do today: tarot stuff, bullet journal migration. I need a nap and my right wrist is hurting and I think my left will soon follow. But guess what? Listening to my body is a great way to mark this transition.

Instead of one word for 2023, I have two:

ADVENTURE + REST

Tomorrow I’ll share more about my intentions for the year with Leigh Bardugo’s Begin As You Mean to Go On and Kim Werker’s Year of Making. But I have three intentions for the new year:

1. Read for pleasure.
2. Make things.
3. Take walks.

More on those tomorrow.

And I want to keep moving toward living in alignment with my core values:

• Curiosity
• Creativity
• Care

That’s all for now. I’ll share more soon.

I’m calling it for the year. I’m not going to try to squeeze one more in before the end of the day tomorrow. When I wrote my year in reading post on December 2, I’d read 46 books this year. I’ve read 5 more since. I’ve also got a nifty new Micro.blog plug-in that will show you the covers of all the books I read.

Not a lot has changed in terms of my favorites since that original post. Hildafolk and The Bloody Chamber continue to be standouts. I’m very happy to be caught up on Leigh Bardugo just in time to get behind again when my preorder for Hell Bent comes in.

Season of Love is a recent favorite. Raybearer was super compelling and as I’ve started the sequel, that’ll probably be my next finished read.

I’ve got Bloodmarked on hold but it’s a wait of about 14 weeks. (I’m going to buy the paperback when it comes out so it’ll match my copy of Legendborn.)

Here’s all the books I read this year:

I thought, given my heavy criticism of the potential perspective that we should all join the Luddite club, it might be useful to discuss my own smartphone use and the steps I take to moderate it.

Let me start by saying that I know in the case of addictive behavior, moderation is sometimes not an option. I have no objection to people recognizing that they are in this situation and opting out of smartphone use, or potentially any Internet use at all. You’ve got to do what’s right for you.

My objection is to people who might suggest that what’s right for the Luddite club is right for everyone with a smartphone.

Don’t want a smartphone? Cool! Get rid of yours if you have one! Never get one if you don’t!

I myself vacillate wildly between intense use to the point of it disturbing my sleep (not good, obvs) and more instrumental use that is less disruptive to the rest of my life.

When I start to notice intense use - or when something like the Luddite club article prompts me to consider my own use - there are a few techniques I rely on to curb my use and help me moderate.

For a long time, my default was to work my way through this Better Humans article, Configure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You. It links an Android version at the end, but the principles work for any smartphone, regardless of OS. This is a time consuming process and actually in the name of habit change and productivity involves adding apps I almost never use, so I have stopped going through the full process. I’ll sometimes Google around for other ideas about turning smartphones into tools (as opposed to toys or distraction), and use what I learn in those, too.

Here are the things I do, divided into almost always and sometimes categories.

Almost always

Turn off almost all notifications. I get notifications for calls, texts, and maps. That’s it. Corollary: I almost always have my phone on vibrate or silent, so even those notifications don’t disturb me.

Avoid social media apps. As much as possible, if I’m going to use social media, I do it through the browser. Occasionally I’ll need a feature like putting up a story on Instagram when I was on the UC Irvine Strike Solidarity Team’s Social Media Team and was contributing to that Instagram account. But I usually uninstall pretty rapidly after that.

Turn on Do Not Disturb. I’m in Do Not Disturb mode, with only starred contacts allowed through, unless I’m expecting a call from someone who isn’t a starred contact (like my doctor or a contractor who’s coming to work on the house). Starred contacts include family members and my kid’s school. That’s it.

Use no wallpaper + a black background OR Austin Kleon’s Read a Book Instead wallpaper. Pretty self-explanatory.

Turn off Raise to Wake. I have to push a button to turn my phone on and put in a code to see anything on it. (I just switched from a swipe to a numerical code in order to add a little more friction.)

Use bedtime mode at night. Most of the time, I have the phone in black and white with even more notifications blocked than usual, between 7:30 pm and 7:30 am. If I’m up in the night and want to watch something or play something on my phone, I try to leave bedtime mode on and do it in black and white. This only helps some, though.

Sometimes

Use Firefox Focus as my browser. When I’m getting way too deep into Internet rabbit holes, which I usually do in Chrome, I disable Chrome and switch to Firefox Focus. It doesn’t remember my log-ins, so I have to log in to each site I visit every time I visit it. It doesn’t keep a history, so I have to either search for or manually type in URLs. Sometimes, I need the affordances of Chrome, and I switch it back on. I haven’t figured out how to copy and paste in Focus yet.

Remove everything from my home screen. I usually have a pretty sparse home screen, but sometimes I remove everything from it. I’m not sure this is very effective though because then I tend to pull up the app drawer and scroll through all the apps, including some distracting ones like the browser, to get to the thing I want. So sometimes I’m more strategic and drop my most frequently used useful apps, like Google Keep and anything related to books or podcasts, on my home screen.

Use bedtime mode all day. Having the phone be in black and white makes it less appealing.

In the future

I still am in the bad habit of checking my phone first thing in the morning, last thing before bed, and any time I get up in the night. So I’ll be working on that.

I have some thoughts about the Luddite club.

First, I don’t have a problem with people switching to flip phones. I do have a problem with the implication it makes them morally superior to people who use smartphones.

I think one of my biggest problems with the article is the feel of the writing: a sense of awe, a focus on fashion, a vibe that reads to me like “Ooh isn’t it amazing that these kids wear Doc Martens and read books?”

I fully support the desire to break free of slot machine dopamine hit features of social media. But here are activities that, in the article, read as though they require giving up your smartphone but that I, a person with a smartphone, sometimes do:

• Draw
• Paint
• Close my eyes outside
• Read books
• Sew
• Borrow books from the library
• Go to parks
• Fall asleep away from the glow of my phone
• Read in hammocks

I’m glad teens do these things. And if they can only do them without smartphones, okay. But let’s not act like these activities are inaccessible to people with smartphones.

One of the most concerning things is the veneration these kids seem to feel for Chris McCandless. One of them says, “…that guy was experiencing life. Real life.” But actually, what he experienced was death. This dude might have been sympathetic but I know I don’t want my kid holding him up as a role model. If you’re going to go off the grid, learn how to take care of yourself BEFORE you get there.

I’m also not convinced that this is the beginning of a social movement. The founder of the club was discouraged when people suggested it was classist, but she says, “[my advisor] told me most revolutions actually start with people from industrious backgrounds, like Che Guevara.” I think the word we might be looking for here rather than “industrious” is “privileged,” “middle class,” “bourgeois,” or “capitalist.” But also, Che Guevara was motivated by witnessing other people’s misery and took action directed at alleviating it. I hope Luddite club kids use some of their screen-free time to benefit others. The article doesn’t make it clear whether they do, so I don’t know how apt the comparison to Guevara is.

Meg Pillow pointed out that for some of us, social media has been a great way to expand our awareness beyond our own experiences, to escape a filter bubble. One of the kids quoted in the article said, “Being in this club reminds me we’re all living on a floating rock and that it’s all going to be OK.” But when I read this, it made me think that without some other way of learning about the world, this is simple escapism. Are the Luddite club kids listening to the radio? Reading independent newspapers? Watching public television? How do they learn about the world beyond their schools and club, about the world that’s not printed about in classic or mainstream printed texts?

The most honest part of the article seemed to me to be when the founder of the club said that she likes that her parents are addicted to their smartphones, “because I get to feel a little superior to them.” This is developmentally right on track for a high school senior. I’m pretty sure these kids in the Luddite club will be fine. But I think we adults need to look a little deeper at what’s going on before deciding we should model our own lives on theirs or pressure our kids to do likewise.

I just finished the first episode of Wednesday. I have so many thoughts and feelings.

First, I’ve seen criticism that the Addams Family works best when you have the whole family. (Sadly, I can’t find the link to where I read this right now.) I completely agree but the decision to rely on the trope of a teen rebelling against their parents means any family time here is very tense. So I don’t want the whole family together because they’re not as loving as I’m used to.

As Emmet Asher-Perrin points out, the Addams Family movies are all about family as a safe haven, on the unconditional not just love, but positive regard they have for their children. That vibe isn’t present here.

(I’ll mention at this point that I haven’t seen the recent animated Addams Family movies, and that I shunned the musical because a huge part of the premise was Wednesday wanting to be normal for a boy and that’s just… not very Wednesday.)

But.

Jenna Ortega is brilliant. She perfectly revives My Generation’s Wednesday (what’s my generation? Xennials I guess?). Her delivery is beautiful. Her physicality is on point (🤺).

I really appreciate the Christina Ricci cameo. She’s adorable.

I love how this feels like a goth Veronica Mars. I’ve seen comparisons to Riverdale, but at least in the first season, Jughead’s narration is reportage, not reflection. He is wryly commenting on the corruption in his town. In contrast, Veronica and Wednesday give us interiority that isn’t self-indulgent.

It has me thinking about what bell hooks has to say about confessional writing, how perception of it is gendered. I’ve been reading remembered rapture lately.

I can’t deal with the family tension and all of the school bits are sort of… just being the cliche rather than commenting on it?

We’ve seen this roommate dynamic in Wicked (I may have started singing “Loathing” to myself when Wednesday and Enid met). There doesn’t seem to be a new take on it here.

Also: the embrace of the supernatural beyond the Addams’s immediate circle feels a little off to me here. In Charles Addams’s comics and in the 90s movies, the world was pretty normal. To suddenly have a school full of vampires, werewolves, gorgons, and sirens feels not exactly random, but out of place.

On this note: Thing. Thing has scars, Frankenstein’s creature style, and I don’t love it. I think because a disembodied hand is enough weird. It requires no additional weird.

The costumes are wonderful. The exterior view of the school makes me super happy.

I’ll give it a few more episodes but giving the Addams Family the Riverdale treatment with a Harry Potter setting, Doyle/Cordelia-on-Angel visions, and a more-Veronica Mars-than-Jughead voiceover feels mostly like trying to do too many things at one time.

(Also, I’ve seen comparisons to Nancy Drew, Buffy, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch but none to VMars, which feels super weird to me.)

In November, when I realized there was no way I was going to be able to get 50,000 words of writing done, I decided to try writing 750 words a day using the website 750words.com. I enjoyed doing morning pages this way. The traditional writing-in-a-notebook way tends to give me hand or wrist pain. But I was using the new site, and after a streak hiccup, I realized that it wasn’t quite the write tool for me. I actually do better without streak tracking, because if I mess up (and I didn’t, their system didn’t save my 750 words even though I’d written them), my perfectionism has me go NEVER MIND!

So I decided to use a combo of my Google Calendar to send me an email reminder like 750 words does and Scrivener to set up a journal where each entry had a 750 word target. That went well, for a while, until I hit a day when I just didn’t feel like it. And I gave myself permission not to. And that was fine, too.

I got back into it but overtime it just felt like… not quite what I was looking for. I would write things in there, and then I would think I had said those things to someone, but I hadn’t. And I realized that private journaling is great and valuable, but if I’m looking to be motivated to keep up a regular practice, I want an audience. (Can you tell I’m an obliger?)

I’m not a journaler. I’m not a diarist. I am an escribitionist. I have been for over 20 years. So if I want to keep up a writing process, blogging is the best way to do it.

I also really appreciate blogging as a mode of thinking, as a way of finding out what I think. When I write for no audience, words come out, but they don’t have sticking power in my mind. I do best when my ideas are things I can talk out with another person, even if that other person is a silent reader. I love having my blog as a tool I can refer to when I need help, a place where advice from my past self bubbles up for me.

So hi. I’m trying out daily blogging, again. I’m not setting a word target. I’m not going to stress if I miss a day. But this is my plan, to get something a little more deliberate than a quick note written every day.

My kid’s best friend’s mom got a new job and isn’t starting it until January, but has already left her old job. She has all of December to just be, with her kid in school for the first two weeks.

I told her that sounded amazing.

She said, “I feel like… I feel like myself. I was going to say I feel like a whole new person, but really I feel like myself.”

I said, “I want to feel like myself. I’ve gotta figure out how to do that.”

2022 feels like a year that was stolen from my whole family of origin, thanks to my mom’s leukemia and paraplegia. My mom has obviously had an incredibly hard year. My dad is learning what it is to be a primary caregiver at almost 70 years old and it’s a very different life than he’s ever known before. My brother has gone from being cared for to needing to give care to. My sister and I have both experienced frequent chronic illness flares.

In the spring, I resented the flowers for blooming. Didn’t they know my mom had leukemia? I didn’t do any of my normal springtime stuff.

In the summer, I made a whole plan to achieve summer vibes, but I only really did it halfheartedly.

In the fall, my mom was in the ER about once a week, with an extended hospital stay due to the cognitive effects of a medication reaction. Halloween was fun but I didn’t appreciate the gorgeous weather nearly enough.

And now Winter Is Coming 🐺, and I am realizing for the first time that I have always been A Christmas Person, but when we were decorating our tree I suddenly got very grouchy. Because of how different this year is and will be.

This is not just me sharing the bad — it’s me elucidating the things that have made me feel Not Me.

In a very Me move, to figure out what feels like me I went to my blog archives to see how I was coping in year 2 of the pandemic, before my mom got leukemia.

How to Feel Like Myself

Books & Reading

• Share quotes from what I’m reading.
• Read lots of books in a variety of formats & genres, but come back home to fantasy frequently.
• Talk to other people about what we’re reading & what else we might want to read.
• Read & write fanfic, especially for sitcoms and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• Read a lot of interesting articles.
• Re-read Austin Kleon’s books.

Health & Wellness

• Blog about my experiences with chronic illness.

Work

• Blog about my research.

Crafting

• Gather references for a cosplay but don’t make it yet.

TV & Movies

• Watch holiday rom-coms.
• Watch Star Trek.
• Introduce my kid to older kids TV.
• Blog about what I’m watching.

The Internet

• Think about cool possibilities for the web, mostly late at night.
• Take occasional breaks from social stuff.

Uh oh, I’m doing me things and I still don’t feel like myself

I’m reading, especially fantasy. I’m watching holiday rom-coms and Star Trek. I introduced my kid to Wishbone 🐶. Why don’t I feel like myself?

The Missing Piece

I’m not reflecting, blogging, and talking to people. Metacognition is key to Kimberlying and I have let it get away from me. Time to get back to it.

Everybody is doing their year-end stuff, so I thought I’d do mine.

I read 46 books this year including comics/graphic novels and poetry. About 12 of those were graphic novels or poetry and another 2 or 3 were short story or novella collections. This puts me right about where my usual average for longer works is, around 30 books. I don’t set quantitative reading goals anymore besides reading one more book than I’ve read so far in a given year.

My reading this year was heavily influenced by the microgenres/aesthetics of cozy fantasy, adventurecore, and woodland goth.

I sought out cozy fantasy and adventurecore in particular because I wanted my reading to comfort me.

I joined the Atlas Obscura book club on Literati, because Austin Kleon stopped running his book club. I only finished two of the 5 books I got, but I look forward to finishing the ones I didn’t. I love the curation but the monthly format doesn’t really work for me and I wasn’t making the kinds of connections to other readers that I’d hoped to.

I started to list my favorite books I’ve read this year but the list got too long. I loved the Hildafolk series and The Bloody Chamber.

I began the year with the intention to get caught up on Leigh Bardugo’s backlist, and I only have one book to go, The Rule of Wolves. I started that this week, so I hope to finish before the year is out and be caught up just in time for the release of the new Alex Stern book.

I think that’s all I have to share about my reading this year. How did your reading year go?

Spoilers for lyrics from Disenchanted follow. Without context they only mean a little but if you’re avoiding spoilers, just move along…

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Are you ready to be spoiled?

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It’s how I’d make a world for you
That never breaks your heart
Where you can grow and thrive
And your every wish can flower
I will always love you, Morgan
I’m so proud of how I know you’ll carry on
I’ve known a lot of magic in my life
But never anything as strong
Love power
My love for you has power
And you’ll have it there inside you
When I’m gone

These lyrics make me sob as a mother AND as a daughter because of course this is what I want for my kid but the “When I’m gone” part hits extra hard when your mom has leukemia and chemo/TKI complications you know?

This is a big cry I’ve been saving up since January as I kept it together for everybody else.

Okay, time for me to go strike now.

Dear Kimberly,

I’m just going to jump right in.

Remember E’s cute boyfriend and how you noticed she seems to not be dating him anymore and you think that’s kinda sad? Don’t be sad. YOU’RE MARRIED TO HIM NOW. I mean, you’ll marry him in 2009.

You’ll have a beautiful kid with him in 2016. The kid has long eyelashes and says delightful things. You had him later than you expected but he’s worth the wait, I promise.

Hey guess what neighborhood you live in starting in 2011? W! That’s where rich people live, you say? Well, two things: 1. It’s actually where a broad range of middle class people live and 2. you definitely would think of the household you live in by 2022 as rich. Y’all could eat Lunchables and Fruit Roll-ups and drink Capri Sun Every Day if you wanted to. (But you won’t, it would create way too much trash.)

You have a PhD (2021) and your job is to read, write, and talk to librarians. ON THE INTERNET. I know, right? Pretty sweet gig.

There’s a lot of scary stuff going on in the world right now (2022) - global health stuff, political stuff, war stuff, climate change stuff (that’s what we call global warming right now because it’s more accurate). Also, some family illness stuff. I know that doesn’t feel new, and it’s not, but it’s still a lot.

And yet in spite of those difficulties, on the micro level, your life is AMAZING.

Just wanted to let you know.

Love, Kimberly

I have a lot of friends, but the circle of friends I think of as my people is much smaller. If I make a list, it’s probably maybe 10 or so people right now, though the circle has porous boundaries.

This morning I sent something Austin Kleon wrote to a friend with the note “This seems like something you’d appreciate.” Sometimes my friends send me things that remind them of me.

Sometimes there’s an obvious reason, like when anyone sends my sister red panda stuff or me mermaid things.

But my favorite times are when it’s about a vibe. That feels to me like accessing the ineffable core of a relationship that I always imagine you can only get at after a very intense initial period of friendship, unless you happen to be friends with a literal horse, in which case it happens instantly because horses just understand you.

There’s a sort of distance that I think makes this kind of thing easier. My dearest friends all live far away. I think it facilitates finding this kind of thing. I want to be in the lookout for more opportunities to do it for my most inner circle, my innest circle? My spouse, my child, my household of origin.

Do your people have vibes that give you shortcuts to letting them know you’re thinking of them?

It turns out giving yourself credit for everything you write is actually really challenging because you have to pull it all together somewhere, and sometimes you lose track of the last thing you counted.

It’s far too early to give up on NaNoWriMo.

But have y’all noticed that November is a really hard time to write in the Northern hemisphere? There’s the time change. The lack of light because of it. If you’re in the US, Thanksgiving eats up fully 5 days it feels like. (That’s 17% of your writing time!) At least it does in my family.

It’s just a brutal time!

This is why I like Camp NaNoWriMo. Especially July. July, if you work in education and can afford to send your kid to camp, is a great time to write.

Anyway. I’m not giving up on NaNo but I’m also not trying to do word counts on all my texts.

The only time I won NaNo, I wrote 25K words on November 30.

I’ve won Camp NaNo a few times with smaller goals.

I do want to write. I don’t know what a good writing goal, process, or practice looks like for me. Maybe I’ll take the rest of this month to figure it out.

Hello friends!

It’s been slow-going working on my TNG fanfic. Early in October, I toyed with the idea of being a NaNo Rebel with the goal of writing 50,000 words of literally anything at all. At the time, I meant fanfic, original fic, and academic writing.

But at 4 AM this morning, I decided to return to that, with a much more expansive definition of “literally anything at all.”

Here are the things I’ve added to my word count so far:

• Blog posts (including short notes)
• Emails
• Texts
• Slack messages
• Meeting agendas
• Comments on other people’s documents
• Forum posts

And once I log back into social media tomorrow (I’m posting this via micropub), I’m going to add replies and quote tweets.

Why am I being so generous to myself with this definition?

A lot of the time, I use a goal like NaNoWriMo to prove to myself that I “can* write.

But lately, I’ve felt not that I have writer’s block, exactly, but that I’m just at a moment in life when writing is beyond my current capacity, that I just don’t have the bandwidth to write at present.

So I’m using this expansive definition to prove to myself that I do write, that I an writing, even when I feel like I can’t.

How’s NaNo going for you? Can you find a way to be more generous with yourself this month?

Cooking is really hard with chronic illness, because both pain and fatigue reduce your options for homemade food that won’t eat up all your energy for the day.

When Suzanne Scott mentioned the cookbook I Dream of Dinner (So You Don’t Have To) at the Fan Cultures/Food Cultures session at FSN North America, citing the ease of prepping its recipes when you’re exhausted, I immediately put it on hold at the library.

I picked it up over the weekend. Today I made my first recipe in it: Marinated Beans with Crunchy Veggies. TL; DR: It’s tasty and I still had energy left after making it.

Right away the book delighted me by including all prep work in the written instructions rather than ingredients. Author Ali Slagle doesn’t say “Fresh shallot, finely chopped” in the ingredients list. Instead, it’s the first step in the recipe. Slagle also encourages substitutions.

I modified the recipe a bit to make it even friendlier for my chronically-ill self. Here are some photos with explanations.

The first change is that I subbed garlic powder in for chopped shallot. Target didn’t have shallots and I didn’t want to go to another store. Plus, I already had garlic powder on hand.

The second change is that I used canned diced green chiles instead of chopped fresh chile. I’m a spice wimp and once again Target had limited selection.

I then followed the recipe as written, using canned black beans, salt and pepper, red wine vinegar, and olive oil.

Slagle suggests chopping and adding veggies right before serving but I wanted to do that in advance, so I sliced celery and cucumber and stored them in a Mason jar to keep them crisp until serving time. They’ll only keep in the fridge for 3 or 4 days, but so will the beans.

When it was time for lunch, I spooned a quarter of the beans into a bowl, then pulled some celery and cucumber out of the jar and stirred it all together. It was a lovely, easy lunch.

(The real star of this photo is my beautiful new kitchen counter.)

In my doctoral program, there was a class that we colloquially referred to as “babydocs.” As it was taught the year I took it, the purpose of babydocs was two-fold: 1. to introduce us to the field of library and information science and the variety of potential research areas and 2. to introduce us to the skills a person needs to be a scholar.

It’s been over seven years since I started babydocs and I’m still trying to get that “how to be a scholar” part down. Here are the topics and skills babydocs covered in this vein:

• Theory and methods
• Literature reviews
  • searching for literature
  • reading other people’s literature reviews
  • managing literature
  • writing literature reviews
• Peer review
• Project management
• Research ethics
• Diversity, equity, and inclusion
• Presenting orally
• Empirical research methods
• Collaborative & interdisciplinary work
• Creating posters
• Writing research proposals
• Grants and funding
• Data management
• Writing referred papers
• Metrics

This was a two-semester course and that was only HALF of what we covered, with the other half being specific to our discipline.

I know how to do all of the things on this list, but I still haven’t created a cohesive framework or workflow that lets me do them in any but the most just-in-time manner. But a just-in-time scholar isn’t really the kind of scholar I want to be.

(And I do want to be a scholar, even though I’m not interested in tenure-track work.)

I share all of this because I’m going to try, all these years later, to create such a framework. Something that wasn’t part of babydocs.

I plan to blog about it and I thought y’all might like to follow along.

Yesterday, W, M, my sister ME, and I went for a little hike at the Eno River State Park. I’d planned a little flat loop, but we didn’t know which access to use to get to it. We ended up at the Few’s Ford access and just walked the closest trail to where we parked, which turned out to be the Buckquarter Creek Trail.

We happened upon some folks from the Eno River Association, who had set up a tent, nets and water shoes, and little bins with water in them so people could catch little water animals and learn about them. It was a beautiful serendipitous occurrence and we had nowhere to be, so we stopped to join in. M found some water striders and a snail.

After they packed up, we continued down the trail, then stopped for a break so M could play on the rocks and fallen logs. While he was doing that, a great blue heron landed a ways from us. We watched it stretch its neck down to the water, then pull its neck upright. It was huge. Eventually it flew from one side of us to the other. Its wingspan was incredible. It’s a majestic bird.

Eventually, a tree wobbled under M and he fell in the water. We didn’t have a change of clothes, so we ended our break and started walking again. We made our way to the pedestrian bridge. It was a suspension bridge, and walking across it gave me a bit of vertigo. We continued on the other side of the river, then crossed the river on rocks when I heard a family ahead of us talking about an animal on the ground. I thought it might be a snake and W hates snakes, so we went ahead and crossed.

We finished up the trail and came home for a late lunch from Domino’s.

This was a super successful adventure, so I think we’ll try a hike every weekend while the weather is favorable.

I hate when my brain won’t read, which it won’t today. Reading is my core way of interfacing with the world. The tools we use shape our thought processes, and writing and reading have been my primary tools since I was a small child. Reading heals me, distracts me from pain, comforts me when I’m lonely, and gives me new ways of thinking.

I know this inability to turn other people’s words into things that cohere for me will pass. And I can do audiobooks some. But there’s also something about the physicality of reading that I miss when I do that. So it is a great companion to reading text, especially for times it’s not smart to focus on texts like when I’m driving or trying to fall asleep.

Maybe I’ll try reading something middle grade instead of YA or adult and see if that helps.

This is a gorgeous book, full of grief and beauty.

Selected quotes:

Water

In water
my sister is no longer
lonely. Her right leg is crooked and smaller
than her left, but she swims straight.
Her whole body is a glimmering fish.

Eating Alone

White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas > fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness.
What more could I, a young man, want.

Visions and Interpretations

Truth is, I’ve not seen my father
since he died, and, no, the dead
do not walk arm in arm with me.

Selected quotes:

Eidolons

We seeming solid wealth, strength, beauty build,
But really build eidolons.

To the States

…Resist much, obey little

Thou Reader

Thou reader throbbest life and pride and love the same as I,
Therefore for thee the following chants.

Selected quotes:

6:45 pm

…God, it’s pretty.

But what does any of it mean?

A Unified Theory

You think, what if I am stuck like this? What if

I never change? So what.

Never change.

Moments are not for revision—

if they are lived honestly, they are open to one interpretation.
only. They make you like a child.

Of course that’s what they make.

I didn’t get to liveblog/tweet this session because I was co-facilitating it, but I’m jotting down a few takeaways and a list of resources/links in hopes they will be of use to folks.

Our panelists were:

• Julie Stivers, middle school librarian at Mt. Vernon Middle School in Raleigh, NC
• Miles, a rising high school junior and former student of Julie’s
• Kym Powe, Children and YA Consultant, Connecticut State Library
• Juan Rubio, Digital Media and Learning Program Manager, Seattle Public Library
• Sandra Hughes-Hassell, Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science

We opened by asking the panelists to share their broad perspectives on creating equitable and inclusive library perspectives.

Connected Learning Lab Senior Research Manager Amanda Wortman took awesome notes on these. Here are some big ideas:

• Hold onto why you do the work.
• Recognize structural aspects of fostering equity and inclusion and simultaneously equip library staff to take individual action.
• Center the voices and experiences of youth themselves.

We then launched into some questions based on our work in the Transforming Teen Services for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion project. I basically acted as a clueless, well-intentioned librarian asking for help.

How do I know if I’m actually creating an inclusive space?

You might not be able to tell, but if your love for the work shines through, you’re moving in the right direction. When your space starts to feel like a living room and a community hub, keep doing what you’re doing and grow more in the same vein. Look at yourself and your colleagues; what unstated or invisible expectations are you communicating? They might be making the space less inclusive.

I think I’m creating inclusive spaces but people aren’t actually coming into them. What should I do?

LEAVE THE BUILDING. There are a lot of reasons people might not come. Go to where they already are. Consider not just your own actions, but those of your colleagues. Are other people in the space making it less equitable and inclusive? Build authentic relationships, in or out of the library. The relationship with the person is more important than the presence of the physical space. Change the power structures in the space; design with youth rather than for them.

I know I need to leave the building but I’m overwhelmed. How do I start?

You start by starting. Team up with a friend. Build on the work of a colleague near or far who has already gone out; learn from their experiences. Don’t stop going out after one attempt doesn’t work. Move on to the next potential place or partner. Keep trying. You’ll eventually find the right fit.

Okay I’m ready! But I talked to my supervisor and they said I can’t leave the building. What’s my next step?

Relationships are important here, too. Build a relationship with your supervisor. Help them understand the value of the work you’re doing and why it’s important to go into the community. Write a formal proposal for the supervisor. Include outcomes and impact. Make it clear it won’t take you out of the building for a whole day at a time.

How can school and public librarians think beyond just going into each others’ spaces? How can we get to places that don’t have library or school vibes?

Go to where they spend time outside of school. If you’re partnering with a school, think about going to extracurricular events that don’t feel so formal and school-y. Recognize that what matters most is that youth get what they need, not who provides it or where.

I want to learn more! What should I do next?

• Attend events like the Connected Learning Summit.
• Look for free professional development like Project READY.
• Talk to your state library.

Links

• YALSA Article describing #LibFive
• Images of Practice: #LibFive at Mount Vernon Middle School (featuring youth researchers!)
• #LibFive Infographic
• VRtality website
• Article in American Libraries about VRtality
• “From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces”
• Project READY: Reimagining Equity & Access for Diverse Youth
• GELS: Growing Equitable Library Services
• Equity Literacy Institute
• Project ENABLE (one of the models for Project READY!)
• WebJunction
• Radical Hospitality
• Racial Equity Institute
• EmbraceRace

I’ve been sitting on a paper that was “accepted with revisions” for more than 3 years. I have poked at it sometimes and worked hard on it others, sometimes hated the revision process and sometimes enjoyed it.

The purpose of submitting this paper was not actually to get it published. It was to get it submitted so I met the requirement of having submitted 2 items for peer review before my comps. Also, it’s not original research. It’s a literature review.

My assistantships in my first 4 years of the PhD put me in a situation where my colleagues and I weren’t publishing much in scholarly journals. The first year, I helped with a lit review that I think was for a popular publication. The next three years, I worked on an immense professional development project. I’m very proud of the curriculum we created and did get some trade publication out of that but again, not scholarly publication.

So it wasn’t until my last 2 years of my PhD that I was working with other scholars on papers, most of which are currently in submission or revision. All my work for scholarly publication before that had to be solo-authored and, quite frankly, what I wrote was Not Good. It wasn’t BAD but it needed so much revision.

By the time this accepted-with-revisions lit review came back to me from the journal (it had gone to a third reviewer because one reviewer was like “Accept! Minimal revisions!” and one was like “R&R… Maybe.” Reviewer 3 basically said “Accept but with heavy revision”), I was 3 years out from the original class paper it was based on. I had barely rewritten it from that for submission because, again, I just needed to move past a PhD milestone.

I was very excited when it came back accepted with revisions, but I was also in the middle of a very stressful house-buying process, writing my comps, and only had half-time childcare, so I couldn’t make it a priority.

Also I was, understandably, hurt by some of Reviewer 2’s pointed and accurate statements, so I set it aside for a while.

I picked it back up and made a revision plan, drawing on Wendy Belcher and Raul Pacheco-Vega’s advice on how to deal with revisions but as I sorted through these changes, I began to realize that NONE of them were small. They were all large changes. Here’s the kind of thing I mean:

• Elaborate on places where I cited multiple sources and be more explicit about what they say and how they’re in conversation with one another. (This is a very reasonable suggestion, and the one I’ve been working on this whole time.)
• Completely re-organize the literature review based on insights hinted at in the conclusion.
• VAGUELY CONTRADICTORY SUGGESTIONS FROM THE SAME REVIEWER: broaden the scope to include more scholarly research; narrow the scope to focus on only one of three areas addressed in the lit review.
• Find criticism that contrasted with the positive sources cited and described in the paper. (There wasn’t enough literature for that to really be a thing.)
• Completely restructure the paper based on one of the developmental frameworks I drew on.

This is daunting as all get out, especially alone, especially when dissertating AND working (because I didn’t have a dissertation fellowship, I was also conducting research and writing as part of an assistantship my final year), and there’s a pandemic on (that wasn’t until a year after the paper was “accepted” but still) and you’re a parent of a young child and you have limited childcare.

But y’all, the shame I placed on myself for not revising this paper.

I’m absolutely still excited by the central ideas of this paper:

• Teen library programming should support teens’ identity development.
• Teen library programming around TRPGs should go beyond the idea of engagement and actually reach a level of impact where teens get to try on new personas, take imaginary risks, and figure out their own moral beliefs through pretending to be other people.

But oh my goodness I do not want to work on this paper anymore. This iteration of this set of ideas does not bring me joy.

And after yesterday’s Connected Learning Summit panel on post-pandemic burnout with multiple panelists talking about the importance of centering work that feeds and serves you, I am ready to let go of tinkering with this six-year-old literature review for publication in a journal that honestly deserves a more insightful set of arguments around these ideas.

On the other hand, I’ve worked hard on this thing for a few years and don’t want it to sit in my Google Drive collecting dust and being of no use to other people. And my colleague Maria Alberto said it was “absolutely interesting and useful.”

So I’m going to read through it one more time and make sure it makes sense, and then I’m going to publish it effectively as a pre-print/author paper here on my website and in a couple of pre-print archives as well, so it can get out there as it is.

THEN I’m going to do two more things with it:

• Use it as the foundation for some public writing. If you know of an outlet where a paper about how TRPGs support identity development would be a good fit, please let me know.
• I’m going to pocket it to support some original research, if I end up in a situation to actually collect data on the relationship between TRPGs and identity development.

Huge thanks to Sandra Hughes-Hassell for her feedback on this, the folks at JRLYA who gave me feedback, and Maria for validating me. Also to Katy Rose Guest Pryal for her advice on how to deal with research in The Freelance Academic, and yesterday’s panelists for talking about doing research that resonates with your soul.

About 7 years ago, Geek and Sundry (RIP) published a post titled HOW TO HAVE A GREAT, GEEKY WEEKEND WHEN YOU’RE NOT GOING TO SDCC.

As a chronically ill person with an immunocompromised mom, I have no idea when I’ll feel safe going to cons again. G&S’s advice was for a PRE-COVID world. Here’s my updated set of tips, inspired by their original article.

Get into some trivia with the Dorky, Geeky, Nerdy Podcast. This podcast shares their trivia questions as playable text pages online and on YouTube if you want to share with friends and play together over Zoom or something. They cover tons of different topics and have three difficulty levels. They even have rules and scoring advice. I enjoyed the Star Trek: The Next Generation trivia, of course.

Catch up on comics with your local comic shop, library, or favorite online service. I’ve got some unread books left over from Free Comic Book Day. My local shop does online ordering and curbside pickup. My library offers comics both in physical form and digitally via Hoopla and Libby. And of course there are your bigger operations like Marvel Unlimited and DC Universe Infinite. I’m going to try some of the Eisner Award nominees in the Early Readers category to share with my kid.

Work on a cosplay project. I’m putting together a vaguely genderbent (in that I’m a woman and won’t be making any effort to crossplay) Eddie Munson (BEWARE OF SPOILERS AT THAT LINK!) from Stranger Things 4. I’ve got a jacket and vest. I’m waiting for my Hellfire Club shirt to arrive. Next, I want to dig out my black jeans and try distressing them.

Do some gaming. I’ll probably play some Metroid: Zero Mission myself, but I’m also going to go prep the first Magical Kitties Save the Day adventure to play with my family as soon as I’m done writing this post.

Watch something geeky. For me, it’ll probably be Star Trek: The Next Generation, but I might also rock the 1976 Carrie. If you want to stay home but not watch alone, you can try a virtual watch party tool. I like Scener.

I hope you have some fun this weekend, wherever you are!

I’m 41 today and it’s a big deal because every day that I live is a day I chose to be in the world and a whole year of sticking around is huge.

40 has been by turns amazing and rough. But mostly I’ve loved how it feels like the perfect age to really go all in on unapologetically being myself and to completely bail on caring about any superficial opinion anyone has of me. It’s also a great age to realize mostly people aren’t silently criticizing me, because they’re too focused on themselves to pay attention to me.

Who I wanted to be at 40 is also who I want to be at 41. I’m doing a good job on all of those. 41 will be a year of maintaining that and having new adventures.

If you want to be part of the virtual celebration of Kimbertide, I offered some good suggestions in 2020 and 2021. I’ll probably do some of those.

Thanks for hanging out with me on the Internet this year, y’all. You bring a lot of love and connection into my life.

I wrote this a week ago to sort through my thoughts on disability on Star Trek. It is essentially a freewrite, not a carefully structured essay.

Some context: I write this as my mom has recently changed from being a person with variable and invisible disabilities to someone with consistent and visible disabilities. She has lost the use of her legs and must ride a wheelchair if she wants to move around independently. But for years, she has had problems with sometimes falling down, for decades she has had chronic illness with debilitating fatigue as a symptom. Disability is not new to her but her recently developed disability is quite different from her disability in the past.

I myself have lived with chronic illness as my primary disability for a long time, though I did not conceive of myself as disabled until the COVID-19 pandemic. My disabilities are variable and invisible, like my mom’s earlier ones. I sometimes have debilitating fatigue or brain fog. I struggle with activities of daily living due to challenges of executive function, rather than physical limitation.

And on top of all of this is my experience as an autism sibling - while this hasn’t impacted me much because Micah’s diagnosis came when I was away at college, I’m still keenly aware of it. I also am perpetually working on foregrounding the voices of autistic people themselves rather than trumpeting my thoughts on it. But it is work, not something that comes to me naturally. I’m too keen on talking about my own thoughts and ideas for that to be my default state.

With all of this in mind, I’m thinking lately about two depictions of disability on Star Trek: Christopher Pike’s experience as a quadriplegic who can communicate only using assistive technology and, for whatever reason, that assistive technology is limited. (Maybe in the 60s it was the best they could imagine? Maybe his cognitive damage is so strong that he can only formulate yes or no as thoughts?) And Geordi Laforge, whose disability is mitigated by assistive technology that not only gives him sight, but allows him to use his sight in ways that people who are born sighted cannot do.

And then there are others as well who I would love more details about. On Discovery in particular, Airiam and Detmer. What about on Lower Decks? Is the character with an implant there using it as assistive technology? Or is it an augmentation? I should look at these characters more closely and look for others as well.

What about Sarek as he nears the end of his life?

There are plenty of possible examples for me to look at.

Today, though, I’ll focus on Pike and Laforge.

Pike’s plight is presented as a kind of death or “the death of the man I am now,” as Pike tells Spock in SNW 1x01. In TOS (I’ll admit I have yet to watch this episode and have only read about it on Wikipedia), Spock kidnaps Pike and takes him to Talos IV where he can live with the illusion of his body as it was before his disabling event. What does this mean about disability in Star Trek? How does the illusion on Talos IV work? Is he actually lying in a bed somewhere? Rolling around in his chair? He gets to live out his days with Veena and that’s nice but what is the nature of this “solution”? And what does it tell us about disability in the world of Star Trek? I need to watch “The Cage” before I can know at all. And also perhaps to revisit Pike’s experience of the future on Discovery and take notes on his mentions of it in SNW.

(Also who else is writing about Star Trek and disability?)

Now Laforge. This is someone whose assistive technology effectively eliminates his disability but who 1. is once again disabled if his VISOR falls off and 2. if I’m remembering correctly, is always in pain and that’s the tradeoff for using the visor.

(I feel like there is somebody else on Trek who’s always in pain but I wonder if I’m actually thinking of Miriam from Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.)

Geordi Laforge’s disability isn’t a thing until it is. I’ve been falling asleep to the TNG episode, “The Masterpiece Society,” in which a colony has systematically bred its citizens for optimum living, including eliminating disability. Laforge reads this (and I do too) as a suggestion that as a disabled person, he has no contribution to make to a society. And then there’s delicious irony that the technology from his VISOR is just the technology they need to save the colony from being essentially doomed by tectonic activity responsive to a star core fragment. (Still not sure what that is, though I can guess from the words. Maybe I’ll look it up.)

I talked to W about this last night, and he suggested that it’s not that Geordi wouldn’t have been born, but that he would have been born sighted. I think this is a set of hypotheticals that it’s hard to think through. To what extent do our disabilities make us who we are? Are we the same person if we’re born without them? This is something that we’ve thought about a lot in our family with my brother and whether being able to isolate an autism gene would change his life. We wouldn’t have wanted to terminate Mommy’s pregnancy with him but it might have allowed us to prepare better. But if it were possible to manipulate the autism out of him, would he then be himself? I know he doesn’t think so.

Neurodivergence is a different sort of disability, I think, than physical limitation. (I’m keenly aware of this deficit-based language and know that I need to change it before I write anything for wider publication on it.) We want autism acceptance, neurodivergent acceptance.

But there is a real tension between the social model of disability and the medical model of disability. Is the world what disables you, or your body? I think it’s both. Star Trek sort of shows us with Geordi that it can be both. The Enterprise is a pretty accessible place, as long as the turbolifts are working, and Geordi has technology he needs to live and work. By the social model of disability, as long as he’s wearing his VISOR, he’s not disabled.

But he is sometimes in circumstances where he’s not wearing the VISOR, especially in environments that are NOT DESIGNED. And that limits his potential activity, and so in those cases, it is his body that disables him.

I need to be careful not to feel like I have to do a complete literature review on critical disability studies before writing about this any further.

Katy Peplin has a great Twitter thread on the difference between sharing your process with “This is how I do it” and “This is how you should do it.”

one thing i think about a lot as a coach and person:

there's a BIG difference between "this is how i did it" and "this is how it works best / this is how you should do it"

— Katy Peplin (@ThrivePhD) June 15, 2022

I try to write with the former attitude. Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega does this and it’s one of the things I most appreciate his writing.

I thought today I’d share one thing that address how I do it, wherein it = almost anything in life at all.

Piecemeal. In teeny, tiny fragments. I’ve written before about parenthood and kintsugi.

Yesterday, I was thinking about how I want to write more, and I had a thought about writing that was so good, I wanted to capture it. This happened in literally the one minute before M’s swim lesson started, so there I was on a deck chair by the pool with M basically in my lap (and he’s big, y’all, I love having him in my lap but it’s very different now), and took out my phone and typed out these words:

There will never be time to write. This is my life now. Prismatic. Fragmented. The bits inside a kaleidoscope. They make beautiful patterns and they can be arranged in new ways but they aren’t large. So how do I write in the fragments?

“How do I _______ in the fragments?” is the guiding question of my life. There is perpetually a giant pile of laundry at the foot of my bed. I do put the laundry away, but I put it away one item at a time, while I’m getting dressed and in between finding the things I want to wear on a given day.

I’m working on binding a little pamphlet-bound notebook for M. I fold a page here and there when I can.

This is how I get things done. It’s necessitated by two things: parenthood, which carries with it the eternal threat of interruption, and chronic illness, which means that while my mind loves and craves routine, my body disrupts my ability to stick to it.

So I live by this mantra: what I can, when I can.

And that’s how I get stuff done.

Transcript:

Hello friends. I wanted to write a blog post about sweetweird and its relationship to hopepunk and other narrative aesthetics, we’ll call them, because they’re not exactly genres. But I am having some peripheral neuropathy today. And so I’m giving my wrists a break, and I’m gonna just record a podcast and then I’m going to upload the transcript with it so it’ll be effectively a blog post.

So sweetweird. Sweetweird, in case you are not constantly on the science fiction and fantasy internet as some of us are, is a term coined by Charlie Jane Anders. She first coined it in her book. I think it’s called Never Say You Can’t Survive and it’s like half-memoir, half-writing craft book, and she proposed it as an alternative to grimdark. So in case you’re not familiar with grimdark, it is fantasy or science fiction that’s set in a really hopeless, gritty world, and the most commonly thrown around examples are the are the Game of Thrones TV series/the Song of Ice and Fire books, or what I think is an even better example, The Blade Itself. So there’s really no one redeemable in those stories.They are fantasy stories without real heroes. When there are people who seem to be heroic like Jon Snow, things go badly for them. The general sense is that the world is terrible, and it’s just gonna stay terrible, but let’s read about some interesting happenings. Grimdark was fine.

Until 2016, when a lot of people started to feel that things went very badly, myself included. And so from 2016 to 2019, there was a bit of a shift that author Alexandra Rowland noticed and they called this shift hopepunk. Hopepunk is stories, especially fantasy and science fiction, but a lot of people have offered other examples, where the world is terrible, and it’s not going to ever be fixed 100% but it is worth fighting to do what we can to improve it anyway.

So in addition to being opposed to grimdark, this is also opposed to the idea of noblebright, which is where you get things like Lord of the Rings, where you have some foreordained hero who is guaranteed to save us all and they have a birthright. My easiest go-to example of noblebright is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Some people would say it’s something else. But Buffy has a destiny. There is an evil. She’s the one girl in all the world chosen to fight it and she consistently defeats it. New evil springs up, but it’s not the sort of ongoing, miserable world that she’s in. It’s that sometimes new evil pops up and that’s just when we happen to be watching her show because it’s probably not as fascinating to some people to watch she and her friends hang out. I would watch that, but not everyone would. And so Buffy is a great example of noblebright.

Angel, which is technically a spin off of Buffy, is a great example of hopepunk and it’s one of the examples Alexandra Rowland gave and it’s one of my favorite examples not just because I love it very much, but also because it sort of is quintessentially about this. In season two of Angel there’s an episode called “Epiphany.” And there’s a great quote from it, written by Tim Minear who is one of my favorite writers and himself, I would argue, a pretty hopepunk kind of guy, based on what we know about him from his writing, which is all we can know really. He also wrote the show Terriers, which I would argue is also hopepunk. So check that out. But the quote is,

“I guess if there’s no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.”

That is as mission statementy for Angel as you can get. And it is the most hopepunk arrangement of words I think you can have and you see it going on through season two of Angel all the way up to the very last moments of season five when it’s very clear that these heroes are fighting a war that they cannot win. And they do it anyway. And there’s a great moment and a great quote there that I don’t want to spoil in case you’re a person who hasn’t watched Angel, but the world around them is horrid. It’s never going to get 100% better. The forces they face are not readily defeated. They keep coming back. They’re not like Buffy where new evil comes. It’s the same old thing coming back over and over again. And so that’s hopepunk, in a nutshell basically, I think is Angel.

So sweetweird. Charlie Jane Anders offers as a different response to grimdark and alternative to noblebright and a lot of people myself included at first were like, “Wait, don’t we already have hopepunk for this?” but then as I learned more about it, I saw that they are related, sweetweird and hopepunk. I call them cousins, but they’re not identical. And the quick way I like to say this is that hopepunk is global. And sweetweird is local. So in hopepun,k you live in a hellscape and every day you muster your energy and you go out and you fight the bad of the world. And you just keep doing it because it’s worth doing. And I think from 2016 to 2019, that was a storytelling mode that we really needed. Because it felt like all right, we can do this. We’re going to have to fight it every step of the way. And it will keep coming back. But we can do that we can improve the world at least a little bit by doing that. And even into 2020 hopepunk was really something that seemed good.

But now it’s 2022 and I would say I don’t know about y’all, but I do know about y’all. We’re all exhausted. We live in the hellscape and it’s hard and it doesn’t always feel like we can make a difference. It feels like the places where we can make a difference are small. Sweetweird is an alternate way of approaching the hellscape. So the little phrase that I’m very pleased with myself for coming up with in the comments on Gwenda Bond’s newsletter about sweetweird, is that sweetweird is about the idea that even within a hellscape you can create a haven.

I think the best example of this is The Owl House and I’m gonna go to that in a minute. But just a quick shout out to The Book of Mormon which posited this in its big finale way back in 2011 with the idea that we can make this our paradise planet. And you know, that does sound bigger than sweetweird, but the idea I think is still there. So The Owl House is not the only example Charlie Jane Anders offers. She suggests many trends, especially in animation. I haven’t seen all of them. I am a little familiar with Steven Universe and Adventure Time and I’ve watched all of the Netflix She-Ra and I think those are sort of stepping stones on the path but that The Owl House, which I also have not seen all of but have seen enough of to have a sense of its vibe, is sort of the perfected sweetweird.

So in The Owl House, Luz, a middle-school-aged, I believe, girl longs to live in a fantasy world and just so happens to find herself in one instead of ending up at summer camp like her mom had planned for her. And immediately she’s very excited because she’s met a real witch and there’s this great moment in the pilot where they leave the witch’s house and Luz sees this fantasy world she’s ended up in for the first time and the place is called the Boiling Isles. And it is miserable. It is a literal visual hellscape. It looks like a terrible place to be. There are a lot of bad things happening there all the time. It’s a harsh and unfriendly world. But Luz and Eda the Owl Lady, the witch that she works with, and King the tiny, adorable — it’s not actually cat but a lot of ways feels like a cat to me — creature bent on world dominatio,n and then Luz’s school friends, and then over time Luz’s frenemy/love interest Amity, all build this sort of cocoon of love together. I would say that sounds more lurid than I meant it, but they create this group of people who all love and care for each other in the middle of the hellscape and they’re not trying to turn the Boiling Isles into not-a-hellscape. The Boiling Isles are a hellscape. It’s where they’re at. And so they are creating their own place here.

And so for me, the thing that makes the most sense with sweetweird in our current moment is that sweetweird is the story we need when we’re too exhausted for hopepunk. When we need time to recover and to remember that we are people who can do things. But we’re not ready to go out and be the people doing those things in the face of the horrible world we live in. Then we can retreat to these spaces of love that we have built for ourselves. And so that’s sort of the purpose in my mind of sweetweird and the distinction between sweetweird and hopepunk as a visual aesthetic.

A lot of the examples of sweetweird are a very specific vibe that is not one that resonates with me though I’m very happy so many people have found them resonant — specifically, Adventure Time and Steven Universe and The Owl House. But I have lately been into woodland goth which is a whole other blog post but I think can be related. Except there’s you know ominous fairies and stuff. But but still this idea at least in the book I just read, War for the Oaks, which is basically one of the first books to ever be an urban fantasy, even in the face of a giant fairy war, the main character Eddi builds a little band of people who all play together, and their music is related to fairy and to magic, but it also is its own thing and the connections they build with one another stand independent of that big fairy war. So it’s a similar idea, though the book itself is not sweetweird.

All right. That was a lot more than I realized I had to say and I’m super glad I said it out loud instead of typing it. I will post the raw transcript with this with maybe a few corrections because it seems Otter.ai does really not understand hopepunk as a word but yeah, that’s that. I hope you have enjoyed listening to and/or reading this and I hope if sweetweird sounds like the story aesthetic for you that you go out and enjoy a lot of it. Bye

This transcript was generated by otter.ai

Hello, friends. I want to talk about something from Stranger Things 4 that is brilliantly done. And that’s a Star Wars reference.

There are a lot of iconic quotes from Star Wars (and I mean the whole shebang, not just A New Hope). “Use the force, Luke.” “Luke, I am your father.” “I love you.” “I know.” “Do or do not. There is no try.”

People use these to varying effect, with varying degrees of acknowledgement. Sometimes it’s hackneyed, though I can’t think of any examples right now.

Sometimes it’s brilliantly used to reveal character, like in 30 Rock:

Liz says, “I love you,” Criss says, “I know,” Liz says, “You Solo’d me,” and then you’re certain that this is a love that will last.

But in this case, not only is this a Star Wars reference, it is a Star Wars reference that is then diegetically marked as a Star Wars reference.

Star Wars is 45 years old. It’s hard to make a Star Wars reference feel fresh. But Stranger Things 4 does, and here’s how (spoilers!):

This beautifully mimics this scene from The Empire Strikes Back:

The 20-to-1 odds of rolling a 20 on a 20-sided die make it line up extra beautifully with Han Solo’s odds of 3,720-to-1.

“Never tell me the odds” is something that most Star Wars fans will recognize as a reference, but in Star Wars it isn’t said with the gravity of so many of those other commonly known phrases. It’s something that people who like Star Wars okay, or are dimly aware of it, aren’t super likely to recognize. And it’s something that doesn’t take you out of the flow of the scene in Stranger Things. We’re not stopping the action to make a Star Wars reference: we’re making a Star Wars reference in much the way actual D&D players do, in the context of the actions surrounding the game.

I think this is probably now my favorite use of a Star Wars reference. Sorry, 30 Rock.

The chat runs by much too quickly to scroll with it while presenting but I love the vibrance of #FanLIS2022 chat so I wanted to go through and respond to people’s comments from my presentation, in addition to answering direct questions. So here we go!

procrastination and indecision then instantaneous dissertation topic is such an adhd mood

I’m not diagnosed, but you’re not wrong.

embodied fannishness

YES. More studies on how fans express their fandom with their bodies, please.

I’m kind of curious to see how many Cosplayers base their information process on others'.

This is a great question. I only got at individual practices and how others' shared resources are an influence, not shared process, but I did have 2 participants collaborating on an epic Yuri On Ice wedding cosplay who used similar curation methods. I wonder if groups that frequently collaborate have more commonalities in their information practices.

I feel there is some modesty that comes with cosplayers and that would refrain them to define as creators

I think that’s right. They don’t necessarily identify as creators, though I did have 2 participants refer to themselves as “makers.” But whether they’d use the term or not, the position they put themselves in with both trial-and-error and documentation of their construction processes is information creators.

I was able to recover my Noter Live log, yay! I’ll go back and collect the tweets from after my reboot later.

In reply to Star Trek: Discovery Has Problems (& How They Can Be Fixed) (Trek News) by Bill Smith:

I agree with Smith’s assessment of Discovery. Each season, the stakes are bigger. In Season 4, they were literally extragalactic. Once you’ve broken the galactic barrier and made first contact with a species living beyond it, where else is there to go?

The race to solve the puzzle box is exhausting. The hyperfocus on serialization leads to a lot of intriguing threads being introduced and tied off more quickly than I would like. For example, in Seasons 3 and 4 we saw what looked like they were going to be mental health crises for Detmer (PTSD from the jump into the future), Tilly (depression related to existential crisis), and Culber (burnout). In Detmer’s case, I don’t recall being shown the road to recovery at all. Tilly seemed to have two episodes of feeling bad that were magically fixed by deciding to become an instructor. And Culber I guess just really needed a vacation?

I really enjoy Discovery. In fact, I enjoy it so much that I wish there were more of it so we would have time to devote a whole episode to each of these characters.

I love Michael Burnham. But I also love so much of the rest of her crew. TNG started with a focus on the bridge crew and especially Picard, but opened up to give us time to get to know O’Brien, Barclay, and more. I wish Discovery had the breathing room to do the same.

I especially agree with Smith’s point here:

One of the things that Star Trek: Discovery did exceedingly well in Season 4 was First Contact with Species 10-C, the originators of the Dark Matter Anomaly.

It was its own challenge in unlocking the mystery of the DMA and I thought that aspect was something that the show did really well. It took this concept of seeking out new life and new civilizations and put a 32nd-century spin on it.

Discovery really leaned into that first contact situation hard and it worked. For 56 years, Star Trek has taught us that the unknown isn’t always something to be feared, but we should always strive to understand. There isn’t always a “big bad villain” when the puzzle is assembled or, sometimes, we find out that we are the villain however unintentionally.

These are the types of stories that have always found their way into Star Trek—from Gene Roddenberry’s first script right up to today’s iterations of the franchise. These are Trek’s roots and when Discovery revisits them, it works brilliantly.

Watching everyone work together to make first contact with the 10-C was exhilarating. It had all the delight of Picard figuring out the speech patterns in “Darmok” with an added bonus of getting to see a bunch of different people work together, leveraging each of their specialties to shine. This is foundational Trek stuff and I love when Discovery puts a spin on it.

I hope the writers will go a little softer in Discovery Season 5, giving it room to breathe. I look forward to seeing what they do.

🔖 Read How I Build My Common Place Book (Greg McVerry)

McVerry generously summarizes his workflow:

• Document impetus of thought (often after the fact)

• Collect initial bookmarks
• Ask in networks, bookmark your queries
• Collect research, and block quotes or use social annotations
• Begin to formulate thoughts in random blog posts
• Start to draft the long form thought
• Publish an article on my Domain.

In case it would help other people, here’s how I did it. I would have something that looked like this:

9
00:00:36.900 –> 00:00:40.560
Kimberly Hirsh (she/her): Do you agree to participate in the study and to have the interview audio recorded?

With the help of this guide from Drexel and replies to this Stack Overflow post I now can remove the number, the timestamp, and the two extra lines created when I remove those. Here’s how I do it.

1. Open the VTT file in my advanced text editor.
2. Use the find and replace feature.
3. For the thing to be replaced I use the regular expression ^[(\d|\n)].*$. You don’t need to know what a regular expression is. Just copy and paste that little code bit into the “Find” box.
4. Make sure either “Regular expression” or “GREP” is selected.
5. Click “Replace” to test it once and be sure if it works.
6. If it works, click “Replace all.”

For BBEdit:

7. Paste ^\s*?\r in the “Find” box.
8. Make sure the replace box is empty.
9. Repeat steps 5 and 6.

For Notepad++: 7. Then switch so that “Extended” is selected instead of “Regular expression” or “GREP.” 8. Paste \r\n\r\n in the “Find” box. 9. Put a single space in the replace box. 10. Repeat steps 5 and 6.

I hope this is helpful!

Josh Radnor writes a beautiful newsletter. It always feels like a gift. Here are some gems from the latest issue - italics are emphasis from the original, bold are mine.

There are no unwounded people. Wounding and trauma are features and facts of being a human being.

Why is it that I’m convinced my life should be linear and predictable, devoid of obstacle, conflict, and challenge, the very elements that make a story engaging and worth telling? Don’t I want to live a great story?

Nothing is the heaven or hell I want to make it out to be.

As I mentioned earlier, I defended my dissertation a year and a week ago. It was a joyous defense, with my committee cosplaying and my friends and family able to attend via Zoom. My BFFs were there, plus lots of people I’ve met online. It was amazing and fun and at the end of it I was WIPED OUT.

Exactly one year ago today, I spent about 10 hours formatting my dissertation so I could graduate. That was not my favorite part.

Some people leave their PhD with a job in hand, whether in academia or industry. Other people, people like me, have no idea what comes next.

What came next for me involved a lot of sleep.

But there was other stuff, too!

A lot of the past year has been focused on parenting stuff, as my kid switched from remote preschool to F2F preschool. A lot of it has involved managing my health, trying different interventions and seeing what felt doable.

I’ve done some work for Quirkos, including writing two blog posts. I really enjoyed that work. I like figuring out what to say, how to say it, and how to make it meet a client’s needs. Content writing/marketing is on the table as a bigger potential stream of income for me in the future, and I like that.

I’ve done a bit of sewing: I made napkins, a blanket, and a pillow. I have fabric ready for making a maxi skirt. I love sewing, but it always feels like a bit of a production to set up. It’s not! It’s actually fast and easy! But it feels like it is, which means I don’t do it as often as I’d like.

I completed W’s application for Public Service Loan Forgiveness and consolidated my loans so I can start that process, too.

I applied for some jobs, not a ton, but maybe close to 10? I wasn’t scattershot: I picked out particular organizations I wanted to work for (like NoveList) or industries I wanted to work in (ed tech, libraries). I had meetings about three potential freelancing gigs but none of them panned out and that was fine.

I spent all of last summer as a Pool Mom, which was amazing: I would take M to the pool first thing in the morning for swim lessons and then he and I would just hang in the water for an hour or two. I loved it.

I presented at MIRA, ALISE, World View, Micro Camp, and FSN NA.

I got caught up on Star Trek: Lower Decks and Discovery. (That reminds me, new Picard today, yay!)

I participated in Micro.blog writer and reader groups sometimes, as well as continuing my participation with the Creative Adventurers community via Discord video chats (something else to look forward to today!).

I got vaccinated.

I got consultations about our broken driveway and eventually went with the choice suggested by our arborist: having Will use a sledgehammer to smash up the parts that were sticking up. This saved us thousands of dollars in driveway refinishing. I had consultations and scheduled work with the arborist and the electrician.

I had lunch with friends.

I let a lot of things go in all different areas of my life.

And I got my dream postdoc, which is huge and made me feel that the not-having-a-plan thing was worth it because I wouldn’t have been available to apply to this postdoc otherwise.

I know that’s just a chronicling of what I did, but I needed that before I could really reflect.

Life isn’t super different aside from the not-working-on-a-dissertation part. I don’t feel different. I do get confused whenever someone calls me Dr. Hirsh.

My postdoc is for one year with the possibility (dare I say expectation?) of a one-year renewal. I have no idea what I’ll be up to come January 2024. I’m privileged to be able to say that that’s okay.

So what’s life like, having been a doctor for a year? The biggest difference is that because I hadn’t been immersed in research from last April through December, I have to go back now and review my notes on earlier processes more when I need to do a technique I’ve done before.

If you make a purchase through a link in this post, I may earn a commission.

Do you wish Dan Brown books were sexy and full of pop culture references? Do you like your religious artifact stories with comedy and kissing? Have I got the books for you!

Gwenda Bond’s books are always The Most Fun and her madcap fantasy romance duology is no exception.

First up, NOT YOUR AVERAGE HOT GUY:

Callie is a recentish college grad with no particular direction in life but a great love of books, learning, and creepy religious lore. She also works at her mom’s escape room. When Callie designs an immersive culty room and puts a book in it that is ACTUALLY an arcane artifact, cultists come to claim it and try to use it to release a demon on earth to bring about the end times. But instead they summon Luke, the super sexy prince of Hell. Wackiness ensues as Callie and Luke must team up to find the Holy Lance (that’s the Spear of Destiny for you The Librarian fans) and keep it from the cultists (who don’t actually know that Luke isn’t the demon they were trying to summon). To do so, they travel through painful demon magic, bopping around the world in a way that would make an Indiana Jones map look like Charlie Kelly’s conspiracy board:

Because you know how romance works, you know that they figure it out and get a Happy For Now. It’s important that it’s a HFN because a Happily Ever After wouldn’t leave room for the sequel:

THE DATE FROM HELL

Callie and Luke are happily dating now and they have an amazing date planned. But they also have a bit of a revolution planned: Callie wants to petition Lucifer to reconsider the damnation of people like Agnes, a 12-year-old girl who really probably should not have been sent to hell and certainly isn’t an adult by modern standards. Lucifer agrees to a meeting — on the day Callie and Luke are scheduled to have their big date. Which also happens to be the same day Callie is supposed to be helping her mom with a big escape room event to raise the money to make repairs after the mess she and Luke got into in NOT YOUR AVERAGE HOT GUY. Lucifer says that Callie and Luke have 72 hours to prove that they can redeem someone who deserves to be released from hell. The person he chooses is Sean, a lost-Hemsworth-brother-type/international art thief who oh, by the way, is a Grail seeker. More wacky hijinks ensue, more traveling by map, and more Arthuriana than you can shake Excalibur at. (Excalibur isn’t in the book to my recollection, by the way.) I briefly found myself thinking for a moment, “How wild is all this Arthuriana just happening in Callie’s real life?” before remembering that OH YEAH HER BOYFRIEND IS THE PRINCE OF HELL.

Because it’s a romance, it ends with a tidy Happily Ever After (leaving Gwenda free to work on other romances like MR. & MRS. WITCH). Callie figures a lot of stuff out, so does Luke, and they get to be together, yay. (And if you consider that a spoiler, romance probably isn’t the genre for you.)

What I loved

So many things! But here’s a partial list:

• The meticulous attention to detail with respect to all the mystical artifacts
• Callie’s supreme nerdiness
• Detailed Escape Room stuff
• Pop culture references aplenty (Wondering if you share Callie’s opinion on Season 4 of Veronica Mars? Read THE DATE FROM HELL to find out!)
• The love that radiates from Luke whenever Callie Callies all over the place - seriously, I haven’t read this much warmth in a romance novel since I don’t know when (because warmth is different than heat)
• Lilith. I just love her, okay?
• Porsoth, a polite Owl Pig Demon who is a bit stuffy but can get scary when necessary
• The affection Callie has from her mom, her brother Jared, and her bff Mag (who uses they/them pronouns and nobody ever makes it a thing)
• What Gwenda does with Arthur and Guinevere, can’t say more or it’ll spoil you but big ONCE AND FUTURE graphic novel vibes

I can’t think of them all. If this isn’t a ringing endorsement, I don’t know what is: My whole family is going through a rough time right now and it makes it hard for me to immerse myself in a book. I would often read a chunk of THE DATE FROM HELL and then step away from it for a few days, but I ALWAYS CAME BACK. There are a lot of non-mandatory things I’m abandoning in life right now, but this book kept me returning.

What I need to warn you about

I really can’t think of much. I guess if you don’t like people being playful in stories about holy artifacts maybe skip these?

What I wanted more of

I can’t think of anything here either. Everything was exactly what it needed to be.

Who should read this

People who like Indiana Jones AND Sabrina (the Harrison Ford version). People who don’t know what to do with themselves and want to see somebody who also doesn’t know what to do with themself succeed at stuff. People who want a romance that is hot but not explicit. People who wished their were more badasses who were badass for reasons other than their ability to engage in combat (Callie is a badass and no one will convince me otherwise). People who need more fun in their lives.

Highly recommend.

Book: Not Your Average Hot Guy
Author: Gwenda Bond
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication Date: October 5, 2021
Pages: 320
Age Range: Adult
Source of Book: Library Book

Book: The Date from Hell
Author: Gwenda Bond
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication Date: April 5, 2022
Pages: 336
Age Range: Adult
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley

As you may have noticed, I’m reading up on Learning Experience Design. LXCON 2017 resulted in a beautiful magazine. I highlighted this bit:

To reach a desired learning outcome you want to focus on four different types of learning objectives: insight, knowledge, skill and behavior. These learning objectives are about who you are, what your views are, what you know and what you choose to do.

I am a productivity hobbyist and have a bad habit of chucking my whole system every once in a while to try and adopt somebody else’s from scratch. This never works, though, and I inevitably end up rebuilding my own Frankenstein’s monster of tools. I started feeling this itch again recently, and after briefly flirting with Tiago Forte’s PARA method, decided to go back to basics and look at what I already know works for me before spending a lot of time switching things up.

Personal Productivity

Here’s what I’m using right now. I based the list on what kind of things are in a productivity stack on this Pleexy blog post.

Personal Task Management

I don’t like using software for this. There’s something about the feeling of pen on paper that makes me prefer it intensely. It does mean that my tasks are not linked to relevant email messages, as Tiago Forte suggests they should be, but I can use email labels to hold things for later in a sort of David Alleny method with folders like Waiting For, Read/Review, and Reference.

So because I prefer to do task management on paper, I use the Bullet Journal method and its companion app. I do a pretty vanilla implementation of the core collections and add custom collections as appropriate.

The notebook I prefer is a large hardcover squared Moleskine/. I’m experimenting right now with the expanded edition, since I usually go through a couple notebooks a year. At first I didn’t like the added weight or feeling of it in my hand, but now I’m used to it and it doesn’t seem that different from the regular one.

The pen I prefer is the Pilot G2 07 in black.

I also use tabs with my notebook: 1” ones across the top to mark the future log, this month, this week, and today, and 2” ones down the side for collections.

Calendar

The Bullet Journal Method includes a way to calendar, and I do use it some. But I mostly use Google Calendar for this. It’s useful for collaboration - my colleagues and my husband all use Google Calendar, so it’s easy to schedule things with/for them this way. I also schedule a lot of recurring tasks and appreciate being able to search to see when something happened in the past.

Note taking

The Bullet Journal is great for note-taking, too, but I have a tendency to ignore notes once I get them on paper. For short notes that I want to be easily accessible, I use Google Keep. I use recurring reminders with these. For example, I have a list of all my meds and a recurring reminder to fill my cases with them, and a list that pops up every day of stuff M. needs to be ready to go to school.

Longer notes end up in my blog, which I host on Micro.blog, or in Google Docs. This is an area where I could grow. If I decide to really get into personal knowledge management, I’ll probably experiment with some other tools. I’ve tried Evernote and Notion in the past and neither of them is quite right for what I’d imagine doing.

Focus

I use Forest, but I use it pretty inconsistently. When I’m in flow, I don’t really need this kind of app. As I do more writing, though, I might use it more.

Time management

I could use Forest for this, too, and I might. So far I don’t do a lot of time tracking.

Habit tracker

These never work for me, so I don’t bother with one.

Automation

I don’t do this much, either. I like a bit of friction in my workflow. As I keep refining it, I may discover areas that could benefit from automation, though.

Scholarly Productivity

Scholarly productivity requires its own specialized set of tools. Here’s what I use.

Citation management and reading

I use Paperpile for both citation management and scholarly reading. It integrates seamlessly with Google Docs for writing. It has its own built-in reader interface available on web or mobile. It costs about $30/year and I love it. It has completely eliminated lots of document-syncing headaches I had in the past when I used Zotero.

Literature tracking and notes

I use the labels and folders in Paperpile, along with Raul Pacheco-Vega’s Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump method for this. I track a given body of literature using a Notion spreadsheet I created. You can get it (pay-what-you-can starting at $0) here.

Keeping up with literature

I use a combination of Google Scholar alerts and journal alerts for this.

Mind-mapping

I use bubbl.us.

Writing pipeline

I track my writing pipeline in Notion, with a database that lets me view it as a list or as a kanban-board according to stage in the publication process. I have a pay-what-you-can (again, starting at $0) template you can download for that.

Revisions

I have a revisions database in Notion for each paper, as well. I haven’t made this available as a template yet, but I plan to soon. Sign up for my Newsletter if you want to find out when it goes live. It will be pay-what-you-can like the others.

Permissions

If you are using images from others’ work in scholarly publishing, you will need to obtain and track permission to use that work. I do that in a Notion database. You can get my template. (As always, pay-what-you-can, $0.)

Areas for growth

There are two big gaps in my productivity stack right now. One is the difficulty in serendipitously serving up notes to myself. The kinds of connections that build creativity aren’t readily available using Google Docs or Keep. I started to build a personal wiki for this purpose but I think the amount of labor required to keep it up was too high. I’ll probably play with Notion for this some more, but I might just keep putting stuff on my website and occasionally scrolling through categories there to find connections.

The other big gap is REVIEW. I don’t have a solid review process. I’ve tried timers and time blocking and so far they haven’t worked for me. But I know all of this would work much better for me if I dedicated the time to review it, so I will keep working on figuring that out.

I hope it’s been helpful for you to read about my productivity stack. What’s in yours?

It’s the time of year when people are announcing their PhD acceptances. If you are psyched to be doing a PhD, yay you! I have some advice for things you can do to make it easier. If you are already into your program or even graduated and haven’t done these yet, it’s never too late to do them. But I wish I’d done all of them before beginning my PhD, so if you can do them ahead of time, I think it will go better for you.

1. Choose a citation manager.

You’re going to be reading a LOT of scholarship: articles, book chapters, conference proceedings. You’ll read some assigned by your professors and some you find for your own work. If you start out capturing all of them, it’ll be easier to find them later when you reference them in your own work.

You have two options here: something that will grab references for you and build citations and reference lists, or doing it manually.

Software that will do it for you

There are a lot of options for the former. I personally use Paperpile. It integrates with Google Docs, which is where I do most of my writing. It has mobile apps and includes a reader that will save your highlights and annotations. It costs about $30 a year.

I’ve also tried Refworks, Zotero, and Mendeley. I recommend looking at the features for each option and choosing the one that looks like it will match best with your anticipated workflow. Paperpile is good for me because I like to read on a tablet and it requires no extra steps to set that up. Think about your plans for reading and your plans for writing.

Know that this is a pretty low stakes choice, as most of these have an export option that will let you move all of your references to a different manager easily.

Doing it manually

You can do this manually if you like, though it can get unwieldy if you start to build up a large collection of resources. (I currently have over 3500 in my Paperpile library.) To do it this way, I recommend setting up a spreadsheet according to Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega’s Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump method. (If you’re a Notion user, I’ve got a pay-what-you-can template for doing this.)

To create the references to include in your bibliography, you can either build them manually or find them in Google Scholar and click “Cite” to get a list of formatted citations.

If you go this route, you should be meticulous about keeping track of which references you use. I would recommend building your reference list as you write rather than waiting until you’re done writing.

2. Choose a way of storing readings.

With Paperpile, Zotero, and Mendeley, this is handled for you. If you use Notion, you can use their web clipper to gather readings. You can also just download readings into a folder you manage yourself. If you do this, I recommend backing them up to the cloud using Dropbox or Google Drive and backing up to an external hard drive for extra security.

3. Figure out how you prefer to read.

Knowing this preference will save you time later and help you build a reading-writing-citation environment. You might like to print things on paper, read them on your computer screen, or read them on a tablet or phone. Try all of the options available to you to figure out what you like best.

4. Look for information on your university library’s website about help with research.

Is there a specific librarian assigned to your department? Learn about them. Maybe even get to know them. You are not bothering the librarian. The librarian’s job is to help scholars with research. You are a scholar. The librarian will work with you.

Does the library provide instruction in how to use databases? Sign up for a session. Do they offer topic guides? See if there’s one close to your research interest and get familiar with the resources included in it.

5. Learn to read and take notes.

This is the most important one. Don’t be like me and spend hours of your PhD reading every paper in excruciating detail. If you are in the social, natural, or applied sciences, check out Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega’s Abstract-Introduction-Conclusion method as a starting point, then dig deeper into readings that feel especially important for your own work.

Track everything you read, keep notes on it, and later you won’t have to work as hard to hunt it down. Again, I recommend setting up a spreadsheet according to Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega’s Conceptual Synthesis Excel Dump method. (If you’re a Notion user, I’ve got a pay-what-you-can template for doing this.) Dr. Pacheco-Vega also has a lot of wisdom to share on note-taking techniques, so look at those and see what might work for you.

6. Develop an elevator pitch for your research interests.

You’re going to have to introduce yourself and your research interests to people, a lot. Try to get down a quick explanation of your research interests. This will change over time.

For example, in my application, I said I was interested in researching how connected learning could fit in school libraries. Then, I said I was interested in interest-driven learning in libraries. Now, I am interested in how connected learning as manifested through fan activity contributes to information literacy and practices. (Would I need to define some of those terms? You betcha. In that case, I could say I’m interested in how fans engaging in activities like cosplay and fanfiction learn through those activities, as well as how they find, evaluate, use, create, and share information.)

7. Get a hobby or two.

A hobby gives you something to do that’s not school, and that’s important. Ideally, it’s something you will have begun learning before school starts so that you’re not, say, simultaneously trying to understand Marxist geography and the sociology of space while also learning to knit. If you can get more than one hobby, even better. I like having a solitary one and one that will lead you to interact with non-school people. In my MSLS days, my principal hobbies were baking cupcakes and being in the Durham Savoyards. During the PhD, they were tinkering on the IndieWeb and doing improv comedy.

There are a lot of other things you might do to make your experience go smoothly, but if you’ve got these seven down, you’re going in with a strong foundation.

Koh, K., Ge, X., Lee, L., Lewis, K. R., Simmons, S., & Nelson, L. (2020). Fostering Information Literacy Through Autonomy and Guidance in the Inquiry and Maker Learning Environments. In J. H. Kalir & D. Filipiak (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2019 Connected Learning Summit (pp. 94–101). ETC Press.

This is a quick note that I’m really excited about this conference paper I found that builds a bridge between connected learning (my broad research interest) and information literacy (my specific disciplinary interest). I’m going to explore it more and dig into the connection later, but I’m psyched to find a new paper on this.

I originally posted this on Facebook on March 17, 2016.

I’m only 9% Irish, but I sure love Saint Patrick’s Day. I think most of my affection for it comes from St. Patrick’s Day 1991, when my sister, our mom, and I arrived at our Tallahassee church for the last round of the church’s progressive dinner, and my dad, who had been living in Durham for more than a year, surprised us by showing up. Will and I have a picture from that Saint Patrick’s Day hanging on the wall of our parlor.

As promised, here’s a walkthrough of my thought process for playing Wordle. This is the game for 03/14/2022.

I begin most games with the word ATONE. This uses 5 of the 6 most frequent letters used in English (etaoin).

After this, I know that the word will have T and E in it. I have eliminated one possible position for each of those letters.

My next goal is to do two things:

1. Systematically eliminate other location possibilities for T and E.
2. Include as many of the remaining letters from the 12 most frequently uses letters as possible (i shrdlu).

So I try TIERS, which moves T to the beginning and brings in I, R, and S.

This locks E in the middle position, tells me that I chose the wrong position for T, and lets me know that S will be in there somewhere, but not in its current position.

I actually get a bit less strategic now. I only have two more possibilities for where T could go, so I figure I’ll try it at the end, as that seems more likely than the next-to-last place. That leaves me with 3 possibilities for S, so I start with the first of those. Now I’ve got to fill in two letters. So far I’ve got S_E_T. I try not to repeat letters this early on, which eliminates a lot of possibilities. I look at what’s remaining from letter frequency (HDLU). I consider and reject words with repeats like SHEET and SLEET. I think through other possibilities and settle on SLEPT.

Now I’ve got 4 out of 5 letters and know their positions, since L is in the word by not where I put it first. I’m looking to fill in the blank for S_ELT.

This is when I just start looking at the keyboard and plugging letters in. Swelt? Shelt? Skelt? Sbelt? Those aren’t words. What about SMELT?

At first I think that can’t be right, it’s just a joke word as in “He who smelt it dealt it.” But then I remember no, you can smelt iron, because smelt means “to melt or fuse (a substance, such as ore) often with an accompanying chemical change usually to separate the metal” (Merriam-Webster. (Also it’s a legitimate past participle of “smell” so " He who smelt it dealt it" is perfectly good English .)

So I try it.

Boom.

I hope this is helpful as you build your own Wordle workflow. Take care!

I don’t share my daily Wordle result, but I do play it most days. I get it in 5 or fewer tries 94% of the time, 3 or fewer 32% of the time. I wanted to share what I do in case it spares anyone else some frustration.

The first key is to memorize this combination of nonsense words that will help you remember English letter frequency: etaoin shrdlu.

I try to start with a word that uses five of those letters.

Next there are two tricks I rely on most of the time:

1. Familiarity with common letter combinations/placements
2. Systematic movement of yellow letters

The first one involves things like knowing that H is often part of a two-letter combo like SH, TH, or CH, and that these combos usually occur at the beginning or end of words. Likewise thinking about how there are vowels in most words, different things that often come before E at the end of a word (like ATE, ACE, ALE), or how two letters often appear together (like UI).

As for the second: once I get a yellow letter, I try words that use that letter in different positions so I can eliminate places where it doesn’t belong.

The last thing I do before random guessing is look at the unused letters on the keyboard and try to build words combining them with the pieces I already know.

I hope this has been helpful. I’ll try to post a sort of “play-aloud” with screenshots and my thought processes soon.

My sense of routine and timing and goal-setting has been completely exploded over the past month or so. The routines I put in place to help me cope in the face of my mom’s illness weren’t really doable last week because M was home from school Wednesday through Friday for a teacher workday and conferences. Just today am I beginning to claw some of that structure back.

Today I did morning pages. I did a tarot reading for Pisces season. (The overall gist was one of recognizing abundance, not worrying where it would come from, and letting go of the need to try to create a perfect balance.) I had a smoothie. I filled one of my three medicine cases. (Two more to go!)

I cleared several small items off my to-do list. Soon, I will get down to work-work, continuing to analyze the documentation that’s going to help us develop a typology of the challenges library staff face when implementing connected learning.

I’ve had headaches almost continuously for a few weeks, partly due to hormone shifts, but maybe also partly due to stress. I had two cycles where I thought my body had sorted out my PCOS a little bit but here we are on Day 44, no new cycle in sight (a normal menstrual cycle is 40 or fewer days long from the beginning of one period to the beginning of the next). This is fine, or rather, not catastrophic. But disappointing.

I spoke with my doctor the other day. My Hemoglobin A1C is high - that’s the number that says how my blood sugar has been over the course of the past few months, as opposed to the glucose measurement that really only tells you about the past 24 hours or so. (That one was high-normal.) My LDL cholesterol was high, too - but total and triglycerides were good, so let’s celebrate that!

My doctor recommended two new supplements and I asked about a third. One of the ones she recommended was corn silk for kidney function. When I eat things with whole corn, corn flour, or corn meal in them, I get joint pain. I’m going to try the corn silk and see how it goes, but am prepared to stop it quickly if it causes pain and ask her for other possibilities.

She also recommended berberine for cholesterol and blood sugar, and agreed with me that it would be good to try GABA to improve the quality of my sleep. And she said it was smart of me to up my l-tyrosine when I noticed clinical signs of declining thyroid function (increased fatigue and decreased body temperature).

I write about these things because my life is a constant set of calculations relating to how to handle different conditions and the fact that my health will never be “fixed.” Chronic illness is not a problem to be solved; it is a condition to be managed.

I bought this Art Oracles card deck at the North Carolina Museum of Art when we were there to see the Mucha exhibit in December and I keep the Frida Kahlo card pinned on my corkboard because it says, “Convalescence lasts a lifetime” and that is something I need to keep in mind.

I don’t expect I’ll ever get a tattoo, but inspired by both my own experiences with chronic illness and having recently read Ninth House, if I ever did, I think it would be the tarot Wheel of Fortune, and probably the Wayhome Tarot version.

(That picture is from the Everyday Magic website.)

The thing is, wherever you are on the Wheel, three things are true:

1. At some point, things will be better than they are now.
2. At some point, things will be worse than they are now.
3. You will be back here again.

It would be good for me to keep these truths in mind at all times.

I’ve been reading the Future Ready with the Library posts at the YALSA blog and it’s got me thinking about the skills I was building in middle school and how they have persisted and how I’ve leveraged them throughout my career.

In middle school, I spent my out-of-school time practicing theater, reading books, and coding in BASIC. I volunteered one summer at the library. (My memory of this is that somebody at school decided I needed more to occupy me and sent me to the counselor and when she asked my interests, “reading” was the only one she could figure out how to match with a volunteer opportunity.)

In my career, I’ve been an educator and public speaker (both use my theater training), a librarian, and a web editor (HTML is pretty easy if you’ve got a handle on BASIC). I use knowledge and skills from all of these domains as a researcher, too.

It’s fun and cool to think about the connections between that me and this me.

I realized as I was helping my family in the face of my mom’s return to the hospital that there will never be a time when I’m not a caregiver and that given my family’s medical woes, I am much more likely to need to drop everything to caregive than many other people. It would be wise to design my life to accommodate this fact, rather than hoping for some imagined time with minimal caregiving responsibilities. Even if I get my own conditions well-managed, even as M. grows and becomes more independent, I will still benefit from the flexibility I need as a parent of a young child and a chronically ill worker.

This is a radical shift in my thinking about the future. I’ll write more about it as I tease out what it means for my planning practices and daily life.

I own a lot of writing craft books. There’s the obvious, like Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, but I also have more obscure ones like Richard Toscan’s Playwriting Seminars 2.0. I have books about how to write romance, like Gwen Hayes’s book Romancing the Beat and books about how to write science fiction and fantasy, like Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing. I have books about writing for different audiences, like children, and in different formats, like screenwriting. I have purchased many more of these books than I have read. In a sense, I have a whole little antilibrary devoted to writing craft.

As I was doing my morning pages this morning, I thought about my affection for freewriting and realized that it first started in seventh grade, when our teacher assigned us the textbook Write Source 2000. This was 1993, so adding 2000 to the end of things made them seem very futuristic. The cover of the book, which can still be purchased used, was very shiny. It’s got a pencil-shaped space craft on the cover and kids looking up at it through a telescope. The third edition is available via the Open Library. I had the first edition, but I suspect they’re very similar. The cover design is the same.

A lot of my initial affection for this book was because of its quality as a material object. The shininess of the cover. The fact that it was a trade paperback, unlike most of our textbooks. The page layouts inside were attractive. And the authorial voice was conspiratiorial:

We’re in this together. You and I. We’re members of an important club - maybe the most important club ever.

The book focuses on learning across settings, writing as a tool for learning, and metacognition (though it just calls it “learning to learn”). I did not realize that this had been my jam for almost 30 years, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

I’m pretty sure I still have my copy somewhere. If not, I definitely carried it around with me at least through college. I thought about buying it again but now that I know I can read it on Open Library, I feel okay holding off.

This book was the first book I read that talked about how to write, and I loved it for that. I’m pretty sure I was the only kid excited by this textbook. (It also had new-book-smell, which for my money is equal in joy to old-book-smell. Really, if it’s a book in pretty good condition, I probably like how it smells.)

I can’t find the source right now because I’ve read so much of her stuff, but sometime Kelly J. Baker wrote about the idea of writing as a career never occurring to her. It didn’t occur to me, either, though I did it constantly: in my diary, in journals, at school. In fifth grade I wrote a series of stories using the vocabulary list words, and it was all extremely thinly veiled autofiction where the characters names were just my classmates’ names backward. They ate it up.

I started and left unfinished tens of science fiction stories about my own anxieties as a middle schooler, and in high school I wrote a silly children’s book (I think it was called The Hog Prince), Sailor Moon and Star Wars fanfic, and short plays (the plays were in Latin). In college, I wrote more fanfic, all of the school writing assignments, and blog posts.

As a teacher I wrote lesson plans and assessments. As a librarian I participated alongside my students in NaNoWriMo. Working in higher ed K-12 outreach, I wrote blog posts and newsletters.

Writing is, it turns out, a potential career, but it’s also just part of life.

During the next couple of years as I work as a Postdoctoral Scholar, I’m thinking about what I’d like to work on next. I’m pretty sure it will involve reading and writing, because those activities are almost autonomic for me. I don’t know beyond that.

But maybe it’ll involve actually reading more of those craft books.

As we work on the Transforming Teen Services for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion project, one thing I have to be reminded frequently is that creating Connected Learning programming does not require providing for all three spheres: interests, relationships, and opportunities. Frameworks like Connected Learning begin as more descriptive than prescriptive: they say, “This is what’s been happening,” not “This is the only way to make it happen.” People like myself latch onto the aspirational qualities of this description and feel that if they can’t create a Connected Learning experience that encompasses the whole model, we shouldn’t even bother trying.

WE ARE WRONG.

Interests are the sine qua non of Connected Learning, so if librarians or educators start there by genuinely figuring out what youth are interested in and building their programming around that, they’ve gotten started in that direction. When CL happens spontaneously, the relationships and opportunities often come about through the course of the activity. When I started doing community theater as a teenager, I built relationships with peers and adult mentors and I had opportunities to learn things about theater production, to serve on non-profit boards, to act as a stage manager and a publicist. These aspects were not built into the environment explicitly for my benefit; they were natural byproducts of me participating in my interest.

So if you’re a librarian or educator considering implementing Connected Learning, please don’t be overwhelmed by the multiple spheres and various possibilities. If you’re building from youth interests, you can bring in the other components over time.

The creators of Project READY had the same problem: we shared frameworks that it’s easy to feel you must implement perfectly or not at all. We discussed Dr. James A. Banks’s framework for multicultural education, which has four levels of integration, ranging from the contributions approach (what we sometimes call the “heroes and holidays” approach to culture) all the way to the social action approach, in which students actually work to solve social issues. It can be easy to see models where youth contact government officials and make social change and think, “Well, I don’t have what I need to do that, so this model has nothing for me.” But there are two other levels in the model, the additive approach incorporating new multicultural content without changing curricular structure and the transformation approach which involves reshaping curriculum to center multiculturalism rather than adding it on. If your current approach is at the contributions level, moving to the additive approach is preferable to giving up on the whole framework.

As with improving the nutritional quality of your diet, adding more movement into your day, or any habit change, moving in the right direction is preferable to not moving at all. For example, if you learn you have some youth at your library interested in cosplay, maybe you start by hosting some simple no-sew project events. Then over time you can find out if there is a cosplay charity organization in your area and find out if any of those cosplayers would be interested in sharing their expertise, and the youth might build relationships with them as well as each other. And those cosplayers might then introduce the youth to opportunities like participating in contests or engaging in charitable cosplay themselves. You didn’t start with all three parts, but you moved in the direction of Connected Learning at each stage.

I’m still thinking about essays after reading Jackson Arn’s “Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot​ | Against the Contemporary American Essay. Arn references other people’s writing about the essay without actually linking to that writing, but I have managed to track them down.

The essay, James Wood wrote in The New Yorker, “has for some time now been gaining energy as an escape from, or rival to, the perceived conservatism of much mainstream fiction.”

This refers to James Wood’s Reality Effects, which discusses John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essays.

For Brian Dillon, such an authority on the essay that he authored a book called Essayism, it’s “unbounded and mobile, a form with ambitions to be unformed.”

The full title of Dillon’s book is Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction.

Mary Cappello, one of the most respected essayists around, claims the essay is actually a “non-genre,” mutating too fast for diagnosis.

This is a reference to Mary Cappello’s book Lecture. You can read the relevant excerpt at Literary Hub. I prefer Cappello’s full description:

Midway between a sermon and a bedtime story, the lecture is knowledge’s dramatic form. Nonfiction’s lost performative: the lecture. Cousin to the essay, or its precursor: that non-genre that allows for untoward movement, apposition, and assemblage, that is one part conundrum, one part accident, and that fosters a taste for discontinuity.

Assemblage and discontinuity seem key to the essays I enjoy reading, so I appreciate Cappello pointing them out here.

Arn turns to the personal essay boom of the 2000s, especially the 2010s, and mentions other writers’ explanations for the personal essay’s popularity.

Vivian Gornick, writing in The Yale Review, traces it all the way back to her youth, via the waning of modernism and the rise of the Holocaust memoir; Jia Tolentino, writing in The New Yorker, suspects the feminism-inflected internet economies that helped make her a star.

Arn refers to Gornick’s The Power of Testimony and Tolentino’s The Personal-Essay Boom Is Over. Tolentino then cites Laura Bennett’s Slate piece, The First-Person Industrial Complex.

Bennett mentions “personal essay habitats” like “Gawker, Jezebel, xoJane, Salon, BuzzFeed Ideas.” Bennett says

First-person essays have become the easiest way for editors to stake out some small corner of a news story and assert an on-the-ground primacy without paying for reporting.

Arn also mentions this, that the lack of money for publishing outlets to spend on funding writers’ experiences as fuel for writing makes the personal essay more appealing because everyone is an expert on their own experiences. Bennett goes on to discuss publications’ and editors’ potential exploitation of new writers who think they’re ready for a sensational personal essay to go public and only learn after the fact that they were not. These point to a more structural concern than much of Arn’s discussion of The Contemporary American Essay, which tends to focus on the ways individual writers engage in navel-gazing, write disconnected from broad sociopolitical issues like climate change and the impact of the Internet, and work so hard to be likable.

Bennett points to a gendered element to the personal essay boom, as well:

On its face, the personal-essay economy prizes inclusivity and openness; it often privileges the kinds of voices that don’t get mainstream attention. But it can be a dangerous force for the people who participate in it. And though the risks and exploitations of the first-person Internet are not gender-specific, many of these problems feel more acute for women. The reason—aside from the fact that the “confessional” essay as a form has historically attracted more women than men—is that so many of the outlets that are most hungry for quick freelancer copy, and have the lowest barriers to entry for publication, are still women’s interest sites.

While Tolentino asserted that the personal essay boom was over in 2017, Arn points out that most of the essays in The Contemporary American Essay are personal, constantly making “I” statements. They are also ambivalent, not just about the form of the essay itself, but about whatever they’re writing about. Arn catalogs several times the essayists use “perhaps” or “maybe,” seeming to hedge their bets in fear of upsetting anyone with a firm, declarative statement.

Reading all of the examples Arn pulls out from The Contemporary American Essay, I got the distinct feeling that these essayists were all just reading each others’ writing, going “AHA so THAT’s what an editor wants,” and then putting their own spin on it. It feels like they read the first few pages of Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist but never got to the remixing part. The frequent use of etymology as an in-road to an essay, the perhapses and maybes - I haven’t read the book, but based on Arn’s description there is a sameness to the essays in it.

In the middle of the piece, Arn says

The Contemporary American Essay (let’s call it TCAE) is not the contemporary American essay. I hope not, anyway.

As I was sharing some of the most hilarious-to-me essay quotes with W., I realized that I read essays and most of them don’t make these moves. Yes, there are a fair number of Steven Hotdog essays in my reading, but each of them seems to make the Steven Hotdog format fresh. Why am I getting essays that don’t read this way?

I realized that it’s probably about my genre of choice. TCAE is all about literary nonfiction. This can be treated as a synonym for creative nonfiction, but I prefer to think of it as a subgenre, or a mode of writing. The writers are deliberately Writing Literature. The essays I read tend to be cultural criticism, usually about pop culture, or deft at connecting personal experience with shared experience. They are published in venues that have a specific focus rather than in general interest publications like Harper’s or The New Yorker. Instead, they’re in Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Catapult, Tor.com, StarTrek.com. My favorites are often public writing by PhDs. These are the kind of things I want to write, too.

As often happens, I’ve come to the end of this blog post and am a bit deflated and lacking in a conclusion, so I’ll just point you to one of my favorite essays:

You’ve Reached the Winter of Our Discontent by Rebecca Schuman

In which Dr. Schuman ruminates on the cool Gen X guy as he enters middle age, and how cool isn’t even a thing anymore.

That critique of the essay piece I read and linked yesterday has sent me down a rabbit hole of other writing about essays. I’ll put together a list of links soon; for reasons I don’t know the original piece at The Drift didn’t contain links or citations for the other pieces it references, but I have used my librarian skills to track them down.

This has me thinking about my own writing voice and what it is. I think it varies. Of course I have a standard academic writing voice, but I’m thinking for more personal writing. Mostly blogging.

I think I have two voices.

One is my Big Sister voice. This is vaguely didactic but not moralizing. It’s an attempt to be helpful. This is the voice I use when I write about my experiences as a doctoral student and tips for doing research.

The other voice is more lyrical, vaguely witchy even, and also fragmented. This is the stream-of-consciousness voice, the more vulnerable voice. This is the voice I use when I’m writing about my feelings.

These two voices add up to a fairly accurate representation of my headspace. Big Sister is when my mind is sharp, I’m feeling good about myself, and I believe I’ve got help to give. Fragmented dream voice is when I’ve got brain fog, when I’m feeling weak, or when I’m feeling woo woo.

I think they’re both valuable, though Big Sister voice is probably preferable for more audience-focused writing and fragmented dream voice for when I’m writing primarily for myself. For a while, I thought I should pick one and go all in on it, but now I’m happy to have these two different voices. They are both me, both verbal representations of my vibe.

What about you? Or your favorite writers? What kind of voices do they have?

Right now, I’m in awe of writers who can write something that feels scholarly and beautiful at the same time. Sarah Kendzior is great at this. Hiding in Plain Sight is a terrifying book, an important book, and a gorgeously written book. I don’t think I knew those could all line up before reading that. I think that’s the kind of voice I would like to develop. Maybe if I can get my two voices to play together I’ll be able to make it happen.

How does a person write an essay? I’ve been trying to figure out. The thing is, it’s a versatile form. So versatile, I can’t pin it down.

There are the essays they teach in grade school.

My eighth grade Language Arts teacher called the five paragraph essay a cheeseburger essay. I think she really liked Jimmy Buffett. This pop culture reference was not as hot in 1994 as you might imagine.

So there’s a basic format, cool cool cool. The cheeseburger essay is best for persuasive or argumentative writing, I think. In tenth grade, we had to write narrative essays. I wrote mine about the day I almost had to go on stage as Fern in a production of Charlotte’s Web where I had originally been cast as an Owl. I was really proud of this piece of writing. I included a ton of sensory detail. I probably have a copy of it in one of my juvenilia boxes. (Yes, of course I have juvenilia boxes, plural, for when I donate my papers somewhere. If you know me, you are not surprised by this at all. I am exactly the kind of person who would label the boxes full of her childhood writing “juvenilia” and move them from house to house rather than throwing them away.)

My tenth grade English teacher praised my essay but gave it something less than a perfect grade. When I asked her what was wrong with it, she said, “I just would have written it differently.”

I was incensed. She couldn’t have written it at all. She didn’t have the personal experience. This was, to my mind, extremely unhelpful feedback. How could I improve my writing if the problem was simply that I wrote it like myself?

In college, we wrote papers. These were mostly persuasive/argumentative or research-based. (Pssst, all great research-based writing has an argument. Wendy Laura Belcher’s book _Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks can help you figure out yours.)

I wrote about Furor and Pietas in the Aeneid. I wrote about the extended wine metaphor in Horace’s Ode 1.11, the source of the aphorism “Seize the day.” (The actual translation is “pluck the day.” Plucking the grapes is the first step in winemaking, but Horace uses it at the end of the poem. He begins the metaphor by saying we should strain the wine of life, arguably the end of the process, and works backward from there. I was really proud of this paper. It’s the result of my only all-nighter.) I wrote about the validity or lack thereof of AP testing. I wrote about the Takarazuka Revue.

Most of these papers got good grades but when I read them now, I cringe. Their arguments are weak. Their evidence is thin. But they were good enough for class.

But good enough for class isn’t the kind of essay I want to write anymore. I want to write essays that mean things. Preferably that connect pop culture with life in significant ways. Like my essay about the Star Trek episode “Peak Performance” and impostor syndrome.

The thing is, I really thrive with a model. So I’m looking at models for essays. And I’m reading excellent essays, by Sarah Ruhl, by Kelly J. Baker, by Jess Zimmerman. (Jess Zimmerman’s Women and Other Monsters is probably the closest to the kind of writing I want to do.) By tons of other authors on Literary Hub, Electric Literature, and Catapult.

They’re all different, which is fine. It means, though, that I have to build my own model by combining these, rather than just following one.

I need to Steal Like an Artist.

It was my half birthday almost 2 weeks ago, so it seems like a good time to check in on whether I’m being the person I want to be at 40. Here are the intentions I set:

1. I think I want to be a little less ambitious about 40, to set fewer goals.
2. I want to be a loving and mostly gentle mother.
3. I want to take care of my own body, including making clothes built to fit it.
4. I want to keep trying new things and growing as a self-employed person.

So how am I doing?

For #1, pretty well. There are a lot of maybes right now. Maybe I’ll submit a paper for that conference. Maybe I’ll go to that webinar. Maybe maybe maybe. This fits in with the need to be super flexible as a caregiver and a person with chronic illness.

For #2, awesome if I do say so myself. My kid definitely knows I love him - and making sure my loved ones feel loved is my highest ambition, if that imagine-your-own-funeral exercise is any indication. I’m also doing pretty well with being mostly gentle. I step away if I’m too frustrated to be kind, saying out loud, “I’m frustrated.” A+, me.

3. I am slowly taking care of my body, though not making any clothes yet. I’ve made having a cup of warm lemon water in the morning a habit and have gotten into a routine of eating nutritious breakfasts that don’t have a ton of sugar in them and meet my target dietary restrictions (eliminate gluten and corn, limit dairy and nightshades).

4. This is another one where progress is happening, but it’s slow. My consulting work for Quirkos is the main way I’ve been doing this. This is on the back burner a bit while I’m doing the postdoc.

Pretty pleased with myself, actually. I’m doing okay.

An undergrad sent me a message thanking me for my post A Start-to-Finish Literature Review Workflow and asked the question:

Is there an exhaustive way of making sure that the literature gap you have identified is genuinely a gap?

The short answer is, no. There isn’t. But there are ways to get close.

In my experience, the best way to begin is with a specific research topic in mind, but before you have fully developed a question. You get familiar with the literature using the tips from step 4 in my workflow: Identify potential literature.

• Consult with a trusted colleague.
• Search databases.
• Search Google Scholar.
• Follow citations backwards.
• Follow citations forwards.

After you look at the abstracts for these and eliminate the ones that are outside the scope of your topic, pay close attention when you’re doing your Abstract-Introduction-Conclusion extraction reading to suggestions for future research. In my experience, this is the most fruitful way to find gaps. Both my Master’s paper and dissertation research questions were suggested in the future research section of other scholars’ work.

As H. L. Goodall says in Writing the New Ethnography,

To locate a gap in any scholarly literature requires that you read a lot. (emphasis original)

Goodall offers some more specific advice as well:

• Start with the most recent literature.
• Notice which things are referenced repeatedly - the references all the most recent work has in common.
• Make a chart of names, relationships to institutions, and arguments.
• Look for patterns of citations, themes, and topics.

I don’t think I can give better advice than that. I’ll close out with more from Goodall:

You are reading for the storyline. You may not be sure what you are using it for, at least not yet. But that is all right. Be patient. Ideas, and uses for them, often take time.

You are also reading to find out what is collectively written about an idea, what individual voices have to say about that collective idea, and for an opening that you can address.

There’s no shortcut, I’m afraid. You have to jump into the literature before you know what the gap is. When everything you’ve read is referencing everything else, it’s safe to trust you’ve got a good sense of the topic and know where the gaps are.

How are you doing, Internet? I’m obviously Not Okay, with my mom having leukemia and all, but I’m trying to do things besides worry about her anyway. I’m doing pretty well at that.

Have we talked about how much I love working for the Connected Learning Lab? Maybe we have. I’ll say a little more about it anyway. I styled myself for this type of position throughout my PhD program, in spite of having no expectation that such a position would be available. I always live a better life when I just do whatever is interesting or exciting to me and let professional opportunities arise as they may. (Woo-woo types would say this is because my Human Design type is Projector and I would not argue with them.)

My job is to read about what’s making it hard for teen librarians to support connected learning in their libraries, interview them about it, analyze a bunch of data from my reading and interviews, and work with a team to develop tools to help teen librarians with this. It is dreamy as can be. Teen librarians (and librarians who serve teens and others as well) tend to be pretty awesome, based on my encounters with them. On their best days, they want to make space for what lights teens up. (On their worst days, I would guess they probably just want to go home. Being a school or public librarian is really hard as well as being rewarding.)

I do feel a need to figure out what’s next, which is why I’m doing Jen Polk’s PhD Career Clarity program. I wouldn’t have been able to pay for this as a student, but my consulting/content development work with Quirkos paid enough that I could actually afford it. Yay!

My previous explorations with ImaginePhD have indicated that writing, publishing, and editing is a good career family given my skills and interests, and I don’t disagree. I still find myself attracted to the idea of being a freelancer, so I’m doing some thinking and planning and learning about what that would look like. The ideal situation for me would either be enough consulting to cover the bills paired with writing as a creative outlet, or some sort of dream job instead of the consulting. I don’t think I want to depend on freelance writing for my income, but I do think I want to get words out of me and in front of human people.

Blogging even on days when I don’t have A Topic in mind is a gesture toward that. So is doing Morning Pages, and the Artist’s Way more broadly. (I’m still doing that at my very glacial pace.)

I’m reading through Joanna Penn’s Author 2.0 Blueprint and the posts and books she mentions in it. I’ll probably pick Bird by Bird up soon. I thought I’d read it before, but it’s not on my list of books I’ve read. I know I have a paperback copy somewhere but I think it’s lost in a pile of stuff in the attic, so I’m going to buy the ebook for my Kobo, too.

I definitely idealize writing as an art form. I don’t know a way around that, and I’m not sure I want to. I don’t have this idea of a person who spends all their time sitting in a garret writing, because as I learned when I was doing improv, you have to go experience life if you want to make art about it. (You could make art about sitting in a garret, I suppose.) When I watched Hamilton, the thing that stood out for me that for some reason had eluded me in listening was writing as a throughline in the whole story. The lyrics “I wrote my way out” and “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?” had made an impression, of course, but something about seeing it brought it out as bigger than a leitmotif. What’s bigger than a leitmotif? I don’t know. Something really big.

There was some other art that I was thinking about that has contributed to this idealization, but I don’t know what it is. Definitely the story of Donna Tartt spending so much time on her writing at Bennington College was part of it.

Anyway. I am unapologetically romantic about writing as art and craft, but very realistic about the ways in which it can be a career.

How are things going for you?

I’m taking an indefinite hiatus from checking or cross-posting to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and most other social media services, with the exception of Micro.blog. I’m doing this right now because I don’t like when stuff pops up in front of me without me choosing to see it, and that’s most of what social media is. In particular, when my mute filters aren’t working because they apply to timelines but not other parts of an interface and ads are proliferating so it’s hard to find content from the people I actually followed, I just end up grouchy and I don’t need extra reasons to be grouchy.

If you want to get in touch with me, you can email me at hello@kimberlyhirsh.com or text my Google Voice number at +1 ‪(919) 794-7602‬. If you want to know what’s up with me, you can subscribe to my newsletter or RSS feed. If you want to respond to something I post, you can reply by email, join the conversation on Micro.blog, or send a webmention from your own site.

I’m not deactivating or deleting accounts, just logging off.

This week is really asking me to live my commitment to embracing radical uncertainty. I’ve had a hypothyroidism flare due to the cold weather, which has impacted my sleep habits and energy levels. We had a big winter storm and while it hasn’t been a huge problem, it shifted some childcare plans away from what we usually have. The kid is home today for a school holiday, which is expected but different than normal, and due to the winter storm he’ll have a two-hour delay tomorrow. (Guess who won’t? His dad. Which means I’m in charge of all the dealing with the delay, I think.)

This has been a test, too, of my ability to do my job while living the life I live. Last week, I was able to get a lot done, even in the face of brain fog. I have hopes that I’ll be able to do likewise this week, and it’s nice that my next real deadline isn’t until next week or the week after anyway.

It’s hard to be a person who craves system and consistency and also live with the built-in uncertainty of chronic illness and parenting, and of course a pandemic adds another layer. I think it would serve me well to build some resilient, flexible systems. Sort of like menus as Dr. Katy Peplin and Dr. Katie Linder have written about, maybe. I’m going to keep thinking about this. I’ll let you know where I land.

Since the Micro.blog community is starting a reading group in the near future, I thought it would be a good time to talk about my reading habits and tastes.

My favorite books I’ve read in recent years are Tamsyn Muir’s GIDEON THE NINTH, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s MEXICAN GOTHIC, and Tracy Deonn’s LEGENDBORN. My favorite book of all time is Piers Anthony’s ON A PALE HORSE. (I’m aware my fave is problematic. I love his books anyway.) I first read it in seventh grade. It was the first urban fantasy book I had ever read and I loved that it combined an interesting world, cool philosophical and metaphysical ideas, and characters I loved.

I read widely and enjoy many popular genres. My default fiction genre of choice is fantasy. I also really enjoy soft science fiction, cozy mystery, and Regency romance. I rarely like realistic or literary fiction, but sometimes an author or book in those categories will catch my interest. I read a lot of nonfiction, too, usually focused on my latest obsession or professional needs.

Right now I’m reading Leigh Bardugo’s THE LANGUAGE OF THORNS, Caitlin Doughty’s SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES AND OTHER LESSONS FROM THE CREMATORY, and Kelly J. Baker’s SEXISM ED.

I read physical books, ebooks, audiobooks, and sequential art (comics/graphic novels).

I tend to read books marketed as young adult or adult books that crossover well to a teen audience. This is partly because of my professional history as a high school teacher and middle school librarian and partly because I love a good bildungsroman. I love the possibility and promise of the teen years. Also, I think reading should be fun.

I’m really impressed by authors who can create an evocative sense of place, like Erin Morgenstern or Alicia Jasinka.

I love to chat books and recommend reads, so please feel free to get in touch if you’d like to talk about books!

In October, I learned that for the first time since my diagnosis in 2011, I had actually gotten my thyroid hormone levels to what I consider optimal. Exciting, right? Then I went over three months without brain fog, and it was incredible.

Sunday, my throat started to hurt a bit - a classic hypothyroidism symptom (I know it’s also a COVID symptom, but this sore throat comes and goes in a matter of hours; I’ve taken care all week to be masked and outdoors whenever I’m away from home as I couldn’t book a test before my isolation period would be up anyway) - and I took my temperature to see if I had a fever and my temperature was the lowest it had been since October - I had been hovering around 98.2 which is actually warm for me, approaching a normal person’s body temperature - and I was getting 97.7 (classic mediocre thyroid for me) and even 97.5 (bad sign, y’all). I was feeling a little more fatigued than before and then I realized that the weather has turned pretty cold for here, and remembered that cold weather can impact thyroid function.

Then this morning, I woke up with brain fog.

I have a dream job right now, and one of the things that makes it a dream job is that it involves reading and synthesizing a lot of information.

But these are really hard tasks with brain fog.

So I decided rather than to try to push through the brain fog, I would work with it, largely due to a timely newsletter from Katy Peplin about “dressing” for the brain weather you have.

Here are the things I did today to try and work with this brain fog:

Gave the day a soft reset. After breakfast and a cup of coffee, I went to bed and closed my eyes and listened to an episode of 30 Rock. This gave me a bit of clarity.

Blogged through it. So then I got up and to get my head in the game for work, I wrote the last blog post of my Connected Learning series. But then I was worn out.

Had a snack and read some fiction. Specifically, The Language of Thorns.

Went back to bed, again. I set an alarm to make sure I wouldn’t be down for more than 40 minutes (20 minutes to fall asleep + 20 minutes to actually sleep). This time, I got up and actually felt like I could do stuff.

Had lunch. I always am energized after a meal.

Figured out what work I could actually accomplish in this haze. At first, I thought I didn’t have anything I could get done without intense mental effort. Then I realized that in some notes I made yesterday, I had said, “We might want to make a checklist…” Making a checklist and populating it is definitely something I could do, so that’s what I focused on.

What’s next? Well, because I didn’t want to be indoors around strangers when I had a sore throat, I rescheduled some appointments I had this week for 2 weeks from now, which means I won’t be able to talk to my doctor about this feeling for a couple weeks. But I also don’t want to live through the next two weeks in a fog. So I’m going to up the amount of l-tyrosine I’m taking. I wouldn’t do this except that it is the thing I did most recently that got my thyroid hormone levels to that optimal place and it’s easy to go back down. This is an amino acid that a person with hypothyroidism should definitely talk to their doctor about using. If I start to get palpitations, I’ll go back down. But my hope is this will clear the fog.

This is the fourth post in a series contextualizing my position as a researcher of connected learning.

Here are all the posts published so far:

1. What Is Connected Learning?
2. How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries
3. Connected Learning in Libraries: Changes and Challenges

There are a number of opportunities for connected learning to grow in libraries. Here I’ll discuss some of them, beginning with the one most relevant to my current work.

Research-Practice Partnerships Research-Practice Partnerships allow library professionals to develop connected learning environments and programs in collaboration with researchers of learning and information sciences. The project I’m working on, Transforming and Scaling Teen Services for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (TS4EDI) is one such partnership. Myself and other researchers at the Connected Learning Lab, including PI Vera Michalchik and Research Manager Amanda Wortman, are working with state librarians in Rhode Island and Washington first to identify barriers and challenges to libraries creating CL environments and programs and then to develop resources to help library professionals overcome those barriers and challenges. The state librarians will recruit local public librarians in their state to be part of this partnership, and those public librarians will recruit youth to participate, as well. Other examples include the ConnectedLib project and the Capturing Connected Learning in Libraries project.

Brokering Youth Opportunities in Libraries Connected learning research over the past 10 years has highlighted the importance of caring adults or peers as brokers or sponsors for youth as they build their networks surrounding an interest. These brokers/sponsors can connect youth with other people and resources to help them expand their network and identify opportunities for learning and achievement related to their interest. Current research literature doesn’t explicitly offer guidance on brokering as a distinct activity, investigate the extent to which librarians currently act as brokers, or illuminate how youth may serve as peer brokers in the library setting. Research-practice partnerships and library professional-led professional development could address these questions.

Bringing Connected Learning to School and Academic Libraries So far, connected learning has been documented mostly in informal settings. A few studies have looked at connected learning in formal settings, but those tend to be individual classrooms rather than school or academic libraries. One area that offers potential for CL in these settings is the connection between interests and information literacy. This was the focus of my dissertation, in which I examined the information literacy practices of cosplayers. Cosplayers engage in connected learning as they learn about their interest, build relationships with each other, and find opportunities to contribute to the cosplay community or even become professional cosplayers. Throughout these elements of connected learning, cosplayers engage in information literacy, identifying resources, evaluating them, and even creating new resources. Because school and academic libraries are the primary center for information literacy education in their institutions and because they are not tied to a specific academic discipline, they have the potential to create opportunities for connected learning as learners build their information literacy practices.

That’s all for this series of blog posts, but I expect to write a lot more about connected learning through the course of my work at the Connected Learning Lab, so if you find this interesting, stay tuned!

This is the third post in a series contextualizing my position as a researcher of connected learning. Here are all the posts published so far:

1. What Is Connected Learning?
2. How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries
3. Connected Learning in Libraries: Changes and Challenges

While libraries are poised to be environments conducive to connected learning, they may need to undergo further shifts to expand their support for connected learning. This involves a number of considerations:

Resources. Library professionals must consider not only physical and digital resources, but human resources as well - using “resource” to describe a person the same way we might use it to describe a book or a website. Library professionals can serve as a point of connection between learners, mentors, and other people in the environment beyond the specific context of the connected learning activities.

Technology and space. Current library policies may need to be updated to enable learners to engage in shared practices, socializing, collaborating, and publishing their work online.

Evaluation. Libraries have traditionally focused on quantitative measures of impact, such as how many people attended a particular program. These measures may not be sufficient to capture the impact of connected learning. Measures of connected learning need to capture the way learners move with their learning across settings beyond spaces controlled by the library; identifying specific desired outcomes can facilitate capturing evidence of and communicating the impact of a program. Qualitative data such as interviews or open-ended survey questions may capture this impact better than or alongside quantitative measures.

Role of library professionals. Library professionals must learn to consider themselves as sponsors and brokers of youth learning rather than mentors or authority figures. This means helping youth find other people and communities to support their learning and focusing on enhancing learning rather than enforcing behavior-based policies.

Program design. To create programming that fosters connected learning, library professionals may need to co-design with youth rather than deciding programming in advance and offering it to youth without their early input.

Competencies. The creators of the ConnectedLib project identified the following necessary competencies for library professionals to support youth’s connected learning:

1. …they must be ready and willing to transition from expert to facilitator…
2. …[they] need to apply interdisciplinary approaches to establish equal partnership and learning opportunities that facilitate discovery and use of digital media…
3. …they should be able to develop dynamic partnerships and collaborations that reach beyond the library into their communities…
4. …they should be able to evaluate connected learning programs and utilize the evaluation results to strengthen learning in libraries… (Hoffman et al., 2016, p. 19)

Professional development. Library professionals often will not have been trained in these competencies during their education, so they may need to continue their own learning via in-house professional development, programs provided by professional organizations, open online learning resources, and formal educational experiences. The ConnectedLib toolkit is one example of an open online learning resource directed at meeting this need, while the University of Maryland’s Youth Experience In-Service Training is an example of a formal educational experience designed to build these competencies.

I identified these potential shifts to library practices in response to a number of challenges libraries face in developing and implementing connected learning programming, including:

Attracting teens to skill-building programming. For some advanced interest-based experiences, youth need a foundational set of knowledge. For example, to create a sophisticated video game, a teen would first need a foundational understanding of game design and computer programming. It is a challenge to attract novice learners to this kind of programming.

Working with technology. Library professionals may lack the digital tools they need due to library policy, may know how to design or facilitate technology-focused or -infused programming, or may not feel comfortable acting as effective digital media mentors.

Unfamiliarity with the Connected Learning model. Library professionals may struggle with integrating all the different spheres and elements of the model. They may not have the knowledge, skills, or training they need to successfully implement the model.

Culture clashes. Teen culture may sometimes clash with library culture, requiring library professionals to negotiate these conflicting cultures to create programming that has a strong impact in teens’ lives.

The next and, I think, final post in this series will address future directions for connected learning in libraries.

This is the second post in a series contextualizing my position as a researcher of connected learning. Here are all the posts published so far:

1. What Is Connected Learning?
2. How Connected Learning Happens in Libraries

The first element of connected learning is interest. Libraries explicitly support the exploration of personal interests in both their collections and their programming. The second element is relationships. Libraries are intergenerational spaces that can be (but aren’t always) inclusive of people from nondominant groups. Libraries can serve as a bridge that connects formal and informal learning. Libraries are increasingly spaces where youth can have shared experiences creating new knowledge. They are third places, neither school nor home, where youth can gather, connect around their shared interests, and meet adult mentors and sponsors who can help them leverage a variety of resources in pursuing those interests.

A note about third places in the time of COVID-19: For many of us (the luckiest among us, I would argue), there is only one place: home, which is also work, which is sometimes also school, which is also where we do whatever social activity we do. This is certainly true for me. That said, online library programming can act as a virtual third space, a place to go for something that isn’t all about home or work responsibilities. I’ll be interested to see how scholarship around this shift evolves. A quick search for “‘third places’ COVID” on Google Scholar demonstrates that scholars are already thinking about this, including in the specific context of public libraries. I am exercising extreme restraint to not jump down a rabbit hole of exploring that research right now.

There are some examples of connected learning happening in both public and school library spaces. If you’d like to explore them, here are some links:

• YOUmedia Chicago
• Young Urban Scholars book club
• An afterschool program for inner city, middle school students to imagine STEM’s relevance in their lives
• Hack the Evening
• Publications from ConnectedLib

The next post in this series will discuss some of the challenges of creating connected learning experiences in libraries and some shifts libraries may need to undergo to provide more connected learning experiences.

I’ve seen and heard a lot of people in the Micro.blog community discuss the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. The hold list on this at my library is inordinately long; if I put a hold on it now I might get to read it in 3 - 5 months. So I decided to read the sample of it, to help me decide I’d like to buy it.

As I was reading the introduction, I kept thinking about how my 4000 weeks have a different shape than many other people’s 4000 weeks, different than healthy people’s 4000 weeks. I kept thinking of the concept of “crip time,” which I’d heard but didn’t really understand beyond the concept that time seems to move differently when you’re disabled. This thinking was distracting me from actually reading the book, so I turned to the web to help me get a firmer understanding of “crip time.”

It led me to Ellen Samuels’s essay, Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time, which was exactly what I needed. Samuels quotes Alison Kafer, who says

rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.

I have been trying to bend my body and mind to meet the clock in preparation for starting my postdoc, but I think everyone will be happier if instead I bend the clock to me. My body sometimes needs to be awake at night and asleep during the day. Instead of lying awake in pain trying to fall back asleep while listening to an episode of Star Trek because this is the time when people sleep, I can give myself permission to rearrange my time so the parts of my work that can be done asynchronously (basically everything but meetings, I think) can be done in brief chunks of time in the middle of the night.

This is a positive effect of coming to recognize crip time. (This felt like the right time to stop using quotation marks. I don’t know why.) But Samuels points out the negative elements, which will impact more people than ever before in the wake of COVID. Samuels does this so well that I’m reluctant to attempt to summarize. If you’re interested, I highly recommend reading the essay. For now, I’ll pull out just the bit that inspired this post’s title:

…crip time is vampire time. It’s the time of late nights and unconscious days, of life schedules lived out of sync with the waking, quotidian world. It means that sometimes the body confines us like a coffin, the boundary between life and death blurred with no end in sight. Like Buffy’s Angel and True Blood’s Bill, we live out of time, watching others' lives continue like clockwork while we lurk in the shadows. And like them, we can look deceptively, painfully young even while we age, weary to our bones.

I start working remotely for the Connected Learning Lab tomorrow and while a lot of people are excited for me, most of them don’t actually understand what I’m going to be doing. So I’m writing a blog series that I hope will explain that somewhat, and this is the first post. If you’ve read my comps chapter on Connected Learning or seen my Connected Learning and the IndieWeb talk, some of this will be familiar.

Connected learning can be conceived of in three ways: as a type of learning experience that occurs spontaneously, as an empirically-derived framework for describing that type of experience, and as a research and design agenda aimed at expanding access to that type of learning experience. My brother-in-law, P., is actually a phenomenal example of a Connected Learner.

In high school and college, P. was interested in playing guitar. He started hanging out at a local guitar shop, connecting with a community there of peers and mentors. Through the connections he made, he was offered the opportunity to be lead guitarist for a tribute band, and that job took him all over the world. He has since embarked on a different but related career, working in media law. This area of law might not have been of interest to him if he hadn’t had experience working in the music industry.

That’s an example of a spontaneously occurring connected learning experience. From experiences like this, scholars have created a model to describe connected learning. This model includes three elements of connected learning: interests, relationships, and opportunities. P. was interested in music, built relationships at the guitar shop, and it led him to opportunities to perform as part of a working band and become a lawyer.

Image Source: The Connected Learning Alliance

This type of experience is easier to access with more financial and temporal support; the research and design agenda surrounding connected learning is an equity agenda that aims to broaden the availability of this kind of experience, making it possible for nondominant youth who might require additional support to access connected learning. One way to do that is to bring this kind of experience into public spaces serving nondominant youth - public spaces like libraries.

The work I’m doing with the Connected Learning Lab is part of a grant funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services examining key needs for teen services in libraries:

(1) the challenges library staff face in designing and implementing CL programming for underserved teens and the means for overcoming these challenges, (2) ways library staff can use evaluative approaches to understand youth needs in CL programming, and (3) the means of demonstrating the value of CL programs and building stakeholder support for increasing their scope and scale, particularly to serve equity goals.

The products of this research will include

training modules, guidebooks, mentoring supports, case studies, videos, practice briefs, topical papers, and blogs.

These are some of my favorite kinds of things to create, so I’m extra excited.

My next post in this series will talk about how Connected Learning is already happening in libraries, with some examples from actual libraries.

I don’t want to write a full review of <a href=”https://kimberlyhirsh.com/2022/01/02/finished-reading-truly.html" class=”u-in-reply-to h-cite">Truly Devious but I want to share a couple things.

First: it goes back and forth between details of a cold case from 1936 and the present. I love the way it weaves these two related stories together.

Second: it ends on a cliffhanger, which left me wanting to scream “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” and also simultaneously flail with delight, so well done Maureen Johnson, I guess.

Recommended if you like mysteries, especially dark academia.

Here are a couple of earlier year-in-review posts:

• 2020
• 2019
• 2018

This one’s going to be a little different. I will write up my catalogue of great stuff that happened but I want to give some space to the hard stuff first.

My family has definitely been playing the pandemic on easy mode, as it were, but I have hit a wall of not hopelessness exactly, but grim resignation. Resignation specifically to the fact that things will keep shifting, that it will probably get worse before it gets better, that making plans based on timing of perceived lowered risk (for example, When-My-Kid-Is-Vaccinated) is more likely to lead to disappointment than not. Resignation to the extreme unknown.

Anticipating a year of shifts, the only goal I set was for the first quarter off 2021: to complete and defend my dissertation. I did it! Goal achieved! Setting such a straightforward goal means I can feel good about how I spent my time this year.

I only set a word for the first quarter, which was PLAY and I have no idea how I did with that.

I did some great stuff in addition to defending my dissertation this year:

• I made extensive use of the public library. My kid actually bumped up against the checkout limit.
• I got vaccinated and boosted.
• I got my thyroid managed and hit my target lab results for the first time in the 10 years since my Hashimoto’s diagnosis.
• I consulted for Quirkos and developed content for their blog.
• I organized a FanLIS panel for the Fan Studies Network North America conference.
• I got and swam in a mermaid tail.
• I had a pool party for my 40th birthday.
• I presented at MIRA, Micro Camp, ALISE, and World View.
• I took M to swim lessons.
• I embraced my Trekkie nature.
• I applied for, was offered, and accepted my dream postdoc.

I couldn’t have done these things without immense help:

• from my advisor & committee.
• from W’s mom, who provided me with time for both work and rest.
• from W, who provided for my basic material needs, kept the house clean, continued to be an awesome dad, and made me feel good about myself.

If there was a theme for this year, it was Star Trek. The Next Generation was a balm in the weeks after my grandmother’s death. Lower Decks, Discovery, and Prodigy revitalized my love of Trek. Discovery, in particular, helped me remain hopeful and trust in my values as a guide for living.

(My core values, by the way, are curiosity, creativity, and care.)

I’m doing a New Year New Moon retreat with Katy Peplin on January 2nd, so I will probably dig into my dreams and plans for 2022 then.

For now, I’ll say my word of the year for 2022 is MEND. My goal is to keep going.

I may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

This was a slow reading year for me. I read a lot more fiction than last year, a little less nonfiction, many fewer comics, and no poetry.

I only read 28 full-length books for myself (as opposed to for my kid). I range widely each year, usually coming in the 30 - 50 book range, so this is a little less than even a normal slow year would be.

But of course, year 2 of a pandemic, especially when finishing a PhD, is not a normal year.

All of the fiction I read this year was good, because I don’t keep reading things that aren’t. But my favorite was Gideon the Ninth . It took me a little while to get into, but once I was into it, it blew me away. It also helped me realize, along with the Star Trek: Discovery episode “Su’Kal,” that space gothic is a subgenre I love.

I’m still into Dark Academia, which explains the presence of The Historian , If We Were Villains , Bunny , and Ace of Spades on my [finished books](https://kimberlyhirsh.com/finished-reading/) list. My other fiction reading decisions were driven primarily by media tie-ins. I read the Shadow and Bone trilogy and Six of Crows duology in anticipation of *Shadow and Bone* on Netflix, then decided to stick with Leigh Bardugo and read her Wonder Woman book . I also read The Last Wish , the first book in the Witcher series. It will probably be a while before I get around to that show but I enjoyed the book. None of my nonfiction reading blew me away, but it was all good. I definitely read some fanfiction, but I couldn't tell you what. And I read a lot of articles, most of which you can find in my [Links](https://kimberlyhirsh.com/categories/links/) category. I hope to read for pleasure a lot more next year. What did you read in 2021? If you had a hard time reading, what did you do instead?

I don’t think I’m going to write up my annotations for the first chapter/week of The Artist’s Way, “Recovering a Sense of Safety,” for perosnal reasons but I thought I would share the outcome of my first artist date! I searched Google for “junk shop,” found this eBay seller, and created a Pinterest board where I stuck a bunch of items they’re selling that I thought were interesting.

It’s got some big grandma energy, doesn’t it? That’s 50% what junkshops are about and 50% where my head is at. The sweaters are more 10-year-old Kimberly energy. (It was 1991-1992, okay?)

What does this board make you think of?

CW: Suicide

Sherrie was my friend.

Sherrie and I never met in person. We talked on the phone once ever for a few seconds. But we interacted a lot via text - on a posting board, over LiveJournal, via email, via snail mail. I crocheted Sherrie a hat that I never got around to sending her. When I was in my first year of teaching, Sherrie sent me letters and stickers and a magnet. The stickers were glittery kittens and autumnal leaves. Sherrie loved glitter.

I was in my second year of full-time teaching when Sherrie died by suicide. I didn’t find out about it until five days after it happened. When I found out, I was devastated. My heart was broken. I knew Sherrie lived with bipolar type II. I knew she had gotten a lot of help and it had never been enough.

Sherrie wrote beautifully. Sherrie would dress up in fun ways. Sherrie was a glamazon. Sherrie made some of her friends angry. Sherrie was a lot.

Sherrie was a mom. (I can’t say more than that because this is the part that makes me cry the most.)

Two days after I found out about Sherrie, I had a meeting with an assistant principal to discuss a classroom observation she had conducted in my class a few days earlier. It was the Ides of March. As a Latin teacher, I carried on a tradition my teacher had of having “toga day” on March 15; students got extra credit for coming to school draped in a toga, and as a teacher, I participated too.

So there I was, sitting in this AP’s office, KNOWING I was about to hear about a terrible observation because the day she had observed was Not Good. The class she had observed was my most challenging class ever. While I’m pleased to report that the students who challenged me the most in that class turned into lovely adults who I sometimes ran into because one of them was in undergrad at the same university where I was working and then getting my PhD, at the time, they had their own stuff going on at home and I was Not Equipped to support them through it. The school had failed to implement a key piece of their IEPs and it left them and me high and dry and none of us had what we needed to turn that into a positive experience.

So the AP observed me teaching that class, a class I never did a good job in and where most of my students learned a lot more about Roman civilization and culture via documentary video than they ever learned about language, because it was the only way I could manage for us to all get along and we were all, together, in survival mode.

Like I said - I knew this was going to be a bad review. I hoped the AP would have some suggestions for how to handle it.

My eyes were red and puffy because I had been crying for days. She had stood me up for this same appointment earlier without warning, and we had rescheduled. The only time she had available was during my 25 minute lunch period.

I sat at her desk and opened by telling her that I had lost a friend to suicide and only learned about it a couple days earlier and was still raw from grieving, so if I was especially emotional, that was why.

I don’t remember response, but I remember it was somewhere between awkward and cold. I got the sense that grieving my friend’s suicide was a Me Problem, something I should have left at the door when I entered the building at 6:55 am that morning.

There were a lot of things about my life that were Me Problems, because teachers aren’t supposed to do anything besides be teachers, apparently. Or at least they weren’t in 2007. I don’t suppose it’s much better now.

The AP genuinely opened by just saying, “That was bad.”

I said, “I know.” I told her I was looking forward to this meeting and her feedback on how I could be better.

She told me she didn’t know.

She told me to go ask Barbara. Barbara was the head of the initially licensed teachers program. Barbara would not be available for days.

Somehow this exchange took up my whole 25 minute lunch period. I arranged for a colleague to cover my class for just a few minutes so I could tend to human needs like going to the bathroom and, you know, EATING.

But when I got to the classroom, there was the principal, waiting to conduct my third and final observation for the year.

THAT’S RIGHT: the amount of time I had to improve between “feedback” and my next observation was THE WALK BETWEEN THE AP’S OFFICE AND THE CLASSROOM. On my own. With no suggestions or advice from the AP who had just told me I had done a bad job.

That day I was giving a test, which should have made the coverage easy for my colleague, but instead, it meant I had to get these students settled and make it through the 45 minutes of observation before a colleague could bail me out so I could eat.

Grieving, with low blood sugar, having been at work since 6:55 and it now being 1 pm with me not having eaten much between those two times, probably woefully underslept due to a relapse of anxiety and depression brought on by Sherrie’s death, and immensely frustrated because of this ridiculous observation setup, I broke.

I had been too permissive during my last observation, so I swung the pendulum and I swung it hard.

My students were engaging in antics that I usually “managed” through warmth, joking, and being resigned, but this day, I snapped at them:

“THIS CLASS IS NOT A JOKE. I AM NOT A JOKE. THIS TEST IS NOT A JOKE. SIT DOWN AND GET READY TO TAKE THE TEST.”

This was very un-me, not my usual teaching style, and my students for once obeyed.

Guess what? That wasn’t a good observation either.

I was in an operetta that week. It was tech week. The night after this observation was our final dress, if I recall correctly. The director had explicitly told us in a notes email to leave our personal stuff outside the theater door. We were here to make magic and do art and focus.

Normally I love leaving my stuff at the theater door.

That day I Could Not.

I showed up wearing Rainbow Brite pajamas. I sobbed on my way into the dressing room. My mom was working on the show and I got a hug from her.

I made it through the rehearsal. After rehearsal we were discussing makeup and what some people whose makeup wasn’t strong enough could do to fix it. Somebody suggested replacing drugstore makeup with MAC.

Sherrie loved MAC.

I was done.

I made it home. I made it through the weekend of shows. We might have been doing two weekends that year. I think we probably were. I don’t remember.

I didn’t have the time or space to grieve Sherrie: not at work, not in my happy space of the theater, not in my social environment or hobbies. LiveJournal was the only grieving space I had. (Don’t ask why I didn’t try to take sick leave from work. I was teacher. Taking sick leave as a teacher is at best a hassle and at worst literally impossible because there are no subs.)

That was almost fifteen years ago.

Eleven months ago today, my grandmother died. I knew my grandmother much better than I knew Sherrie. She was my last living grandparent. I grieved her more intensely than the others, because she was the one I was closest to. Because her house was the closest thing I had to a childhood home.

And most of all, because I had a visit scheduled with her for April 2020, of which the pandemic robbed me.

Blessedly, I had plenty of time and space to grieve my grandmother.

For three weeks after she died, I did nothing besides parent, eat, sleep, crochet, and watch Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was what I needed. It was what I could handle. And I’m so grateful for that space.

In spite of it, I’m still grieving. It feels a bit like when a wound heals slowly. Or reopens and weeps a bit. Only in the past few weeks have I actually started crying about her death. I have dreams where she is sick and dying but not dead, and my dead grandfather is tasked with caring for her, and I keep protesting that someone who is already dead is not the best caretaker if we’re trying to keep someone alive because how can a dead person possibly do a good job?

I don’t have a conclusion to this. It was brought on by Kelly J. Baker’s piece for Women in Higher Education, No Space to Grieve.

Photo by Vidsplay on StockSnap

This post contains minor spoilers for Star Trek Discovery Season 4 Episode 2, “Anomaly."

Near the end of the latest episode of Discovery, Lt. Tilly tells Dr. Culbert that something feels off about herself, and that she’d like to talk to him about it in a professional context sometime.

This feels to me like a clear indication that Tilly is dealing with depression, anxiety, or both, and I’m very interested in following where this goes, especially as I read Tilly as my own sort of Discovery-avatar.

Over at Keith R. A. DeCandido’s recap for Tor.com, a commenter says,

The best thread for later is Tilly. Does she miss her mother? Is it about all the stress and loss and responsibility they’ve had? Mental health is an all too often ignored issue, so I hope they do it justice.

I, too, hope they do it justice, but what I don’t need is for there to be something Tilly’s depression is “about.” There certainly are things that can trigger depression, but the depression itself isn’t always a response to trauma. Sometimes it just happens because your body isn’t producing the chemicals it needs to.

I would love to see Tilly work through identifying how she’s feeling, struggling to decide between treatment options (or whether to go beyond talk therapy at all), and dealing with the consequences of whatever treatment she chooses. I’d also just love to see what mental health care looks like in the 32nd century.

But I don’t need there to be a reason she’s depressed.

Because depression doesn’t require a reason to appear.

I mentioned in September that I was going through the Artist’s Way. I got about three weeks in when I realized I was only doing morning pages and reading, but not doing artist dates or any of the exercises. My motivational tendency is obliger, so I thought maybe if I were doing it in community, I’d do better.

But then I thought about organizing a whole community and I got weary immediately. I looked over Julia Cameron’s Guide for Starting Creative Clusters and registered a big old NOPE.

So I’m planning to do it MY way.

My life mantra is WHAT I CAN, WHEN I CAN.

I’m inviting you to participate. Here’s how it’s going to work.

1. I’m going to do morning pages as often as I can, but I’ll be keeping them to myself. I might occasionally blog about what I’m learning from doing them.
2. I’m going to do Artist Dates as often as I can. I’ll blog about them, with what I did, and my response to it.
3. I will end both morning pages and Artist Dates posts with a question about how they’re going for you, what you did, and what you’re getting out of them. You will be able to reply in one of a few ways:
   • through a Micro.blog reply
   • through an IndieWeb webmention
   • through Disqus comments
   • through Twitter replies
   • through Facebook replies (yes, I’m even going to try this on Facebook)
4. I’ll essentially do the same process for exercises, writing about my response to them and maybe even my answers, then asking if you did the exercise and how it worked out for you. You can reply in the same ways mentioned above.

I’m not in a place where I feel good about confining myself to a 12-week schedule, and I know if I try to turn it into 12 months or something I’ll lose steam around the 8 month mark, so instead, I’m just going to do it WHEN I CAN. Here’s what that will look like:

1. I will make a short post when I start a chapter/week.
2. I will make a short post when I finish a chapter/week.
3. And all the exercises and stuff above, I’ll make a note of what chapter/week it’s from.

Here are the rules to participate:

1. Do what you can, when you can.
2. Avoid trying to fix people’s problems or offer advice; “listen” to understand. I encourage you to respond, but try not to have it be advice-focused.

That’s it. I really hope you’ll join me.

I’ve been in the middle of a Star Trek: The Next Generation rewatch for months, maybe even more than a year. Maybe since before the pandemic started, I don’t remember. I often will fall asleep to a TNG episode. I do this with the same episode over and over until I actually watch it all the way through while I’m awake.

Back in May, just over a month out from my dissertation defense and with no plan for the future, the episode I slept through over and over again was “Peak Performance.” It’s one of my favorite episodes, for many reasons, and one reason is a B story focusing on Data. (Surprise!)

The A story is that a strategist named Kolrami has come aboard the Enterprise to evaluate the crew’s performance in a combat exercise. Kolrami is a jerk and has real problems with Commander Riker, suggesting that Riker’s jovial attitude is not compatible with strong leadership.

Kolrami is also super arrogant. He comes from a species called the Zakdorn, well known for producing the galaxy’s best strategists. He prides himself on his strategy and uses it for games as well as combat exercises; he is a grandmaster of a game called Stratagema. Riker challenges Kolrami to a game of Stratagema and loses after only a few moves. Thinking that with his fancy positronic brain Data might actually be able to beat Kolrami, Dr. Pulaski eggs Data on to play and eventually misleads Kolrami into believing Data has challenged him. Data agrees to the challenge, in spite of not initiating it.

Kolrami and Data play Stratagema and it lasts longer than the game with Riker did, but Data still loses. Then this exchange happens:

Pulaski: How can you lose? You’re supposed to be infallible.

Data: Obviously, I am not.

It seems like a simple and innocuous response, but Data goes on to remove himself from bridge duty, believing that his loss at stratagema indicates a defect in himself:

I have proven to be vulnerable. At the present time, my deduction should be treated with skepticism.

I am concerned about giving the captain unsound advice.

This has indicated that I am damaged in some fashion. I must find the malfunction.

I heard the exchange above and these lines from Data and felt a deep resonance in my heart. Isn’t this how so many people feel, all the time? Isn’t this especially how scholars feel? Especially if you are an overachiever, you may make it all the way to a PhD program and only know what it is to excel in everything, and then meet a challenge that you can’t surmount.

You might be pursuing a tenure-track job, have done all the things you’re supposed to do, and still not get hired. Maybe you have tons of publications, brilliant teaching evaluations, a robust record of service, and did important dissertation research. And it doesn’t matter.

Data explains to Picard why he has removed himself from the bridge and what prompted him to do so. Picard replies:

…it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.

Um, excuse me Captain, just a moment, I got something in each eye and it has caused them to water profusely and also has made sobs wrack my body, hold on…

In the end, Data challenges Kolrami to a rematch. We see them play, Kolrami moving more quickly and becoming more agitated by the moment, as Data plays slowly and maintains a calm expression. Kolrami suspends the game, yells “This is not a rematch. You have made a mockery of me!” and storms out of the room.

As Data’s colleagues come to congratulate Data on his victory, he points out that he didn’t win, though no game of Strategema has ever gone to as high a score as this one has. Data explains that Kolrami was playing for a win and assumed that was Data’s goal as well, but Data had in fact chosen his own goal: a draw. He let many opportunities that would have supported a win pass him by in order to maintain a balance that would let him challenge Kolrami indefinitely.

Is this a perspective that can be useful for anyone dealing with impostor syndrome, and especially PhDs moving away from the tenure track? I think so. The “victory condition” for a PhD is assumed to be a tenure track job, but I went in with the intention of learning about qualitative methods. Now, I write about qualitative research and am pursuing other writing and consulting opportunities. It’s not success by the usual metric, but it’s a path with which I am happy. And it’s a path where no one tells me to wait for tenure before I have a kid (whoops did it during the PhD!), do public scholarship, or have opinions. And thank goodness, because that’s a long wait for a train don’t come.

Hi web friends.

I’m having a weird day, with some great news but also me not feeling like doing anything, where I can swing from ecstatic about great news to extremely irritable with my kid. I’m not always the most gracious or graceful parent.

The great news is medical stuff: after only a week of modifying my diet to be more PCOS-friendly, my blood sugar has moved from high to high-normal. My liver indicators were looking rough a month ago, presumably because I was taking a LOT of Tylenol for headaches, but after a month of supplementing with milk thistle, it’s back to normal. My doctor prescribed a new migraine medication for me and if I take it REALLY at the first sign, it actually works.

This is all wonderful! Really exciting stuff!

But I also spent all day kind of blah, not really feeling like doing much. So I focused on really basic self-care: a little yoga, dental hygiene, outside time. I hope I’ll feel less Bartlebyish tomorrow.

The parenting stuff is no big deal, just being annoyed when my kid does stuff like hate every food he used to love or use my head as a footrest when I’m trying to fill his essential oil diffuser. Nornal kid stuff and of course he’s still my favorite person.

I’ve been reading the Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO and geeking out about it. I had in my head that SEO was gross and pushy, but it’s actually about getting resources to the right people, which makes it a good skill for librarians.

Now I’m quite tired, so I’ll watch a bit of Star Trek Discovery and nod off.

I really needed to read “Drafting a Personal Essay Is Like Stumbling Through a Dance” today. Here are some bits that hit me hard:

It’s not enough to see a successful dance or personal essay—you can study all you want, but it’s only in the act of doing that you learn what’s right and what isn’t.

The bad news about first drafts is that they are necessary. The good news is that they’re only a starting point.

There are many ways to get better at writing—take classes, join critique groups, read voraciously—but nothing gets you around the fact that you must also write and revise.

…take comfort in the fact that your words are still on the page. You’ve done the hard part and unleashed your awkward vulnerability.

I highly recommend Sara Fredman’s Write Like A Mother newsletter, in which Sara interviews writers who are also mothers. Some bits from the recent issue with Kate Baer resonated especially with me, so I thought I’d share them here.

Mothers were so punished in this pandemic.

This. I’m playing the pandemic on easy mode - working part-time from home - and I still feel this. The social costs and lack of a village are what’s hurting me most. For the first time since the start of the pandemic, I hung out for a long time with other parents while our kids were at the park and it was huge. Pre-pandemic, M & I spent every weekday morning at a co-working space with a Montessori school on-site. My co-workers were almost exclusively fellow parents of young children, mostly moms and non-binary primary caregivers, and at the time I didn’t really appreciate how special it was.

…nobody cares if you’re a writer. Nobody, nobody cares if you’re a writer, except you. If you want to be a writer, then you have to take control of the situation. You have to think of yourself as a writer, you have to treat yourself as a writer. You have to treat this like this is a job… I have to be the one who cares so much about being a writer. And so I think part of that is just filtering out that noise and just taking yourself super seriously, taking the work super seriously.

I have only recently claimed the title of writer for myself, despite having written all my life and having my first paid byline 10 years ago, and I feel this so hard. I’m still working on taking myself and the work seriously.

This doesn’t include the discussion/Q&A because things started to go so fast I couldn’t keep up.

Dr. Maggie Melo writes for Inside Higher Ed today about the value of video-off time in a virtual classroom and how we might learn from the ease generated by virtual time together-but-apart and apply it in a face-to-face setting.

Dr. Melo concludes:

I want us to question why we have such a persistent desire to “see learning” in a makerspace or classroom. I want us to figuratively and literally turn off the gaze when it’s not needed. As we opt for classrooms and makerspaces that are more inclusive, we should create ways for students to choose how they want to be seen in the classroom.

My son attends a preschool that uses the Reggio Emilia approach. There are a lot of different components to this approach. One of them is documentation. The teachers at his school are constantly photographing the children as they work, posting those photographs around the classroom for the children to see, and writing captions to remind the children of what they were doing. This is not exclusively for assessment purposes. It’s process-focused. The children also take photos, which the teachers share and describe.

Dr. Melo’s piece made me wonder if something like this could be applied in a higher education setting, but placing the choice of how and what is documented on the students. Could you have a shorter class meeting time, giving students the extra solo time to work and document their own process? What if you explicitly asked them to talk about the mistakes they made and what they learned from them, like I do in my blog post about sewing napkins? Does placing this documentation power in the hands of the students allow them to choose how they are seen?

I don’t know.

I just wonder.

Just a note: Dr. Melo was my assistantship supervisor for the final 2 years of my PhD.

It’s hard to figure out exactly which of the many symptoms I have should determine when I got sick but based on the impact of treatment, I’m going to say it was the onset of anxiety and depression. These really ramped up in October 1999.

I was 18 and settling in at college. I had a roommate who was not a good fit. My anxiety and depression seemed to kick off when that roommate suggested at dinner that I had a crush on a dude in our building. I didn’t but I liked talking to him. I thought he was fun. I already had a boyfriend (spoiler alert, 10 years later I married that boyfriend) and I thought that, based on what my roommate said, thinking this kid was fun was basically cheating. (I was wrong. It’s okay to have friends.)

This one conversation launched a spiral of negative self-talk that persisted for months. It was exacerbated by my being at a big university, struggling to make friends, and feeling disconnected from my family even though I was only 12 miles from home.

At the same time, my brother was sick and in the hospital. He was only 5. I don’t remember, but I imagine I felt that going to my parents with my problems felt like adding a burden they didn’t need, in light of my brother being ill

I don’t think I got help until Spring of 2000.

In the following few years I gained a lot of weight, was so sleepy that I would fall asleep in the student union and miss class plus slept through service learning obligations, and started having irregular periods. My primary care doctor sent me to an endocrinologist who ran a lot of thyroid tests but not the one that would lead to my diagnosis 11 years later.

In time, a lot of these symptoms went away, but they recurred with a vengeance the summer after I finished library school in 3011. Again, it started with depression and anxiety - in spite of my being on an antidepressant - and by the time I did a direct-to-consumer test and took the results to my doctor, all I could do was go to work, come home, and sleep, without energy even for laundry or food prep.

Wentz conducted a survey of over 2000 of her readers to investigate what was going on when they got sick. Stress was the most frequent response. I think both of the times I’ve had big flare-ups have been in the face of the stress of a major life transition.

This connection between transitions and flares is why I’m being especially vigilant right now as I continue to live in the liminal space of post-PhD.

Hashimoto’s makes me feel like the opposite of myself. At various points in my life, if you asked friends about me they’d tell you that I have infectious enthusiasm, that I am an excellent writer, that I am a badass who gets shit done. (These are things friends have actually told me about myself.)

When I’m having a flare, I don’t seem to care about anything. I can’t find the right words or structure my thoughts into a logical flow. I don’t seem to be able to get anything done at all.

I’ve seen my mom go through this, too. She’s super smart, loves learning, and is amazing at making stuff. But on her worst days, it’s all she can do to get out of bed.

It’s hard for me to reconcile these two versions of myself. On bad days, I find it hard to believe I was ever enthusiastic, sharp, eloquent, or effective.

I don’t like feeling this way.

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One of the things I’m focusing on right now is feeling better. Today, that means reading Izabella Wentz’s Hashimoto’s Protocol: A 90-Day Plan for Reversing Thyroid Symptoms and Getting Your Life Back. We’re coming up on the 10th anniversary of my Hashimoto’s diagnosis (driven by my own research, in partnership with a doctor I had to push to recognize it) and guess what? I still feel crappy. Not nearly as bad as 10 years ago, but still bad. And part of chronic illness is that there will be flare ups. But I know I’m capable of feeling better because I did, in the 9 months before I got pregnant. But the things that helped me then aren’t enough to help me now, it seems. So, Wentz’s book.

Wentz suggests keeping a health journal using “a method you are likely to stick to.” For me, that’s blogging. I’ll probably keep some private notes, but maybe this can even be helpful to somebody else to follow along. So to the extent I feel okay doing it, I’ll be keeping my journal here, in the Health category.

Wentz suggests beginning by identifying health goals. Here are mine:

I want to have more energy. I am tired, all the time. My kid will tell you. I’ve been the kid with the tired mom and I’d love to spare my kid that. So this is my highest priority. Right now, if I go on an outing with my kid, I have to take the rest of the day and potentially the next day to recover. So my energy goal is to be able to go on a family outing and stay in the swing of things the next day.

I want to feel better about my looks. Mostly I think I’m pretty cute, but sometimes I feel dull and puffy. I’d like to look in the mirror and be not dull and not puffy. I’m not going to worry about weight or even girth because those are tricky targets and easy to disappoint me. But I’d like to look in the mirror and see someone with normal bags under her eyes, not extreme ones, with pink and cheery skin rather than wan white skin, with more hair than I have now and with an appropriate amount of white hair for her age. (There is a clear distinction between the amount of white hair I have when I’m well and when I’m ill. I don’t want to eliminate it, just to have what seems like a reasonable amount of it. And then maybe dye it green.)

I want to have endurance when swimming. One pool length wears me out right now and I can’t at present exercise myself into improving that due to the relationship between thyroid hormone levels and respiratory function. But I want to be able to swim in a mermaid tail for long distances. My ultimate goal is 300 yards but I’ll set an intermediate one for now. By next July, I’d like to be able to do 2 full laps with only 12 breath rests.

Those seem big enough for now.

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I love to read about writing. I’m the kind of person who finds Strunk and White fun. I keep buying books about writing: Stephen King’s On Writing, Ursula K. LeGuin’s conversations, and many more. And I do write: mostly blog posts and email messages these days, but I have written just about every format there is. I have not shared or attempted to publish much of that writing, though.

What keeps me from doing it? What has me loving reading about craft but rarely implementing what I read? It’s not that I never write but rather that I enjoy reading about writing perhaps more than writing itself. (No, that’s not quite right. I actually enjoy writing, even genres/formats I think I don’t enjoy, like book reviews. I loved writing last week’s book review of Brent Spiner’s Fan Fiction, despite constantly telling myself I don’t like writing book reviews.)

I think one of the things that keeps me hoarding and absorbing resources but leveraging them less frequently than I acquire and engage with them is my love of learning. I was working on a blog post about qualitative research for a client today and my head started swimming with how much I love learning about different methods of qual research. And I love doing it, too! I love creating a research design. I love finding the meaning in the data. But I think I love learning about new techniques for it even more. I was talking with W. about how readily I forget that I actually love doing this thing I spent six years learning to do - I went into the PhD explicitly because I wanted to devote time to understanding research methods. My PhD is in qualitative methods as much as or more than it’s in my discipline. (Except I love my discipline, too, which I also sometimes forget!)

Back to the point, here: W. suggested that perhaps UX careers would be a good fit, a place where a person could do qualitative research. I told him yes, that or market research. And then I told him that I don’t want to just do it in service of whatever business would want to hire me for it as much as I want to learn about it and share what I learn with other people so THEY can do it.

And then I said, “But what I REALLY need to remember is that I already have a client paying me to do exactly that.”

So I’m actually getting paid to do the learning I love. In a very real sense, I am at present, living the dream. It would serve me well to remember that.

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Quick head’s up: In this review, I use “Brent” to refer to the character and “Spiner” to refer to the author.

Publisher’s Summary:

Brent Spiner’s explosive and hilarious novel is a personal look at the slightly askew relationship between a celebrity and his fans. If the Coen Brothers were to make a Star Trek movie, involving the complexity of fan obsession and sci-fi, this noir comedy might just be the one.

Set in 1991, just as Star Trek: The Next Generation has rocketed the cast to global fame, the young and impressionable actor Brent Spiner receives a mysterious package and a series of disturbing letters, that take him on a terrifying and bizarre journey that enlists Paramount Security, the LAPD, and even the FBI in putting a stop to the danger that has his life and career hanging in the balance.

Featuring a cast of characters from Patrick Stewart to Levar Burton to Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, to some completely imagined, this is the fictional autobiography that takes readers into the life of Brent Spiner, and tells an amazing tale about the trappings of celebrity and the fear he has carried with him his entire life.

Fan Fiction is a zany love letter to a world in which we all participate, the phenomenon of “Fandom.”

Let’s get the fanfiction discussion out of the way.

If you are into fanfiction, you probably know that, despite anything the OED may tell you, fans (or fen, as we’re sometimes pluralized) write it as all one word: fanfiction. Spiner’s book is titled Fan Fiction. But there’s a reason, I promise! In spite of Spiner not writing this the same way as fans do, I can fanwank the title! The novel itself, you see, is mostly Fiction, and it’s about not only Brent dealing with the attentions of a scary Fan, but the ways in which Brent is a Fan himself.

There is a point at which Brent tells Patrick Stewart that he feels as if he is a character in a work of fanfiction. At first, I thought, “Whoa, an actor aware of fanfiction in 1991?” but then I remembered that this is Star Trek, one of the first media fandoms and the first fanzine-based media fandom, and that the first issue of a newsletter devoted to Data and Spiner was released in the fall of 1987, well before this book takes place. That newsletter (adorable titled Data Entries) published its first piece of fiction in issue 3, which was published in spring of 1988, again well before this novel takes place. It’s worth noting that the first issue of the newsletter discusses establishing a fan club for Spiner and later issues report that Spiner requested that fans not do this and that the newsletter not include photos of him out of makeup. While the driving force in the novel is a fan who is creepy as can be, there were a lot of active fans of Spiner’s who were careful to respect his privacy. All of this to say, of course by 1991 Brent would be aware of fanfiction, though whether he would have actually read any for Star Trek or anything else is something I don’t know.

What I loved:

This book is a lot of fun. Brent Spiner makes it impossible to know what draws on real life and what’s totally made up, though there are interviews where he clarifies it a bit.

I can’t include exact quotes because I only have an Advanced Reader’s Copy and not a final version, but I can share some of my own notes with you. I think that will illuminate what I love about the book better than a summary can.

There’s a point at which Brent goes to see a detective at the LAPD. This detective offers a lot of assistance regarding Brent’s stalker, but of course he finishes their meeting by telling Brent he has a TNG spec script that involves Data traveling back in time to the 20th century to team up with a character who is clearly a self-insert for the detective. But really, who among us doesn’t have a TNG spec script that features Data collaborating with a self-insert character? When I was in middle school, my best friend and I plotted out the beats of an episode where Data teams up with a middle school-aged flautist to communicate with the Crystalline Entity through music. The middle school-aged flautist was a self-insert for my best friend; Data was guaranteed to be a Data Sue for me if we had actually finished the script.

Spiner portrays himself as a nebbishy, anxious wreck, which completely contradicts the image I have of him in my head as a confident, charismatic, and hilarious performer. It made me feel more aligned with the character Brent, which is nice because as someone who sees myself in Data, there was the risk I would find Brent to be so different from his character as to be not relatable. I too am an apparently confident and charismatic person who is actually an anxious wreck. (Can women be nebbishy? If we can, I am on the inside but not externally.) Because of this, I found Brent super relatable.

We get a glimpse into the glamor of a Hollywood life here when Brent puts in a CD in his car in 1991. How fancy is he? My family didn’t get a car with a CD player in it until probably 2000 or later. We bought one with a tape deck in 1993.

Spiner references his comedy influences in the book frequently; at first, I didn’t think of him as a comedic performer, in spite fo thinking of him as a funny person, but remembering that he was part of a panel on humor in Star Trek as part of First Contact Day 2021 reminded me that this is, in fact, a huge part of his work. Spiner’s comedy chops shine through in the book, when he has Brent drop jokes in a classic comedic structure. Again, I can’t tell you the exact quotes, but there are a lot of places where my annotations say things like “Fucking hilarious” and “Brent Spiner is a goddamn delight.”

Spiner confirms what I already knew (and used for my Data cosplay at my dissertation defense): Data is not white. He is gold. I liked that he confirmed this and mentioned it pretty frequently.

Spiner portrays Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett-Roddenberry as freaking adorable. I don’t know what they were really like, and I know that Majel wasn’t the alpha and omega of Gene’s attractions and romantic/sexual relationships, but DAMN, so cute.

Spiner’s portrayal of his TNG classmates is, according to his SyFy interview, exaggerated; it’s also delightful. Levar Burton is the most enlightened hippie in hippietown and Patrick Stewart is 100% So Very RSC.

What I wanted more of:

There is a lot going on in this book, in spite of it focusing strongly on one storyline: Brent dealing with the mysterious fan who is stalking him and seems to believe she is his daughter from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Offspring” (almost there in my rewatch!), Lal. I wish we’d gotten to spend a little bit more time with any of it. It’s a fast and fun read but it wouldn’t have been hurt by I having more time on set, more time dealing with the mystery, more time with Brent handling his complicated relationship with FBI Agent Cindy Lou and her twin, private security guard Candy Lou.

What I need to warn you about:

Spiner’s writing voice here is sparse. I think this is because Spiner is putting on a Chandleresque voice; reading the Google Books preview for The Big Sleep confirmed this for me. I rarely read hard-boiled detective fiction or noir; I’m more of a Victorian/cozy kind of gal. Because of this, the voice took me by surprise. If you’re used to that kind of writing, I think you’ll go, “Yep.” If not, know that it’s an intentional style.

While Spiner imitates the voice of a hard-boiled detective here and “mem-noir” is a delightful neologism to describe what he’s written, this has a more optimistic vibe than is typical of noir or hard-boiled detective stories. There’s a mystery, the book is set in LA, and Cindy Lou and Candy Lou could be credibly called dames, but that’s where the similarities end.

There are a couple of anachronisms that I wonder if they’ll be in the finished book. There’s a point at which Spiner uses the word “besties,” which seems to have first appeared in 1991. So it’s possible it would be used in the context of this story, but it would be very cutting edge. There’s also a character described in the epilogue as having been taking online classes for years, and I can’t tell if the epilogue is supposed to be from the perspective of Spiner-now, as the prologue clearly is, or Brent-then. So that might be an anachronism or it might not, I can’t tell.

Some people have criticized Spiner’s portrayal of women in the book, especially the twins Cindy Lou and Candy Lou, as being too limited and focused on them as sexual objecsts. It’s a fair critique, but it didn’t bother me.

Final word: Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation should definitely check this out. Noir readers might enjoy it too; Spiner does a good job of explaining things about the show that non-fans might otherwise confusing.

Book: Fan Fiction
Author: Brent Spiner
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication Date: October 5, 2021
Pages: 256
Age Range: Adult
Source of Book: Digital ARC from NetGalley

Today is the 20th anniversary of the first time the Internet Archive captured my first personal domain. The 20th anniversary of my first blog post was in March. That first post was in hand-rolled html, written in Notepad and FTPed to my host at envy.nu. It used fixed scrolling over a background image of Death from the Sandman comics.

My early blog posts were typical of a personal blog: what was going on with my classes, what I thought of video games I played and movies I saw, political opinions that thoroughly embarrass me now. My current blog posts aren’t that different now than they were then, but it’s much harder to find other personal bloggers now that blogs are a ubiquitous marketing tool.

I’ve liked blogging all this time. I plan to keep doing it.

🥳🎈🎉🎊🎂

I may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

Betsy Greer shared some pages from Carol Dweck’s book Mindset on Twitter this morning. I was reading along, thinking, “YEAH!” and being proud of myself for moving from the fixed mindset of my youth to the mostly growth mindset of my adulthood, when I bumped up against the end of the second quote she had highlighted:

[In a growth mindset, failure] means you’re not fulfilling your potential.

Not. Fulfilling. Your. Potential.

This set of words and its variant, “not living up to your potential,” make me grouchy. It’s not right to say they’re triggering, but they are an echo of educators from my past who made me feel I had a responsibility to live up to their assessment of my potential.

I don’t.

My potential is mine to fulfill or to waste.

This might not seem like a big deal to many people. But for a person with anxiety, this phraseology feels like a confirmation of all the unkind things I say to myself.

I have a PhD. That’s something only 1.2% of the US population can accurately say about themselves.

But I also was not very productive in the academic sense: my publications are all in either revision or preparation even after I graduated, I didn’t get any awards or grants on my own, etc etc. So it’s easy to scold myself for not having been productive enough during my PhD. For not having lived up to my potential.

I have to remind myself that the PhD was instrumental: I wanted time to read and write and understand qualitative methodology better, and I got all of those things. I didn’t go in caring about publications so why should I start now?

My potential is mine to fulfill or to waste.

The list of things I haven’t done is long. The list of things I have done is also long. I tend to be guided by my intuition and while my big life decisions may be based on logic and in consultation with important people in my life, my day-to-day is generally led by what feels possible and what feels good. (Hat-tip to Katy Peplin for “what feels possible.") There are more things I will do. There are many things I won’t do. All of that is okay.

I have no obligation to live up to someone else’s perception of my potential. And neither do you.

Your potential is yours to fulfill or to waste.

I am making a few notes here now that I hope to turn into a longer post later. As I scrolled Twitter and read there what some colleagues have been working on, I started to feel my current post-PhD existential crisis take a new and unexpected shape: the shape of wishing I knew a way to stay in academia.

Here are the things that have kept me from pursuing an academic career after graduation:

• watching tenure-track colleagues be miserable
• lack of mobility (it would be very challenging to find a position, even tenure-track, that would be worth uprooting my family for, and I refuse to live apart from my family)
• being a mother (I also refuse to prioritize career over family)
• being chronically ill/variably disabled (I also refuse to prioritize career over health)

Here are the things that today appeal to me about academia:

• pursuing a research agenda that I design

That’s actually about it, and as a freelance academic/independent researcher, I can probably work out a way to do that but today it feels like it’s in conflict with everything else I’ve got going on.

Which is why I’m going to dive into the #motherscholar literature.

More on that later.

If you have access to it, watch The Simpsons, Season 1, episode 3, “Homer’s Odyssey.” This bit happens at around 12:50: Depressed due to losing his job, Homer decides to throw himself off a bridge. He ties a rope around a huge boulder, then ties the other end of the rope to his waist. When he goes to open the gate in the fence around the yard, struggling to carry the boulder, he finds the hinges squeak. He then interrupts his suicide attempt to get a can of oil and oil the gate’s hinges. This cracks me up because in the middle of a devastating act that he is carrying out in a ridiculous way, he stops to take care of this mundane problem.

Is he doing it because he doesn’t want to wake his family with the squeaking? Could be. The rationale is irrelevant. It’s the juxtaposition of the extreme and absurd with the quotidian that makes this moment work for me.

I have a friend who is due to have a baby in January. I offered to write up a bunch of notes for her and realized it would make a pretty good blog post, so here we are.

Make a list ahead of time of ways to help. You won’t want to think about it once the baby’s born. Share the list with people who you think will want to help. (I just put out a call on Facebook asking for who wanted this information.) If someone offers to make a meal train or whatever for you, take them up on it, but you don’t have to wait for an offer. You can do it for yourself.

If you’ve got the money and a place nearby that makes prepared meals, do this for the first couple weeks. It’s amazing.

Stock up on easy snacks. If you’re nursing, you will need to eat all the time. Get a giant straw cup to drink water from. My doulas recommend a giant Bubba Bottle.

Populate your streaming services with queues of everything you’ve been meaning to watch. Again, if you’re nursing, there will be cluster feeding nights when streaming this stuff will save your sanity, and you don’t want to pick which thing to watch in the moment.

Read these books:

• Before baby is born - The Happiest Baby on the Block
• When baby is born - The Wonder Weeks (also has an excellent companion app)

Get the latest edition of Baby Bargains and use it as reference material.

If swaddling seems like a real challenge, try a Miracle Blanket. They don’t work for everybody but if they work for you, they are the best thing ever.

If you’re nursing, get a My Brest Friend pillow. So much better than a Boppy or whatever.

If you have the energy, try to assert your needs to family that wants to hang out with the baby. You might find it a huge relief to have the baby taken away for a while but you might find it really upsetting. Communicate with people about what you’re feeling. I was not good about this. I wish I had been. The first few weeks would have been happier if I had.

Remember that Boppy that isn’t super helpful for breastfeeding? It’s actually a great pillow for keeping your genitals and butt from having to touch real furniture. If you have a vaginal delivery, those parts of you will hurt. Not putting them on real furniture and instead having them propped up with a pillow with a hole in the middle will spare you a lot of crying in pain. Sit on the Boppy.

Learn to use a baby carrier ASAP. YouTube is your friend for this. In fact, YouTube is now your co-parent. Go to it whenever you can’t figure out what instructions are telling you to do. Including for the Miracle Blanket.

Don’t go to YouTube for hand expressing milk advice, though, because it will show you things that are more designed to turn people on than to educate them, and that’s not helpful. (Unless that’s what you’re into, in which case it might be helpful. But I found medical information about this much more helpful.)

Seriously, though, learn to use that carrier because then you will be able to use your hands for things like feeding yourself.

Your baby will hate tummy time. (Learn what tummy time is if you don’t know yet.) If your baby cannot handle it without misery, try rolling up a little receiving blanket and propping it under baby’s armpits. This turned tummy time from hated time to happy time in our house.

Try to remember that this is a temporary time. You are becoming a new version of yourself. You don’t know what this version of yourself will like or care about. You will probably have an identity crisis. Becoming a parent is a lifestage not unlike adolescence, especially if you’re the birthing parent with all the hormones that come with that. (People use the term “matrescence” to refer to becoming a mother. I don’t think there is a similar gender-neutral or non-binary term, and I suppose maybe somebody uses “patrescence” to refer to becoming a father, but I haven’t heard it.) It’s okay if you don’t know who you are right now but I promise you are other things as well as a caregiver. Caregiver is just taking priority right now.

When you feel like you’re doing it all wrong and you’re the worst parent ever, get quiet and check in with your intuition. If you’re like me, it will tell you what to do.

Many thanks to my friend Monica, everybody at Emerald Doulas, and Victoria Facelli for all the things they taught me that contributed to my ability to write this post.

I read Ravynn K. Stringfield’s How I Became a Scholar of Black Girl Fantasy and felt energized. I felt energized specifically by how she found role models who were doing the work she wanted to do, how she came to terms with being able to be a scholar AND a writer of other genres.

I attended her class The Scholar’s Guide to Writing & Publishing Creative Nonfiction and she talked about pursuing questions. She talked about that in her essay, too.

And I thought, what questions motivate me?

I went back to my PhD personal statement. The question motivating me there was broad. It was basically “How do Connected Learning in school libraries?” Meme style.

I drafted it in 2014. I have changed a lot in the last 7 years. Connected Learning has changed a lot in the last 7 years.

And I’m still delighted by people loving things and all the amazing learning that comes from that, but… I don’t know. I don’t feel like I’m interested in that set of questions right now.

I love reading about affinity spaces.

I really loved my dissertation topic.

But now? What now? I wrote my proposal before COVID-19 was well-known.

I defended my dissertation when there seemed to be hope on the horizon: I was freshly fully vaccinated and things were looking up.

I’m despairing about a lot now.

I’m also jazzed about the possibility of taking some time to be a writer.

But a writer of what?

I don’t know.

I’ve been banging my head against WHAT NOW?! as if it’s a puzzle I can solve if I just look at or play with it long enough but I think I’m not there. Doing all the parachute-color-style exercises isn’t what I need right now; it just leads to frustration and exhaustion.

I did a couple Self-Employed PhD sessions with Jennifer Polk back when I was still working on the dissertation. I knew that I could go a lot of possible directions with either traditional or self-employment. I said so. People said “So what’s the problem?” I said “Well I have limited time and energy so I need to pick one to try first.” People said “Well what do you want to do?”

I said:

I WANT TO REST.

I want. To. Rest.

My dissertation has been fully submitted since mid-May. I officially graduated on May 16, I think.

I have been “resting” for 3 months.

But “resting” has meant caring for my son and drumming up client work. It’s meant applying for jobs. It’s meant presenting for both professional and personal endeavors. It’s meant figuring out how to safely get my kid into preschool so I can work. It’s meant agonizing over the fact that while I am incredibly lucky and privileged to be in a position to take time to figure out what’s next, I hate the idea of my husband paying my student loans. Partly because I fear his resentment.

Partly because like… what do I have all these degrees for if all I do is sleep?

Some of what I’ve been doing has been home ownership management. Lots of logistics.

I do not feel rested.

A lot of things happened over the course of my PhD in my family and personal life, in addition to the world being what it has been since 2015. Listing it really bums me out so just trust me that it’s been A LOT and it has taken a toll. And when I look at it all written out, as I did privately for myself last night, I think:

NO WONDER I AM SO TIRED.

So the questions that are driving me, for the foreseeable future, honestly, are:

• What do I HAVE to do to care for myself, my family, and my home?
• What feels good?
• What heals me?
• What energizes me?

Those are all the questions I can handle right now.

I learned a lot from recording my Micro Camp 2021 talk. If you watch it, you’ll notice a pretty big sync problem starting a bit before the 6-minute mark.

Most of the stuff I learned is related to that.

I recorded the video last minute, which I will try not to do in the future. It doesn’t leave time for fixing problems.

I was trying out new recording software, Loom. I don’t know if it was because my computer is old, my wifi was slow during recording, or a combination of the two, but as I understand it, Loom records to the cloud and the lag getting the recording from my computer to their server is probably responsible for the sync error. From now on, I’ll do my recordings locally and back up to the cloud after the recording is done. I don’t think I’ll use Loom with my current computer anymore.

I didn’t watch the video to make sure it worked. I was tired of my own voice (this almost never happens!). If I’d watched it, I’d have noticed the sync problem right away and could have re-recorded with different software. I’ll watch right away next time.

I thought I had submitted the video correctly. I had not. I don’t know if I didn’t click a button, if I closed a window too soon, or what. Next time I’ll watch carefully for confirmation.

I don’t have any very good video editing software on my computer so if I wanted to fix the sync error without re-recording, I couldn’t have. I’ll investigate different recording options before I make another video.

Also, as soon as I can, I’ll get a new laptop because a six-year-old low-end Acer isn’t going to cut it for creating much besides words.

What have you learned recently?

Because fantasy is the genre I read the most and YA is the market segment I read the most, I’ve already read a lot of the books on these lists.

If I come to a book I’ve already read, I will ask myself if I want to re-read it. If the answer is yes, boom, I’ll re-read away.

If the answer is maybe but not right now, I’ll keep moving down the list and ask myself again later.

If the answer is no, I’ll write a quick blog post about what I remember about the book and how I felt when I read it and move on to the next.

Another thing: a lot of these books are in series. If the book is the first book in a series and I enjoy it, I’ll do a check-in with myself to see if I want to take a detour from the list and read more of the series. If I do, I will.

If the book is a later book in a series, I will attempt to read the books that come before it. I like to read books in (publication) order, even if I don’t have to. If I decide not to finish the first book in the series, then I will move on with the list and try the listed book on its own later.

These plans are intended to prevent me getting bored and giving up on the project and to make sure I try as many new-to-me books as possible.

And some stuff I already knew but needed the reminder sewing napkins gave me.

1. If you want things to be the same size, cut them at the same time. Corollary: This is easier if you have a rotary cutter and cutting mat.

I made 4 napkins. Three of them are slightly different sizes and one is much smaller than the rest. This is fine. But my next project is a pillow, and I’d really like the two pieces of fabric I need to be nearly identical in size.

I knew this already because as I watched my mom sew garments I would see her cut both sleeves at once. The way you do this is fold the fabric in half with the side you don’t want to show in the finished item out. You pin or draw your pattern on, and then cut around it.

The easiest way to do this is with a rotary cutter, which has a round blade and a handle and you can essentially trace the pattern with it and it will cut through multiple layers of fabric. I don’t have one right now but I’m probably going to bump the one on my wishlist up in priority. But I think for only doing two layers, my fabric shears will do just fine.

(Do not use fabric shears to cut anything else ever.)

You need a mat to put under the project if you’re using a rotary cutter so it doesn’t cut into the surface you’re using to hold your fabric as you cut.

2. I really need help to sew a straight seam.

At first I thought I needed to practice this but my friend Casey gave me some magnetic seam guides for my birthday. I had forgotten those existed. These are little magnetic bits of metal you attach to a piece of the sewing machine called the throat plate. The throat plate is the thing the fabric scoots across as you’re sewing. Keep the fabric right up against the seam guide and you don’t have to remember where it should be. Which was my problem, I couldn’t remember how much fabric I wanted to the right of the seam.

3. If your pressing doesn’t get the fabric flat enough, you can help it with your fingers.

Most of this project involved sewing through three layers of fabric. The fabric was folded under itself to hide the edge because people can see both sides of a napkin (as opposed to a garment, where people can’t see the edge unless you pull the garment up or take it off). Sewing the edge of the fabric so it’s folded and doesn’t have a raw edge is called hemming the fabric.

On the corners, though, I had two sides' worth of folds to sew through, so I was sewing through six layers and I hadn’t been able to press it with my iron fully flat.

But guess what? I have fingers! And I could just barely put a little pressure on the fabric to get it flat enough, so that’s what I did.

4. Sewing is super satisfying.

I crocheted myself a cardigan last fall and it took months. I could probably sew a cardigan in an afternoon. It’s really nice to see the results of your work so quickly.

What have you learned lately?

I’ve written before about how matrescence is like kintsugi: having a baby shatters you and the living you do after you have the baby puts you back together with shiny gold holding you together. But I haven’t articulated how putting yourself together is a long process.

Meg at Sew Liberated writes today about the twelve year project of making a skirt that she started when she was a new mom and only finished recently. Her oldest is 12.

Part of the kintsugi of matrescence is finding the pieces. I misplaced a lot of mine in the time after my son was born. He’ll be 5 in October. I’m gathering the pieces but a lot of them are still in a pile waiting to be stuck to the me that’s here now.

I find them in moments when I’m doing something and suddenly feel more me than I have in a very long time. When I stay up late coding. When I watched the Stephen Sondheim 90th birthday concert. When I talk through a research design with colleagues.

Putting yourself together is an ongoing project; we’re each a big Katamari ball of experiences and interests. (How’s that for a dated reference? Have I mentioned I’m 40?) In my case, at least, that ball got blown apart. It’s encouraging to find all its bits are still within reach.

Are you familiar with the poem/book/animated short film WE’RE GOING ON A BEAR HUNT?

I highly recommend it. Kids wander through all types of terrain trying to find a bear. They come across many obstacles: long, wavy grass; thick, oozy mud; and others. The refrain is this:

We can’t go over it, we can’t go over it, oh no, we have to go through it.

Katy Peplin’s recent newsletter about being in the middle and getting discouraged made me think of the bear hunt.

Everything in life is a bear hunt, isn’t it?

But of course, while the kids are in the middle of each obstacle, they’re having fun. The mud goes squelch squorch. The grass goes swishy swashy.

It’s just another variation on the journey being more important than the destination.

What are we rushing toward? Can we find joy in the hard parts?

I promise I’m going to write about what I learned from sewing napkins soon. But first: my personal history with sewing!

I’ve known how to machine sew for a long time (and how to hand sew for even longer). My mom is an accomplished sewist and made a lot of clothes and costumes for my siblings and I as we were growing up. She even made my prom dress. I didn’t sew with her, but I learned a lot of techniques just from being around while she sewed. Mainly how to be a perfectionist about your sewing, which has both benefits and drawbacks. (She never presses seams open or leaves a pinked edge. All her seams are French seams. Gorgeous, but intimidating to a less experienced sewist.)

I didn’t actually use any of what I’d learned from watching her until I took a required tech class as part of my dramatic art major; I chose costuming (this is where W. shakes his fist because in his day you had to do both cost shop AND set but by the time I got there 3 years later, you got to choose). One of the assignments was to design and construct a garment. I made a dress to fit me, lightly inspired by this Drusilla costume from Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

The process involved making a paper pattern on a dressmaker’s dummy (heavily padded in my case), then a muslin, and then finally the real thing. I finished the edges with a zig-zag stitch and pressed the seams open, because that was what I had time for. I wished I’d been up to French seams but it just wasn’t going to happen.

The dress had darts out the wazoo: bust darts at both the sides and bottom of the bodice, back darts, darts at the back of the waist. I made sure it fit me just right and I wouldn’t settle for anything baggy or saggy. (Maybe that’s why I didn’t have time left for French seams.) The director of the costume shop saw it and said I could do haute couture with that level of fitting.

I loved making it. I was very proud of it. I also learned that you really need to include a slit in the skirt if you’re going to make a long sheath dress, or your stride will be limited to teeny tiny steps. (I did not include a slit. In spite of it’s excellent fit, the dress didn’t get a lot of wear because of this.)

I wanted to sew more but I was saving all my money for traveling to *BtVS* fan parties (that’s an account written by a journalist of the first Posting Board Party I went to) so I didn’t grab a machine until my mom noticed one at a yard sale down the street from her. The machine and its cabinet were going for around $70, so I bought them.

I sewed exactly one thing on that machine, a costume for me to wear to go to the movie Troy. (Remember when Legolas and The Hulk were brothers?) It was actually a costume that, if historically accurate, would have been no-sew, but I was afraid a no-sew version would fall off. So I made myself a chiton with some success.

And the next time I used that sewing machine, the needle got stuck in the bobbin. And so I did not use it. I kept moving around with it; I think that machine moved with me five times.

At the North Carolina Maker Faire in, I don’t know, maybe 2014? I sewed a quilt square for a big communal quilt somebody was building there. I loved it. It reminded me that I actually loved sewing, and I wanted to do more. So I promised myself I would.

But I didn’t.

When I finally got the machine out for the first time recently to try again, after great success winding the bobbin and threading the needle, the same thing happened. I tried cleaning and oiling the machine, but that didn’t fix the problem. I decided to give up on that machine, for which I could not find a manual online and which was lacking many features of modern machines, such as numbering on the thread guides to tell you what order to thread it in.

So I asked for a new machine for my birthday, and I got one!

And I decided to use Craftsy’s Sewing 101 class to help me get back into it, since I hadn’t really sewed in 17 years.

Which is how I ended up making those napkins.

And I’ll tell you what I learned from making them soon, I promise!

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Hello, everyone! How are you doing?

Over here, I’m on Day 6 of being In My 40s and it’s going just fine. I had an amazing birthday party: I rented a big gazebo area at the neighborhood pool (which is a fancy pool with an expensive membership fee but that membership fee is cheaper than a summer’s worth of camp, so…). I invited a lot of people and some of them came. I got to see some friends for the first time since before the pandemic, as well as invite family out to a place they hadn’t been before (i.e. the pool). We weren’t worried too much about COVID because of being outdoors and it was just really delightful. And it also felt a little like a celebration of me finishing the PhD, too. Also, I swam for a while in my mermaid tail and got to talk to some kids who really liked it and wanted me to go underwater so they could go down and watch what my swimming looked like under there. 🧜‍‍♀️

I also sewed those napkins! Remember? And for my birthday my friend Casey introduced me to pre-filled bobbins, which I’m very excited about. Next up, I’m going to sew a pillow to put on my desk chair. The fabric is MANATEE fabric and I’m psyched.

I did some important businesslady things today. Most importantly, though, I made a to-do list for the businesslady things I need to do tomorrow. Here’s where I stand right now:

1. I’m doing consulting for Quirkos, a company that provides qualitative data analysis software. I have had a bit of a crush on qual since Day 1 of my Field Techniques in Educational Research class and it’s the primary kind of research I’ve done, so I’m excited to work with an organization that is dedicated to supporting it.
2. I’m developing The Quiet Space, a project to provide structure for scholars and other knowledge creators so that they are free to focus on creative work.

In September, once my kid is settled into preschool, I hope to get in touch with some other potential consulting clients.

I talked with my doctor on Friday. My thyroid numbers are moving in the right direction, but still not where I want them to be. I worried that a change in my prescription dosage would be too extreme, so we agreed that I would up my intake of l-tyrosine. My glucose and hemoglobin A1C are high, meaning I’m pre-diabetic. I also have a lot of intense PCOS symptoms like acne, hirsutism, and oligoovulation. My primary focus right now, aside from caring for my kid, is working on healing this so that my PCOS is well-managed. I’m using Amy Medling’s book Healing PCOS to help me with that.

Aside from that, I’m reading Harrow the Ninth, which is super fun.

What’s new with you?

Austin Kleon writes about his desire to be a pirate-gardener,

I’d like to stay happily at home, in the studio, planting my seeds and cultivating my garden, and when I get bored, like Ishmael, and “I find myself growing grim about the mouth,” then it’s time to take to the seas and do some pirating, steal a few seeds from foreign lands to bring back to my own garden, where I’ll stay happily until I get bored again.

I think the gardening affords you the opportunity to pirate.

Three makes a pattern, so this is the year that blogging about who I want to be in this year of my life becomes a tradition. Shout out to my friend Little Willow, who inspired the idea by making her New Year’s resolutions on her birthday.

Part of the tradition is looking at who I wanted to be last year and seeing how close I got. The big one, being a Doctor of Philosophy, happened in April/May. The rest were, fittingly, not so much in focus.

But the microbusiness. The microbusiness! I’ve been taking strong steps in that direction, lining up my first consulting client, creating a little trickle of passive income with my Notion templates, and dreaming big about what the future holds for The Quiet Space.

Hard as it was with the pandemic and my grandmother’s death, 39 was still on the balance a good year. (This is the moment where I acknowledge that the year I was age 39 was actually the 40th year of my life, since we live a full year before our birthday. Yes, Daddy, I know we use zero-based indexing for ages.)

So what’s next?

I think I want to be a little less ambitious about 40, to set fewer goals.

I want to be a loving and mostly gentle mother.

I want to take care of my own body, including making clothes built to fit it.

I want to keep trying new things and growing as a self-employed person.

I want to be aware of my impact on the earth and do what I can to make it gentler. I recognize, however, that this is a systemic problem that requires more than individual action, which is why I joined the Alliance for Climate Education mailing list and will start donating to them monthly as soon as I have something resembling a steady income.

I think four is a good number, so I’ll stop there.

Who will you be this year?

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Kristen Arnett is Florida’s and the Internet’s Lesbian dad. Her puns are a delight and her “The existence of ___ implies ___" joke structure cracks me up every time she uses it. I have no idea when or why I followed her on Twitter but I’m glad I did. I love her Twitter presence so much that I thought I would probably love her books, too.

I didn’t have a lot of expectations going into MOSTLY DEAD THINGS but I feel like I’d seen the phrase “darkly funny” tossed around in reviews.

I was surprised when every part that I bet other people found funny made me sad.

MOSTLY DEAD THINGS is a great book and humans who read should try reading it.

It operated on a very visceral level for me for a few reasons.

1. It’s set in Central Florida. I lived on the east coast of Center Florida (mostly on the Space Coast) for the first 7 years of my life, years that loom large in how I think of myself and what feels like home. I lived in Tallahassee for another couple of years. Even though I’ve spent almost 80% of my life living in North Carolina, I still consider myself a Floridian. The feel of Florida - swampy and magical at the same time, hot and sticky but in a way that works with nostalgia, full of things that can kill you but are also kind of cool - resonates with my heart and is all over this book.

2. The characters in it are mostly in a very specific lower middle class Florida-version-of-Southern (probably white) culture. This is the kind of culture I was familiar with for most of my life, despite my family being genteel poor (and only kind of poor but like sometimes living on federal assistance so definitely not wealthy). The main character Jessa-Lyn has deep nostalgia for her youth spent burning Christmas trees by the swamp, hanging out by the lake, drinking water out of a hose at her best friend/only love Brynn’s trailer home. I think this is what my summers might have looked like, had I stayed in Florida. For special occasions you have homemade pie on pretty paper plates.

3. It is so infused with nostalgia and I am a sucker for that kind of thing. Arnett and I are very close in age so our referents for the things people wore and the way they did their hair as tweens and teens are basically the same.

4. The dynamic of a mother who is capable of lots of cool stuff but doesn’t feel like she’s had the opportunity to do it resonates with my family history across multiple generations.

5. My last real connection to Central Florida is dissolving last week as my mother and uncle close the sale of my late grandmother’s Melbourne house.

This is just a sampling. Basically this book squeezed my heart and pushed on bruises. It eventually patched it up but, you know, mostly in the final act.

Highly recommend.

🦩🐊

Tonight is the New Moon in Cancer. Next Wednesday is my birthday. My Sun, Ascendant, and Mercury are all in Cancer. I don’t believe the stars determine our destiny but as with all magical tools, I do believe they can help us set and live up to our intentions.

Cancer, the Crab, is a watery sign and ruled by the moon. I’ve always felt a connection to water, from when I was a tiny toddler fighting the undertow on Florida beaches, still now as I bob about with my kid in the pool after his swim lessons most days.

The moon is connected to water through the tides.

At Weeki Wachee Springs in Florida, they do mermaid shows, in which performers wearing fabric mermaid tails do water ballet. They also have a mermaid camp for grown-ups led by retired performers. Going is one of my dreams.

In one of the earliest episodes of The Mermaid Podcast, host Laura von Holt attends mermaid camp and interviews the retired perforners. One of them tells her, “The water is a teacher.” I have held this idea in my heart since I first heard it a couple years ago.

The water is my teacher. It can take the shape of any container. It can grow hard and expand when it’s cold. It can boil and evaporate when it’s hot. With persistence, it shapes land over time. It can be still. It can move rapidly. It can nurture life. It can reflect light. It can provide shade. The water teaches me to be flexible and persistent, to move how I need to.

The moon is my teacher. It never truly disappears. Sometimes it is in Earth’s shadow. Sometimes it shines the sun’s light down on us. It appears to change in cycles; it is both never the same and always the same. The moon teaches me to accept change as a constant and to retreat and shine as the time is right.

The water and the moon are my teachers.

Good morning, friends.

I have a new-ish morning ritual. I creep downstairs so as not to wake my kid. I get out a glass. I go to the fridge. I get out a can of sparkling water. I get my thyroid meds. I count out my morning thyroid meds and supplements: one levothyroxine, three liothyronine, two l-tyrosine. I open the sparkling water and pour it into the glass. I open my bottle of liquid kelp (which I obviously need because I am a manatee) and squeeze four drops of it into the glass of water: one. two. three. four. And I sip the water and take my pills. Sometimes I play a game on my phone, sometimes I read. But today, I thought.

I sat in that sleepy barely-awake feeling, in my quiet kitchen, with the sky grey outside and the house cold because I keep it that way for sleep, and stared into space.

And three words came to me.

THE QUIET SPACE.

I’ve had an idea for a week or so and was trying to find a name for it. It’s a project/offering I want to put into the world, building on the Notion templates I’ve created. It’s something that takes my skills for organizing and my understanding of doctoral student life and academia and blends them to create a gift for the world.

And that gift is quiet space.

I wanted to do this as a video rather than a blog post but my kid is still sleeping.

The Quiet Space is a set of offerings that will create structure and space for scholars of all descriptions to focus on creating knowledge instead of managing it. The first offerings will continue to be Notion templates; I have a few more to put together. (I may also experiment with Google Sheets or ClickUp but for now I’m focused on Notion.)

Here’s the idea:

You, a knowledge creator, have a lot going on in your head. And administrative work, such as organizing your readings, tracking your revisions, managing copyright permissions - this stuff eats up space in your brain. It fills your brain with chatter about the best way to do these things. How should you create the structures to deal with them?

But what if the space that stuff ate up was open? And quiet? What if it was space you could use to move your ideas around and play with them? What if you took the time you’ve been spending banging your head against a metaphorical wall to figure this out and instead spent it outside looking at the clouds?

My offerings will be designed to open up that space for you, Scholar. I’ll see you in The Quiet Space soon.

❤️,

Kimberly

[Image caption: White clouds move across a blue sky over a silhouetted group of trees and some orange grass. In the bottom right corner, a stone path curves away into the distance.]

Back in May, I had some bloodwork done. I discovered that my thyroid hormone levels were in the normal reference range but were, in my opinion, suboptimal. Combining those numbers with a slew of symptoms that had snuck up on me a little at a time (as they always do), I talked with my doctor about upping my thyroid support supplement dosages (iodine & l-tyrosine). We agreed that I would increase those and we would follow up in July. If I was still symptomatic and my numbers were suboptimal, we would talk about increasing my thyroid prescription dosages.

My bloodwork appointment for that is next Tuesday. The doctor sent in the lab order today and emailed me a copy. It didn’t have the thyroid tests on it. I asked her to please add them. She did, but warned me that when people have normal results on these tests, insurance plans often only cover them once or twice a year, so I might have to pay out of pocket.

I’m lucky and privileged to be able to take that risk without worrying it will cause my family hardship.

But I’m also angry on principle. Because if I already felt so terrible when my levels were normal-but-suboptimal, how miserable would I feel if we waited to modify my treatment until my levels were below normal? How sick does a person have to be to “deserve” treatment?

Wikipedia tells me:

In case of medical tests whose results are of continuous values, reference ranges can be used in the interpretation of an individual test result. This is primarily used for diagnostic tests and screening tests, while monitoring tests may optimally be interpreted from previous tests of the same individual instead

I wish that had a citation, but I’m going to take the point anyway. I’ve been diagnosed with this condition for 10 years. We always use these ranges for monitoring because I’m already diagnosed. I’ve noticed a correlation between symptoms and the test results but because it’s easy to swing too wide in a dosage switch I like to pair symptoms and results to help determine my next move. I am frustrated and exhausted by the fact that being chronically ill is a constant fight, that so many things can stand between me and wellness no matter what actions I take.

I’m glad my doctor will order the test; I’ve had doctors who wouldn’t. I’m glad my family can afford to pay out of pocket; we haven’t always been able to. But I am livid for myself and others that we have to work so hard to get what we need to merely function, never mind thrive.

(I’m aware that there are many different things that prevent people from thriving. This is the one I’m feeling hardest today.)

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I’m re-reading Unf*ck Your Habitat and wanted to keep some notes in a place I’d be able to find them later. I decided my website was that place. So here we go!

UfYH author Rachel Hoffman points out that small habit changes will be more effective at keeping your home pleasant than a big life overhaul. Here are some of the habits she mentions:

1. Do a little bit every day.
2. Use your leisure time wisely.
3. Use your waiting time efficiently.
4. Put it away, not down.
5. Make your bed.
6. Keep your flat surfaces clear.
7. Unf*ck tomorrow morning.
8. Trash goes in the trash can.
9. Do the dishes every day.
10. Wash, dry, and put it away, gddmit.
11. Deal with your invisible corners.

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It’s July 1 which means it’s the start of Camp NaNoWriMo! I’ve created a new blog at write.as using my romance writing pseudonym which isn’t a secret; it’s just separate so that if I ever publish anything, my academic writing and fiction writing don’t cross-pollinate. (I know some people use the same name for everything and that’s cool but I want to try this.)

The plan is to write a 12,000 word novella in July, edit and polish it, and self-publish it at a $2.99 price point. But the draft versions will always be available for free on that blog, and the final version will probably be there in a split-up format, too. And there’s a non-zero chance it’ll end up on Wattpad as well.

I’m using Gwen Hayes’s book Romancing the Beat to inspire my structure. I’m 99% pantsing. I have an idea about the main characters and the premise and that’s about it. So here’s where we’re at, which is slightly different from where the idea started already…

My original idea was that a “working actor” (we’ll call her H1) in NYC would come home to NC to help her mom recover from surgery and learn that the director of the children’s theater where she “got her start” was retiring and if they couldn’t find a proper replacement, they’d have to shut the theater down. She would run into her high school sweetheart (we’ll call him H2) who she met at the theater but with whom she hadn’t been able to maintain a relationship with him because they both were super career-focused and for reasons I hadn’t figured out yet, he wasn’t geographically mobile.

But in the middle of the night last night, I decided to bring it so it’s closer to home. So now H1 has a DFA in dramaturgy from Yale but has been a freeway flier for years because she can’t secure an adjuncting job, and the rest of the external circumstances are pretty much the same.

The thing that inspired me to write this publicly was Kristopher Jansma’s article for Electric Literature, What We Can—and Can’t—Learn About Louisa May Alcott from Her Teenage Fiction. I’m a sucker for juvenilia. I bought Alcott’s first novel, The Inheritance, when it was published in 1997 and it has a place of pride on my bookcase mostly because the cover is very pretty. I was playing Beth in a production of Little Women at the time. I have multiple boxes of my own creative output in my house that I’ve labeled “juvenilia.” You know, for when I end up donating my papers. I guess to Wilson Library? Anyway. Let’s all laugh about the idea of someone wanting my papers donated.

I’m also a sucker for author commentary. Piers Anthony writes these sprawling author’s notes and every time I read one of his books, I read the author’s note with great eagerness. The same for Leigh Bardugo, who blessedly actually names the titles of the works she used for her research.

I also love seeing works in early stages, works in progress, and hearing what people think of their own early work. So when Jansma mentioned Thomas Pynchon’s book, Slow Learner, , in which Pynchon offers and introduction to and commentary on some of his early stories, I decided to do something similar in real-time. The writing process, especially revision, feels so opague to me. I’m excited to open it up and make it public.

I know that I won’t be able to write every day this month, so I’m shooting for 20 writing days with a word count goal of 600 words each day. Buffer days will be for getting set up, writing commentary, or just taking a day off.

Today I’m writing this post and setting up Scrivener. Look out for those first 600 words in the next couple of days!

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I’m writing up a response to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Nebraska Today article, Knitting’s resurgence reflects women’s desire to confront inequality. This is a super off-the-cuff response that I hope to shape in the future into a proper essay but I need to get ideas out now or I may never bother.

I’m probably going to do this as sort of a list of thoughts.

Please note: I have not read the study referenced here, which according to its abstract looks like it focuses on consumers' use of space (hence the focus on yarn shops, stitch & pitch, etc) to “contest… cultural devaluation.” What the abstract describes and what the news piece talks about overlap, but certainly don’t appear to be identical. I hope to read the article soon.

1. Re: the framing of knitting as “an activity often dismissed as dull busywork for elderly women.” Maciel first noticed the phenomenon of Tucson knitters (which, due to Tucson’s climate, seemed like a counterintuitive phenomenon - and I grant him that) in 2011. This was 8 years after the publication of Debbie Stoller’s book Stitch ‘N Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook and 6 years after the publication of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter. Kim Werker founded the online magazine Crochet Me in 2004 because the world was full of cool stuff for knitters and not for crocheters. The website Craftster was founded in 2000. The Internet Archive has snapshots of the forum get crafty dating back to 1999. CROQzine began publication in 2005. Faythe Levine’s companion book and documentary, both titled Handmade Nation, came out in 2008 and 2009, respectively. Researcher Andre F. Maciel “learned that millions of women have taken up the hobby during the past two decades,” but a lot of this news piece frames it as if he’s discovered something wildly new. (The fact that part of his data collection included reviewing “640 articles about knitting found in large-circulation newspapers and magazines such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and the New Yorker” makes it clear that this was not a novel phenomenon in 2011 and still is not in 2021.) Again, I haven’t read the journal article; perhaps it does not treat the new domesticity as a hidden secret that only he and his colleague discovered in the past 10 years.

2. “Martha Stewart and others led a New Cult of Domesticity that embraced household endeavors such as cooking, baking, fiber crafts and home decorating.” This is the first time I’ve heard of the new domesticity referred to as the New Cult of Domesticity. Also, while Martha Stewart definitely was a big part of the most mainstream stuff happening here, she doesn’t exhibit the punk rock ethos that I associate with the new domesticity.

3. “They are contesting this cultural inequality, the stereotypes of knitting. It’s not in a radical way — they are not joining social movements as hard-core activists; they are not breaking social ties. They are not radical feminists; they are not abandoning their traditional roles. They want to reclaim the value of women’s culture.” I expect this kind of generalization is the natural outcome of a newsy piece as opposed to a scholarly piece; presumably Maciel and Wallendorf address the limitations of their study in the journal article. For example, their survey found that “Of the 110 knitters who responded to Maciel’s survey, 87% held a college degree and two-thirds lived in households with earnings of about $90,000. Most of them were white, most held conventional middle-class jobs, and most lived in committed relationships. About half had children living at home.” But it’s worth noting that when it comes to surveys " …women are more likely to participate than men (Curtin et al., 2000; Moore & Tarnai, 2002; Singer et al., 2000), younger people are more likely to participate than older people (Goyder, 1986; Moore & Tarnai, 2002), and white people are more likely to participate than non-white people (Curtin et al., 2000; Groves et al., 2000; Voigt et al., 2003).” (G. Smith, 2008) (PDF) So there may be a disparity between who knits and who responded to the survey. There is work out there specifically on craftivists. While perhaps the participants and respondents in this study were not radical, that’s not to say that crafters in general aren’t. (Don’t even get me started on the terminology of “make” vs. “craft,” that’s a conversation for another post.)

4. This is clearly affinity space research. When conducting research on an affinity space, there are plenty of potential challenges to doing ethical research. Taking this sort of traditional anthropological outsider view is out-of-step with the best affinity space research I’ve seen. This study is billed as an ethnography and I’m curious to see how the journal article frames it and how it addresses research ethics.

As I said, this is a gut response. This piece and especially the journal article it references deserve more attention.

Back when I started the dissertation process, I had this whole plan to dissertate in the open. I did this successfully up through the proposal process. I shared some process memos and wrote a little after that about things like reconsidering my research design in light of COVID and my data collection workflow. As the pandemic went on, I focused all my writing energy and time on the dissertation itself and didn’t get to do the writing I’d hoped about data analysis or writing.

Obviously I’m not in the process anymore so I can’t provide that in-the-moment reflection I’d hoped to, but I can provide some retrospective thoughts on it. I’m going to do that soon.

Lately some of the things that have been lifelines for me during the pandemic have started to feel less lifeliney. The crafting group I meet with on Thursdays is always full of lovely people but I keep feeling too tired to attend even though attending consists of sitting on my butt in front of my computer. (I’m attending in 7 minutes. Today I’m attending even though I don’t feel like it, to see if it pushes me through the blergh.)

I don’t know what after is for me. We’ve started taking my kid to the local children’s museum and that’s been HUGE. We only go in the outdoor portions, we stay away from other families, and we’re masked any time we’re within 6 feet of anybody else. But having a different place to take him from the few parks we ventured to for the past year and a half has made a real difference.

And I actually let my sister in my house last week, which was great.

But I haven’t hung out with friends really aside from a little bit of post-defense celebration. W and I haven’t gone out just us yet. I’m still really worn out from this thing and I don’t think that’s going away anytime soon.

We’re in the yellow here on the Global Epidemics risk map. I probably won’t feel like doing a lot of that stuff until we’re in the green.

We’re all so tired, aren’t we?

I hope your Wednesday’s going well! (Or Thursday if you’re farther east enough than me that that’s what day it is!)

I’ve been reading and loving Aaron A. Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games. Each week in 2021 he’s featuring a different text game, writing an essay about one from each year from 1971 to 2021. I played a few text games as a kid and this series is really fueling my nostalgia even though I’m only on 1973 in my reading and I didn’t do anything with a computer until probably 1986 or so.

My first computer (well, the family’s computer) was a Sanyo, maybe in the MBC-550 series (the image certainly looks right). Our monitor was monochrome, black with green text, until that monitor died and we switched to one that was black with gold text. I wrote all my school assignments in WordStar and printed them out on a dot matrix printer.

We had some big floppy disks and they had lots of games on them, mostly written in BASIC. I also subscribed to 3-2-1 Contact Magazine which would print BASIC games that you could code into your own computer. A couple of my friends and I really latched onto a couple of specific text adventures when we were in middle school (I’d guess around 1993), probably because they were ones we both happened to have. C and I were very into Wishbringer and L and I were very into Madame Fifi’s… which I’ll let you investigate further yourself but was a very interesting game for two twelve-year-olds, one of whom (me) was perplexed as to why her parents had such a titillating game just lying around. L and I were so inspired by Madame Fifi’s that we began writing our own BASIC text adventure, School Daze, entirely based on our experiences as seventh graders. It stayed on paper - I don’t why I never got it into the computer, but sixth or seventh grade is about when I stopped programming for a couple reasons: 1. afterschool chorus and theater rehearsals ate up my free time 2. computer class was full of programming in Logo which, to me, seemed like it was for babies. I didn’t want to draw circles. I wanted to create elaborate adventures with branching logic. But instead I just stopped programming, and didn’t pick code up again until I learned HTML. Then I went full mark-up/styling and have only done a little bit of true programming since, but this series is definitely tugging at my nostalgia and making me think maybe I’ll try my hand at interactive fiction.

In the introduction to the series, Reed mentions The Freshman, a 2016 interactive fiction (I am not sure about the distinction between an IF with images and a visual novel but I think it has to do with the level of interactivity; I welcome any suggested reading on the subject) that I have played a lot. I’m looking forward to later this year to see what he writes up about that and how things have changed. Certainly the more recent interactive fiction I have played relies more on talking, relationships, and big story actions, and less on things like mapping, manipulating inventory, and moving from room to room. (I recently tried Zork and got totally lost.)

I’ve never actually completed a text adventure; I wonder if as an adult I’ll be better at understanding their tropes. I remember in Madame Fifi’s there’s at one point a “dirty magazine” in the bathroom. As a naive 12yo I thought it was literally a magazine with dirt on it. Only now does it occur to me that “dirty” is describing the magazine’s content rather than its condition.

It’s possible my midlife crisis will involve a lot of computer programming. That would be good, right?

What’s been tweaking your nostalgia recently?

Hello again!

My right hip has been hurting the past couple of days. Or almost a week, I guess - it started last Wednesday and has been off-and-on since then. This isn’t super unusual for me. I have sacralization on that side - my fifth lumbar vertebra is fused to my pelvis (specifically, the ilium, and now the Classicist in me is trying to come up with a bunch of Trojan war jokes related to this congenital deformity). This can be painless but it can also cause lower back pain and bursitis, which is what this probably is. If it doesn’t go away in the next week, I’ll check in with my doctor about it. I’m of an age where these things might need to be resolved by injected steroids rather than careful application of over-the-counter pain relievers.

This pain is constant and so far no motion or position has really alleviated it. Distraction helps some, as I discussed yesterday, but only for a little while. The pain returns and I really don’t know how to work/live through it. I’ve gotten to the point where as long as a migraine isn’t demanding I go to bed and ensconce myself in darkness, I can kind of work through it, but this kind of musculoskeletal/joint pain is newer to me than migraines (I had my first one of those at 7) and I just don’t know how to get around it yet. It’s not the kind of pain that I can breathe through and I guess I could try some gate theory and hold ice in my bare hand or something but that’s not really conducive to tidying, writing, or applying for jobs.

I might need to get a new chair to work in. It’s possible these little folding dining chair things aren’t doing me any favors.

It surprises me how much pain can be a constant, how even if I think I’m not in pain, if anyone asks me about it I notice I am. But this pain, this I notice no matter what.

The goal for treatment of hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (which I may or may not have) is not to eliminate pain, but to reduce pain to a tolerable level. I don’t think the amount of pain I’m in right now could be reasonably described as tolerable.

This looks like a big pile of whining to me but I’m going to post it anyway. I don’t think people talk about pain enough.

Now I’m going to eat and have some of those OTC pain relievers I mentioned.

I’m working to get into the flow of daily blogging, so this post will be rather stream of consciousness.

I work best in two-hour chunks. Today, I helped W. revise a project statement for a fellowship application and applied to two jobs. I’m right around the two-hour mark and can feel myself flagging. It’s also time for that 3 pm snack most people need, so I’ll have that when I’m done blogging this.

I’m in the middle of a bit of a grace period for myself, not unlike Kelly J. Baker’s. I’m figuring out how I want to spend my time and what people will pay me for. Yes, I have plans for consulting, but I would also love a little bit of stability and to not pay out of pocket for health insurance. (Blessedly I’m on W’s but it increased his insurance cost by about $400/mo to add me. This was more expensive than any plan I could get on the market, I checked.) So I’m applying for jobs that look especially good, but not applying scattershot. I’m focusing on research and editorial jobs. Today’s jobs were editorial. I’ve got a couple research lined up to apply for tomorrow.

I’m physically very tired much of the time, which is partly because my thyroid levels are off. I don’t know if I’ve written about this recently, but I’ll doubt it. So a refresher in case you’re new here: I have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, which manifests primarily as hypothyroidism. That means my body attacks my thyroid gland, which then doesn’t work well. I take two synthetic hormone medications to help, plus a couple of supplements to boost the natural production and conversion of thyroid hormones. The thyroid controls metabolism, literally how your body has energy, and my primary symptom is intense fatigue. I also expereince brain fog and joint pain. (I also have polycystic ovary syndrome so basically my whole endocrine system doesn’t know what it’s doing.)

Flares of hypothyroidism sneak up on me because it’s so easy to explain away the symptoms - I’m tired because I go to bed too late, I’m sore because I ate something that probably had corn in it (corn makes me achey), the brain fog is from the tiredness… But when I get lab tests, it’s easier to see the pattern: my thyroid levels, while “normal,” are suboptimal, which is why I feel low-grade misery rather than abject despair.

So in May, I found out those levels were suboptimal and increased the dosage on my supplements to see if, if I provide it with extra building blocks, my thyroid will produce more hormones. And if that’s not enough, we’ll increase the prescription synthetic hormone dosages. We’ll check on that in July.

I’m trying to take care of my body but honestly I don’t really know how to BE embodied. I’m a floating head, a cyborg lady who lives mostly on the web. Being attentive to my body usually means attending to pain and in my experience, distraction is more helpful than mindfulness. But I want to do better by my body, to feed it well and clean it enough and get it moving. But I think I have to do it very gently until this thyroid thing gets sorted out.

What is super weird is that sometimes even when my body is completely worn out, my mind is really active. This leads to a few different things happening. First, I notice all the things I’m not doing because my body is too tired: cleaning out the fridge, putting away the laundry, helping my kid pick up his room, etc. I notice these things and then, because it’s my default, I berate myself for not doing them. But I’m conserving all my energy for mothering so house stuff just has to wait until I have more energy. Sorry, house. Sorry, brain.

The other thing is that my brain wants something to chew on. At first, it was nice being done with my dissertation. But then recently W. was talking about how he was having to think through and write this appication and I thought, “Oh wow, it must be so nice to have something to have to think about and work on.”

But I also feel deeply unready for client work.

Which is part of why I’m here blogging. I’m going to spend at least a week blogging daily to get some activity in for my restless brain without wearing out my body or take on new stress.

So that’s where I’m at. I’m off to have a snack and rest more. How are things with you?

The postpartum experience isn’t just expensive; it can also be one of psychic trauma and creative crisis. Someone who was a person becomes a mother. “You’re not a person. You don’t have a name,” says Zambreno. This feeling of erasure is a current that runs through her work, reaching peak intensity in “To Write as if Already Dead.” “I need to restore myself after being made into a ghost,” Zambreno says. “I always feel like writing the most when I’m being made invisible.”

Kate Zambreno on her new book "To Write as if Already Dead" - Los Angeles Times latimes.com

I may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

I love the way N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became captures the spirit of the five boroughs of New York here in a way that is legible to non-New Yorkers. This book recasts Lovecraftian horror as a fight for the city’s soul. It features street artists, grad students, an MC-turned-lawyer-turned-councilwoman, a PhD director of an art non-profit, and a sheltered girl who’s never left Staten Island. If you’re looking for representation for Black, Latino, and queer characters, Jemisin’s got you. This book is a fast, fun read that imagines some of the daily horror in our world as being caused by eldritch forces from beyond our universe. Borrowed this one from @durhamcountylibrary. Highly recommend.

What’s a fantasy or sci-fi book you’ve read that helped you think through recent events?

My head is swimming after attending the #FanLIS symposium today. At this moment when I’m taking a few weeks off before launching consulting, occasionally doing job interviews, and mostly resting, I’m in the middle of an existential crisis about what I want to do and who I want to be.

I’m in a position where, if I can bring in a fair amount of freelance work, I could use some of my time as an independent scholar and I think that’s what I want to do. I’m not interested in academia-as-institutionalized-in-higher-ed but I love scholarship. I don’t want to not be a scholar.

I’ve been reviewing my notes from Katie Rose Guest Pryal’s Book The Freelance Academic and this quote is standing out to me today:

Our tracks are, by necessity, only limited by our own creativity. They literally are what we make them. (p. 49 in the Kindle edition)

So this is my track today. Freelance academic/independent scholar-librarian.

Tomorrow: Digging into Raul Pacheco-Vega’s blog for help setting up my workflows moving forward.

I’m planning to return and clean up formatting and add links to videos once they’re online, but for now, here’s a collection of everything I tweeted from the presentations at #FanLIS, handily compiled and tweeted for me by Noter Live.

ACE OF SPADES by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

Chiamaka and Devon are both students at the prestigious Niveus Academy and total opposites. Devon is a nobody, a scholarship kid who spends all his time working on music composition, only noticed by his friend Jack. Chiamaka is the definition of Queen Bee, working hard to be noticed and celebrated. She is a brilliant science student with designs on Yale.

Chiamaka and Devon have three things in common, though: they are both prefects at their school this year, they are the only Black students at Niveus, and they are both victims of an anonymous texter calling themselves “Aces” and sharing Chi and Von’s secrets with the whole school.

⚠️: Author Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé provided an extensive list of content warnings for the book on her website. Chief among them are racism and homophobia but this thriller is full of potential triggers so I definitely recommend reviewing the list before reading.

The promotional materials call this book “Gossip Girl meets Get Out” and that description is spot-on. If I get too specific I’ll spoil more than I’d like, but it has the anonymous gossip and deep secrets, especially around personal relationships, of Gossip Girl and the “Oh no seriously get out of there” of Get Out. Multiple times revelations made me gasp and think “OHHHH!” There is some exposition at the beginning to introduce you to the characters and the setting, but as soon as Aces’s first message comes out, the pacing picks up and things get and stay intense.

The book also reminds me of Veronica Mars, with its focus on intrigue, detailed depiction of class differences, and teenagers managing their own affairs without much adult interference.

I definitely recommend this to readers who love gossip, mystery, or thrillers. Author Àbíké-Íyímídé says she has “has dreamt of writing books about black kids saving (or destroying) the world all her life” (lack of capitalization in the bio on her website). She has succeeded beautifully here.

Pre-order ACE OF SPADES now, out June 1 in the US and June 10 in the UK. Àbíké-Íyímídé offers some pre-order incentives on her website, so be sure to check those out!

Thank you to Netgalley and Macmillan for the e-ARC of this book!

♠️❤️♣️♦️

[A phone displaying the US cover of ACE OF SPADES sits on top of scattered playing cards.]

Hello again, internet. I just finished writing the last thing I had to write for my assistantship. I’m taking a break and not hustling hustling for the next month or so. But I am planning to launch as an independent researcher and consultant in mid-June, and in case anyone else is interested in what that life is like, I thought I’d share some of my prospective work.

I really appreciate transparency such as when Dr. Katie Linder and Dr. Sara Langworthy talk about their income streams on the Make Your Way podcast, Dr. Katie Rose Guest Pryal talks about hers in her book The Freelance Academic, and Dr. Kelly J. Baker talks about hers on her blog. Because I haven’t launched yet, I can’t tell you how much money I’m making. But I can tell you what kind of clients I’m courting.

Here are some possibilities I have in the works:

• doing some curatorial work for my blogging host platform
• working with a small start-up to promote qualitative research and qualitative data analysis software
• editing theses and dissertations either through my own networking or as part of another organization’s network (both, if I can swing it)
• writing curriculum materials for Open Educational Resources
• working as an independent researcher again through both my own networking and as an affiliate of a consulting company

In addition to whatever paid work I get, I have a dream of also continuing to do my own research and maybe doing some creative writing (either creative non-fiction or YA fantasy), but we’ll see how much time and energy I have.

I’m auditing Stanford’s CS101 on EdX because while I love Harvard’s CS50x I think I need some back to basics stuff. (All of this recommended by the great FreeCodeCamp article, How to Hack Together Your Own CS Degree Online for Free.)

I’ll be jotting down some notes and reminders to myself here, adding future posts for this course as replies to this one.

If you’re a developer you’re going to be like “Wow, I know that already.” Yeah. It’s a 101 class, y’all.

Data Types

• numbers
• strings - text between quotation marks, e.g., “Dr. Kimberly Hirsh”

Some Javascript stuff

• // comes before a comment; a comment is not run

I’m playing with CSS to get spoiler-text hidden unless selected on my website. Let’s see if it works! I’m putting double pipes around it so people browsing in dark mode know where to highlight.

|| This is a spoiler. ||

Could I create a more elaborate solution to this problem? YES! But I’m not really interested in doing so.

Adam Grant’s article There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing has been floating around different places I spend time online and Austin Kleon wrote a great response, I’m not languishing, I’m dormant.

On Kleon’s Instagram post about this, a commenter quoted Aaron Burr’s line in the Hamilton song “Wait for It”: “I am not standing still, I am lying in wait.” This was my first thought on seeing Kleon’s post about this, as well.

The definition Kleon shares of “languish” and the more clinical/sociological definition Grant cites focus on ill-feeling. Kleon says that because languishing is antithetical to flourishing and he’s not attempting to flourish, he’s not languishing.

I’m definitely in a downtime stage of life, having just pushed through what I call a “Chariot moment,” based on the Tarot card The Chariot, which is my fave and also all about the hustle. I’m in more of a Hermit place right now. I even just had a conversation with W. about possibly spending most of the month of May in PhD recovery, only applying for jobs that are AWESOME, waiting to pursue freelance gigs until I start to feel a bit better.

To me, languishing implies unused potential. I have a bunch of art supplies languishing in a closet in my house. Grant sort of hints at this meaning, but the dictionary definition and Kleon’s response certainly don’t consider it.

So I’m not languishing.

Another commenter on Kleon’s Instagram post suggested that the book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times is a good read for thinking through this. I just borrowed the eBook from my local library and if I enjoy it, I’ll probably buy a hardcover copy. (One of the biggest changes in my life since the start of the pandemic is that I buy way more new hardcover books and I almost always buy them from one of my local bookstores.)

I’m lying in wait. If a great opportunity comes along, I’ll pounce on it. But like a cat, I’m conserving my energy.

And like a plant, I’m not ready to come up yet.

Feel free to apply other metaphors to the same ideas.

I’ve read Katie Rose Guest Pryal’s The Freelance Academic twice now. It’s a great book. I’ve taken notes on it and highlighted all over the place but I feel like I haven’t internalized the notes. So I thought I’d blog some notes, highlights, and marginalia. This blog post is no substitute for reading the book, so if this information seems useful, be sure to check it out!

The Freelance Academic Manifesto

Originally posted on Dr. Pryal’s blog.

1. Get paid for your work.
2. Live in a place you love with people you love.
3. When you find yourself being lured back to your department for a temporary gig, remember: They’re never going to let you in the club.
4. Stop applying to academic jobs.
5. Remember that you are not alone.

Things to Do

• Read books “about how higher education has changed and how how people have dealt with these changing conditions.” p. 13
• “…read everything you can about how to start making money for the hard work you do.” p. 14
• “Take a course on how to pitch ideas to writer’s markets that pay, either through online courses or by hiring a successful freelancer friend to teach you.” p.18
• “…hire an academic career coach, who specializes in helping people transition out of the academy.” p. 18
• Finish outstanding academic commitments such as papers.
• Write your goodbye letter.
• Figure out what you’re good at by making a list of your superpowers.
• Make a list of things you’re an expert in.
  • Add topics you might want to write about.
  • “…figure out who would be interested in reading what you have to say in these areas.” p. 138
  • Some ideas: trade magazines, in-house blogging or copywriting.
  • Make a list of at least 10 story ideas so you can choose 1 to pitch.
  • After you’ve pitched and written one article, pitch a series.
• Learn about running a business.
  • “Find out what the going rates are in the private sector for what you do. Think about the rates that you should be charging, and start charging those rates. And remember, when you set your rates, you have to add 30%.” p. 123
  • Pay yourself a steady paycheck.
  • Standardize the services you offer.
  • Technology
    • email
    • data storage (hard drive/cloud)
    • laptop
    • email signature
  • Library access
    • Find out if you can use your university library with something like a community membership.
  • Online presence
    • Update social media profiles
    • Get a Facebook business page.
    • Get testimonials from clients and put them on your website and social media profiles.
  • Business cards
  • Business structure
    • Consider incorporating.
• “Hire an academic career coach.” p. 18
• Professionalize yourself as a non-academic.
• “Get your research out there, just as it is.” (p. 42)
  • Make your research publicly accessible on your own website and on “open-access repositories that are indexed on Google.” p. 39
• “Create an internet presence.” (p. 43)
  • Learn “about website design, coding, and hosting.” p. 24
  • Change your website from a CV to an online portfolio.
    • “Buy the URL (web address) that is your name.” (p. 43)
    • Create one page for your education and experience.
    • Create another page for your publications.
      • Link your publications to your repository page.
    • Add a blog.
      • Share your blog posts on social media.
      • Blog about important things.
      • Establish your areas of expertise on your blog.
      • When blogging, “Be honest and always link it to the larger trends and structural issues.” p. 32 (quoting Lee Skallerup Bessette)
    • “Put a bullet point on your website about your experience with grant writing or professional writing.” p. 117
  • Make connections on Twitter and Instagram. Network and share your scholarship.
• “Share your ideas – widely.” p. 44
  • “…put yourself in a position to engage publicly with your research.” p. 39
  • Figure out which publishing venues “are interested in which genres.” p. 44
  • “Take a course on how to pitch ideas to writer’s markets that pay, either through online courses or by hiring a successful freelancer friend to teach you.” p. 18
  • “Read the magazines you want to write for. Learn who the editors are by reading their work.” p. 45
  • “Start pitching articles in your area of expertise that are ‘pegged’ (tied) to current events.” p. 45
  • “Reach out to your freelance academic colleagues and ask for help” coming up with creative solutions to problems. Also ask your coach. p. 51
• “Build a community, whether online or off, of others who are trying to do work similar to yours.” p. 80
• “…always have a clean, up-to-date résumé ready as a safety net.” p. 174

Things to Read

• To Write or Not to Write, Kelly J. Baker
• Should Academics Write for Free?, Sarah Kendzior
• Hanging Up on a Calling, Rebecca Schuman
• Love and Other Secondhand Emotions, Jacqui Shine
• On Graduate School and “Love," William Pannapacker
• The No Baby Penalty, Elizabeth Keenan
• The Responsibility of Adjunct Intellectuals, Corey Robin
• What’s the Point of Academic Publishing?, Sarah Kendzior
• Thesis Hatement, Rebecca Schuman
• Sexism Ed, Kelly J. Baker
• Why Everybody Loses When Someone Leaves Academe, Erin Bartram
• Instead of Gaslighting Adjuncts, We Could Help Them, Annemarie Pérez
• Don’t Fear the Résumé, Rachel Leventhal-Weiner
• The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy Norman Mailer, James Baldwin
• Student Arrested after Crawling into a Duct to Steal an Exam, Christopher Mele
• Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, Roger Fisher and William Ury
• What is BATNA? How to Find Your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement, Guhan Subramanian
• Academic Waste, Kelly J. Baker
• How the University Works, Marc Bousquet
• Build a Career Worth Having, Nathaniel Koloc
• Why Freelancers Need a Nonpayment Law, Sara Horowitz
• How to Craft a Pitch, Kelly J. Baker
• Recommended Reading and Resources starting on p. 175

People, organizations, and resources to look up

• Kelly J. Baker
• Jennifer Polk
• Beyond the Professoriate
• Rebecca Schuman
• Sarah Kendzior
• Elizabeth Keenan
• Erin Bartram
• Rachel Leventhal-Weiner
• Editorial Freelance Association (publishes The Freelancer newsletter)
• The Freelancer’s Union
• Who Pays Writers?

Highlights

It’s probably going to be a little while before I get my full dissertation up online, so I thought I’d go ahead and post my acknowledgments here.

Immediately after the graduation ceremony at which I received my MSLS in 2011, I told my advisor that I would probably be back for the PhD sometime. Six years ago, I made good on that promise. Since I started the Master’s program in 2009, Sandra has been a constant mentor, colleague, and friend. Thank you so much, for more than I have the words to say.

I would like to thank my committee for their guidance and reflections from our first meeting to discuss the topics for my comprehensive examination package until today. Your support, especially as I navigated completing a dissertation during a global pandemic, has been invaluable. Casey, your advice and friendship has made this road so much easier than it would have been otherwise. Crystle, your work quite literally inspired this work and I’m grateful to have had you on my committee offering the unique insights from your own research. Heather and Brian, your ideas and questions have strengthened this work significantly. Thank you all. Thank you to my participants for sharing your experiences and insight with me. I can’t wait to see what you’re wearing when we can all go to cons again! Thank you also to the cosplayers who attended the November 2018 Final Fantasy: Distant Worlds concert at the DPAC. You sparked the idea that led to this dissertation.

I am grateful to the UNC Graduate School, SILS, IMLS, and the NSF for supporting me financially for six years and enabling me to work on incredible research with amazing colleagues like Dr. Maggie Melo and Laura March.

I’m thankful for my improv friends, who made sure I had fun during the first year and a half of this thing and served as guinea pigs for some of my earliest research.

I am so grateful for the families and teachers I met at Nido Coworking + Childcare. You are still my village. I want to thank my parents for instilling a love of learning in me and my siblings for enduring my pedanticism. I am grateful to all of them, as well as to my in-laws, for staying with Michael so I could attend class and write. Thank you extra to Laurie, who cared for Michael during the writing stage. Without your help, I would not be graduating in 2021.

Thank you to Michael, my big kid miraculous earth angel, for making me smile, filling my heart with so much joy I often think it will explode, and for being a living reason and reminder to do things besides school. And thank you to Will, who not only made sure I had shelter and food during this whole process, but also introduced me to the world of Final Fantasy and the beautiful music of Nobuo Uematsu, without which we never would have attended the concert that inspired me to choose this dissertation topic. I was able to do this whole PhD thing because I had you to catch all the balls I dropped, to remind me that we would get through it together when I was sure I couldn’t do it, and to make me laugh.

I’ve been wanting to clean up my blog at least since I migrated from WordPress to Micro.blog, maybe longer. But at over 1000 entries and more all the time, it felt too daunting. Then I read John Johnston’s post, Gardening in the Stream, in which he described using an “On This Day” feature to surface old posts and then go back to the posts from a given day in previous years and clean those up. I love this idea. It’s manageable and if I miss a day, it’ll be only a year before I have another chance to look at it. I’m using Jonathan LaCour’s On This Day snippet for Micro.blog to get this going.

It reminds of me of Austin Kleon’s writing about stock and flow, referencing Robin Sloan’s writing about stock and flow. My hope is that by circulating old flow back into new flow, I’ll discover some things I can turn into stock, clean up, and link in places that make them easier to discover.

This post contains slight spoilers for The Nevers.

I just watched the first episode of The Nevers. Yes, it was created, written, and directed by Joss Whedon. Yes, I am appalled and heartbroken by the way he treated his colleagues on Buffy, Angel, and Justice League. That’s about all I have the heart to say about it. I’d like to talk about The Nevers now which, of course, can’t be completely separated from him, but also kind of is its own thing. As Austin Kleon says, “Art Monsters are not necessary or glamorous and they are not to be condoned, pardoned, or emulated” (Keep Going, p. 124) but also “bad people can make good art.” I haven’t decided if The Nevers seems like good art to me, but I can’t deny that a lot of JW’s other art has been central to my life for the past almost 22 years. So. I want to talk about this art, acknowledging the bad behavior of its creator.

I’m going to talk about The Nevers now, like I said.

Over at The Ringer, Alison Herman describes the protagonists of The Nevers as “Victorian Lady X-Men,” and this is not wrong.

Specifically, you’ve got a bunch of persecuted superpowered people living in a facility sponsored by a rich person who used a wheelchair.

Let’s talk for a minute about Lavinia Bidlow (played by “I am very British. I don’t say Hard Rs” Olivia Williams). Lavinia Bidlow uses a wheelchair. As far as I can tell, she herself is not one of The Touched (aka superpowered people) and has no turn (aka superpower). But she is extremely devoted to making sure that The Touched have a home and are safe and thus she sponsors the “orphanage” where many of them live and work. (There are rogue Touched and unaffiliated Touched, too. Like… Like mutants. In X-Men.)

So. Lavinia Bidlow, using a wheelchair presumably due to a disability, feels a great deal of sympathy and/or empathy for The Touched.

People often refer to The Touched as “afflicted.”

Mrs. Amalia True, head rounder-upper of Touched-who-need-protection, precog lady (not to be confused with Doyle/Cordelia’s power on Angel, which IIRC was more clairvoyance than precognition but usually conveniently early clairvoyance that often allowed time to save the person they saw) and skilled fighter, responds to Ominous Fancyman Lord Massen in this conversation:

Massen: I take it then that you are yourselves among the afflicted.

True: Touched, yes. We don’t consider ourselves afflicted.

Massen: Perhaps some women are more fortunate in the nature of their ailment than others.

True: That’s true, but more suffer from society’s perception than their own debilitation.

This set off little bells in my head, as it sounds very much to me like a TV superhero’s quick explanation of the social model of disability. From that moment I started watching this as if it were a supremely unsubtle metaphor for disability. I’m not sure if it works, but I do find it an interesting lens.

There’s also Maladie, who is the most prominent rogue Touched, is a serial killer, and certainly appears to live with a mental illness. (It is a perfectly valid criticism when Natalie Zutter at Tor.com says her dialogue “feels like it was collected from Drusilla’s cutting-room-floor musings.") We see Maladie about to be carted off to an asylum in the flashbacks to the day when the Touched got their powers. And of course, “touched” has been used as a rather unkind euphemism for having mental illness.

I have invisible disabilities including autoimmune disease that is sometimes debilitating, migraines, depression, and anxiety. Lord Massen would call me more fortunate and there are certainly many forms of ableism I don’t face. But when I struggle to work through a migraine or have trouble going downstairs to the kitchen from my bedroom because all of my joints hurt, I wonder if there is a place in this world for me. So near the end of the episode, when strawberry-blonde Irish science nerd Penance Adair (your Willow/Kaylee stand-in and thus my fave) describes a feeling “that I’m here. I belong here… all of us that’s Touched, we’re woven into the fabric of the world and we’re meant to be as we are," my heart swells and I think, “YES, I want to feel that way!” (I do, sometimes, but I want to feel it more.)

Does this all add up to a solid disability metaphor? Not yet, and it’s very possible what we’ll see here is a kind of “fantastic ableism” akin to the fantastic racism X-Men and other stories are critiqued for. But I’m watching with this lens now and I’m interested to see what I find.

I haven’t found anybody else approaching The Nevers this way, but if you have, I’d love to hear about it! I’d especially love a perspective from someone with more visible disabilities.

It feels like submitting my dissertation has freed up an immense amount of space in my head and heart to start thinking about other things. I’m so excited about so many possibilities right now. I bought a bunch of sewing supplies, but my sewing machine thwarted me. It needs a thorough cleaning and oiling, and then I can try sewing again.

I’m back on the Artist’s Way train, doing “morning” pages that are really afternoon pages because the only quiet I can get is during childcare time, and that’s in the afternoon. (I could switch this to morning but it would disrupt some standing meetings I have, so I’m leaving it as-is for now.)

I’m reading John Scalzi’s You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop and it has me feeling energized about writing.

I’m reading Jess Zimmerman’s Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology and it’s phenomenal. I only annotate textbooks, so all my notes from this are commonplace-book style in my Bullet Journal and there are so many of them. Pages and pages.

I’ve got a stack of books about mending on hold at the library. I’m really thrilled at the thought of mending things. My kid’s favorite clothes get holes in them. I’ve got some leggings and pajama pants that could use a good mend. But mostly I love how this feels like a personal step toward sustainable living. Of course we should hold institutions and businesses accountable for their role in promoting sustainability, but that’s not a good reason to not even think about it myself. One day I’ll be able to go in thrift stores again without worrying and I really hope that by then I can start to see the things I find for their possibilities rather than just what they already are. I can dye things! Cut them up! Refashion them! Woohoo! Psyched to get this stack on Saturday and I expect I’ll write more about these things as I read them. (I’ve got a few web links about this, too; maybe I’ll put together a little guide.)

I’m thinking about writing a post or page that is essentially a digital care package for new parents: my favorite books, online resources, and tips related to parenting. You learn so much in the first few years (and more later I trust, but I’m only half way through year 5 so I can only talk about the first 4 and a half years or so). It seems a shame to just sit on that knowledge, or to only pass it on to people in little bits and pieces. Wouldn’t it be cool to just point people to a webpage? I think it would.

Come to think of it, I know little bits about all kinds of stuff. Maybe I should write a BUNCH of guides. One about cupcakery. One about producing community theater or local comedy. What else?

Helping people is kind of my favorite thing.

I’ve now taken an hour and a half of childcare time as runway time, so I suppose I should get down to work.

Anyway, welcome spring! LET’S DO ALL THE THINGS!

Fourteen years ago, I started a book blog - or, as I called it at the time, a reading journal. I jumped in and started writing without any worries about doing it “right.” (For one thing, 2007 was early days with respect to book blogging.) Over time I became part of the kidlit book blogging community.

I slowed down on book blogging long ago, but now I want to ramp up the bookishness of my personal blog. So I did what you do, I googled “book blog.” For months I’ve been reading book blogging introductory articles and posts.

Most of the advice hasn’t sat with me quite right.

I don’t want to book blog like anybody else.

I want to book blog like me.

It turns out 2007 Kimberly has a lot of wisdom when it comes to book blogging. I’ve started looking at my old posts to see how they might be models for how I write about books in the future.

I’m already feeling better about book blogging. I’m excited to get back into it.

Dissertating during a pandemic is not easy. Maintaining concentration is a real challenge. Before the pandemic, my chronic illness allowed me about 2 good hours a day to do creative work, and any other work time I allotted to more rote/administrative tasks.

Now I have the capacity for 1 task, regardless of whether it’s creative or administrative, and 1 meeting. That’s it. If I do those things, my brain insists it is time for sleep, Star Trek, or fiction reading. And often it can’t even handle fiction reading, so I then do this Star Trek/sleep combo.

I don’t sleep well at night. Even on nights when I don’t do a 3 am doomscroll and instead get a good chunk of sleep, I still wake up feeling like I could sleep for the rest of time if only my body would actually, you know, sleep. (I took Benadryl and slept until 10 am one weekend in recent memory and that was amazing but the rested feeling was 100% gone by the next day.)

I rarely have the energy to be “on” for my kid. We read, I remind him of all the possibilities he has (Clay! Legos! Blocks! Sandpaper letters! Pretend cooking! Real cooking! Coloring! Painting! Magnatiles! Action figures! A bunch of tiny animals!), he chooses one of those and plays independently while I crochet or try to read about either unschooling or Reader’s Advisory. We watch Sesame Street and Wild Kratts. Sometimes we play Animal Moves, in which I call out the names of random animals and he moves like them. (I use a random animal generator because I can’t even think of the names of more than probably 7 animals.)

I’m a person who likes to appear cheerful. I’m a person whose nature it is to care about things.

Right now, I want my dissertation to be done, I want to sleep, and I want to read fiction and then talk to people about what I’m reading and what they’re reading. I want to crochet but not to knit because knitting requires brain power since I keep having to re-learn it and my fingers are always slipping.

Sometimes I put on Bob Ross, if I have a migraine.

And I often have a migraine, waxing and waning in intensity.

I am living this pandemic on the absolute easiest setting, with a flexible schedule, two incomes even though mine is right at the cost of living for 1 person, the ability to pick food up curbside and do none of my own shopping, deeply discounted childcare from my mother-in-law, and the ability to communicate with friends and sometimes even visit outdoors with local family.

And I am exhausted.

I can’t imagine how hard this must be for people in worse circumstances than mine.

How are you holding up? Are you holding up? I have a headache today. I really want to write about ideas: craft as healing, being a parent and being other things too, what we mean when we talk about information literacy. My brain though can’t gather all the floaty fragmentary bits of thoughts about these ideas that are whirring through my mind, so I guess I’ll write about them later.

I got my car inspected and its 60K maintenance done. It feels nice to have a car that should be in good shape for another 30K miles. The guy who helped me was the same guy who helped me the last time I took my car in, a year ago, and he recognized me, even with my mask on. He said he remembered my eyes.

So now I think I have memorable eyes.

Last night I had a desire to listen to Michael Crawford sing some distinctly un-Phantom of the Opera songs. I don’t know why. He always sounds ghostly to me, so it’s really funny to hear him do brassy songs in a ghost voice. It makes me happy. The most hilarious is probably The Power of Love, but that’s not on Spotify so last night I went with Any Dream Will Do. Hilarious! They should rename the show Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor DreamGHOST when Michael Crawford sings it.

Have you ever noticed that Michael Crawford doesn’t do a lot of Sondheim? He plays Hero in the movie of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum but on his solo albums there’s not much Sondheim. Maybe a little. (Only vaguely related, another role Crawford had in his early career was Cornelius in Hello, Dolly! and the story of how he got that job is hilarious.)

I’ve been thinking lately about how to be a theater person again, because I miss it and it was a huge part of my identity until the college theater scene kind of beat it out of me. (I made the mistake of aligning myself with the far too serious drama department kids instead of the more fun non-majors putting up their own shows.)

There’s a Theater & Drama Crash Course and it was nice looking through the titles of the videos to realize how much I remember from my BA in dramatic art. I might watch some of those videos and revisit that stuff.

Now is, of course, a terrible time to get back into theater; there’s not much live stuff going on and I’m not really in a position to do virtual shows because my kid could walk in at any minute.

But there are other angles I can approach it from; play reading, playwriting, watching recorded productions, theater history… We’ll see where I go with it.

Anyway, back to my first question.

How are you holding up?

I kind of want to put the person back in my personal website. Not that it isn’t personal - especially my short little notes. But I’ve been thinking about this like it was A Blog, not My Blog, and it’s not a great feeling. So I do have this sort of voice in my head for Important Blog PostsTM with titles like

“My kid isn’t going to be at my dissertation defense and that makes me sad”

or

“Transformations and transitions: How my thinking is changing.”

And these are interesting things that I do want to talk about, but I don’t need to use an authoritative voice to talk about them.

Back in December I set out to get back to a freer form of blogging and then December exploded on my face in a mess that is only now really beginning to be cleaned up.

I’m hoping to change that now.

What are you up to today? I went to a SILS virtual craft circle, which was great; I’m going to have two of those a week in my life now, on Thursdays and Fridays, and I think it’s very good.

I showed my kid the first ever episode of Sesame Street. (It’s on HBO Max.) Bob was so young in 1969, y’all! Of course, many people were - my parents were teens. It’s a really solid pilot; there are some good gags. I think it’s easy to forget how funny Sesame Street can be if you haven’t watched it in a while, but it’s really good. I’ve blogged before about how it makes a great comedy school, and that was true even in the pilot.

I’ve had a migraine that waxes and wanes for over a week now. It’s not good. I think it’s a hormonal thing.

There are too many books to read.

I think that’s enough stream of consciousness for now.

And now to finish, a GIF that features two of my imaginary friends: Kermit the Frog and Levar Burton.

via GIPHY

It’s been two weeks and a day since my grandmother died, and I don’t feel like doing anything.

When I posted about her death, I didn’t mention the three weeks of emotional trauma leading up to it. She was rushed to the hospital with symptoms of internal bleeding on 12/12, beginning a rollercoaster of her being unresponsive, showing small signs of consciousness, being taken off a ventilator and able to breathe on her own, being able to talk, showing signs of significant memory loss, and being moved to hospice. Throughout all of that, I played the role of the emotional support eldest daughter, with my mom calling me almost every day, sometimes twice a day, to update my sister and myself (on a three-way call) and talk through her feelings. She was unable to go to Florida to help; her brother had to manage the whole thing alone, and for a while was her only point of communication about my grandmother’s condition. She was often confused about my grandmother’s state. It was weeks of misery capped off by losing her mother.

And, I have to remind myself when I wonder why I feel so glum, losing my grandmother, who was very important to me even if I didn’t see or talk to her often.

I’d had big plans for the first couple of weeks of January, and I found myself unable to actually do any of them. I was finally beginning to feel like maybe next week (this week now? depends on if your week starts on Sunday or Monday) I could dig myself out of this funk enough to get some work done.

And then on Friday, my mom asked my sister and myself to look over her eulogy. It was beautiful, it needed no changes, and I hope that at the graveside service this afternoon, she gets to deliver it.

Ah, yes. The graveside service, taking place in Kodak, TN, where the coronavirus metrics show community transmission is about 4 times worse there than here. So I didn’t go.

I’ve been to three other funerals at that cemetery.

I hate that I’m not at this one, but I would hate getting sick more.

Communicating about my decision not to go was its own source of trauma.

So I probably shouldn’t be mystified by the fact that I don’t feel like doing anything.

I don’t want to write about research or pop culture or even books. I don’t really want to read. I don’t want to watch new things (though I did watch WandaVision).

All I want to do is watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and crochet. That’s it. One stitch at a time, building a beautiful lace shawl, as I sit with these friends who have been with me since I was six years old and watch them behave in all the ways I know they will.

I’ve been tormenting myself for at least a year with the thought of what comes next after I graduate. I was chugging along really nicely on my dissertation. I suspect I’ll be stalled out on it for another week or so. I hope it won’t impact my timeline too much.

I’ve been thinking that what comes next is probably creating my own consulting business. But I realized that as long as my child is home from school, I probably can’t drum up enough work to cover the cost of paying for extra care for him. So the most economically sound thing to do, then, is to set aside consulting work for later, and double down on momming now.

I talked to W. about this and he said,

“I would expect you to just think of yourself as an educator, then.”

This was a good identity perspective for a few reasons. One, it freed me from the idea that I would need to be a full-on homemaker, which I certainly won’t have the energy to do if I’m also educating M. (My mother-in-law has been caring for him in the afternoons at a rate that is beyond a bargain, but even that rate isn’t cheap enough if I’m bring in no income.)

His school has gone fully remote, so that he’s not the only kid or one of two who is remote, which is nice, but it actually requires more hands-on time for me than just letting him putter about the playroom all morning. It’s really good, though.

So. Fine. I’ll be a consultant without contracts. I’ll squeeze my me-time in around his schedule, crocheting while he unschools or reading after he goes to sleep.

And maybe in a week or two, I’ll feel like writing again. I hope so. But I think right now I need to give myself permission to be in this spot of doing nothing, because grief deserves time. And it’s okay to still be grieving my grandmother, who has been in my life for almost 40 years, after two weeks.

I just re-read my 2019 Year-in-Review & 2020 Word of the Year blog post, published a little over a year ago. When I look at all the stuff I got done in 2019, all the places I went, all the people I spent time with, I am struck by how different 2020 has been. We all know it, but I’ve actually become inured to it. And then I read something like this. Cons. Travel. Flotation therapy. All things I haven’t done in 2020.

Because, you know, global pandemic.

But I still did some stuff in 2020!

• Pre-pandemic, I defended my dissertation proposal.
• I revised that proposal and submitted it for IRB review.
• I then changed my dissertation scope twice.
• I collected all the data for my dissertation.
• I analyzed all the data for my dissertation.
• I drafted my dissertation. (All of that was accomplished in 10 months, which is pretty impressive.)
• I conducted 3 interviews for my research assistantship.
• I analyzed 14 interview transcripts for my research assistantship.
• I managed having the house painted.
• I had plumbers out at least 3 times. (Probably need to get on a service plan.)
• I presented a virtual poster at Fan Studies Network North America.
• I learned about and tried different methods of stress relief.
• I planned a special private birthday video chat storytime for M’s birthday with his favorite storier, Mr. Jim.
• I managed virtual preschool/unschooling from mid-March to mid-December. (Cutting the kid & myself a break during his school’s break time.)
• I kept going.

My word of the year for 2020 was FULL, specifically filling my well and being my full self. I think I’ve succeeded brilliantly, so yay for that. I also wanted to read for pleasure, play video games, and pursue my core desired feelings of ease, creativity, and connection. I’ve done all that stuff, too! So even though 2020 changed a LOT of my plans, I still did what I hoped to do. That’s pretty cool.

One of the things I realized this year was that daily projects don’t suit me, for a variety of reasons. I need a little more flexibility. So I’m giving myself permission to do daily projects my way - which is to say, to focus on increasing how much I do the thing, rather than being sure I do it daily. So I read more poetry this year than ever before, but I didn’t read a poetry book a day every day in August. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.

I’m also realizing that natural cycles are the best way for me, personally, to measure time. So I’m setting goals and planning in quarters instead, specifically Wheel-of-the-Year-style quarters. So from December 21 to March 21, my goal is to get my dissertation done and, ideally, defended. (The defense may be closer to the end of March, and that’s fine.) I don’t know what comes next after that, and that’s okay.

And I’m selecting a word of the quarter, which may turn into a word of the year but I often find that by mid-March, a new word has revealed itself. My word for the first quarter of 2020 is PLAY, which I’m using in its broadest possible sense. So I’m going to try learning to play some of the musical instruments I have around the house, playing more games, trying new art forms, and deliberately engaging in purposeless activity.

I hope you find a way to have fun, regardless of what 2021 brings.

Image Caption: This is what the best days at pandemic preschool look like for us: different kids on screen together, all pursuing work that lights them up. (M. is in the foreground and his classmates are actually hidden behind their work.)

via @Miraz

Humans Used to Sleep in Two Shifts, And Maybe We Should Start It Again sciencealert.com

Archiving...

This piece by Sarah Lonsdale describes the kind of literary friendship I fantasize about having. Who wants to be my literary bff?

How Literary Female Friendships Shaped the Fiction Market ‹ Literary Hub lithub.com

Read: lithub.com

Highlights & Notes

Naomi Royde-Smith was an astute literary editor of the Saturday Westminster and brought Macaulay, an awkward “innocent from the Cam” as she described herself, into her circle of friends, who seemed to Macaulay “to be more sparklingly alive than any in my home world.”

Please. Bring me into your literary circle.

Macaulay would often stay in her friend’s Knightsbridge home where they held soirées for authors and journalists to bolster each other’s standing and forge mutually supportive networks.

We can host soirées. I’ll set up the video chat.

Tell me about your favorite literary friendships and relationships! I’m especially fond of the Shelleys, who wrote collaborative diaries. ♥️

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, which has nothing to do with any gift-giving related holidays and everything to do with end-of-year media lists, especially end-of-year book lists. My favorite is the NPR Book Concierge, though I’m meaning to check out some others, too.

I thought I’d review my year in reading. I felt like I read a lot this year, but it turned out to be really different than I remembered. You can always check out my reading stuff in the Books category or on my Reading page, but here’s what I thought was worth highlighting.

I finished 10 fiction books this year, all of them novels. I got really into Dark Academia, so of course I read The Secret History. If We Were Villains, Bunny, and Ninth House are all in my TBR pile (literally, I have all three of them in the house right now). I also joined an Instagram reading group via my Dark Academia Insta (DAinsta?Dinsta?) and that led me to read or re-read some classics: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. I’m currently partway through The Historian, but it’s ambitious to think I’ll finish it this year.

Here are my favorite fiction books I read this year:

The Starless Sea: Erin Morganstern always creates the most immersive settings for her books. I kind of want to live in this one.

The Power: Naomi Alderman’s near-and-distant-future novel of women who can literally electrify other people blew my mind.

Legendborn: This one is a good read for anybody, but has special meaning if you’re familiar with UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus. It makes campus feel magic and reckons with the University’s history at the same time.

But my very favorite, thought about re-reading immediately, crow-it-to-everybody book that I read this year is Mexican Gothic. I love it so much but I can’t really bring myself to write a good review or synopsis. It is a classic Gothic novel, but moves the setting from Victorian England to 1950s Mexico. It still has an old English manse, mind you. It’s just an English house built in Mexico. It scratches every Gothic itch I have ever had, adds a new criticism of colonialism (refreshing in the world of Jane Eyre and The Secret Garden), and the revealed secret is fascinating and horrifying. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I read 12 non-fiction books this year. Of these, two really stood out for me: Kelly J. Baker’s Grace Period, which I’ve written about before, and Sarah Kendzior’s Hiding in Plain Sight, which is such an important read. I knew it would be important; I didn’t know it would also be beautiful.

I participated in The Sealey Challenge and managed to read a poetry book or chapbook a day for the first couple of weeks in August. This was a great reminder that I actually quite like poetry. I read 16 poetry books; my favorites of these were Electric Arches, Wolf Daughter, and _[re]construction of the Necromancer_.

I’ve read about 25 comic book single issues this year (18 of those in the past couple of days!) and expect to read several more over the next 10 days. Most of these have been X-Men books, a combination of some classic Claremont stuff with my fave Kitty Pryde’s early appearances, and the recent Dawn of X interrelated series. I can’t pick a favorite.

Lastly, I’ve read a lot of picture books, chapter books, and comics for young readers with my kid. I haven’t been tracking this kind of reading much this year, though I hope to more next year. That said, I do have a couple of favorites to recommend: Interstellar Cinderella and the Narwhal and Jelly series. Interstellar Cinderella is basically about what it would be like if Cinderella were really Kaylee from Firefly with a really cute twist on happily ever after, and Narwhal and Jelly is basically a more oceanic and less pastoral Frog and Toad: Narwhal is THE UNICORN OF THE SEA! and Jelly is worried a lot.

I did read some fanfic this year, but not a lot. My favorites were both X-Men: First Class fics: Everything About It Is a Love Song and table for three. What can I say? I love Prof. X and Magneto, who are not unlike Frog and Toad in their own way.

And speaking of Frog and Toad, the best thing I read online this year was probably Jenny Egerdie’s Frog and Toad Are Self-Quarantined Friends. But you can see a lot more of what I read online (but not everything) in the Links category, if you’re interested.

What did you read this year? If it was a hard year for reading for you, what did you do instead?

I’m really on a break now - had my last business-ish meeting yesterday, no Zoom calls scheduled through the new year. So I’m going to write some holiday/end-of-year blog posts.

First up, inspired by this tweet, a list of my most memorable Christmas presents from childhood.

1. A tape recorder. When I was around 5, Santa left a beautiful red tape recorder under the tree for me. I hadn’t asked for it; I’m not sure I even knew such a thing existed. But it rapidly became my favorite thing. I took it to church for the Christmas morning to show off; I told people that it was just what I wanted even though I didn’t know I wanted it. For years I used that tape recorder to record imaginary radio shows or, as we would call them now, podcasts. I also used it to record my baby sister singing “La Bamba,” which was priceless.

2. A globe. I loved that globe. I can’t tell you why. I just remember spinning it and touching the raised mountain ranges and feeling like some new knowledge had suddenly become accessible to me. I was 7 or 8 for this one.

3. A telescope. I never quite got it working right, but this was like an exponential increase in the feeling I felt when I got the globe. I have been interested in astronomy ever since. Probably got this one when I was 9.

So there you have it, my most memorable Christmas gifts from childhood. Or, if you prefer, evidence that I have always been this nerdy and into learning.

Have a good weekend! I’ll be back next week with thoughts on some holiday movies and my year in books.

I sent off the introduction chapter for my dissertation to my advisor a few minutes ago. I also decided to do a total page and word count for the whole thing. And while I was doing that I made the mistake of reading the comments on the methods chapter. Which are good and helpful comments and not that dramatic, but IMPOSTOR SYNDROME, am I right?

Mostly what I’m dealing with is that both of the committee members who have looked at that chapter were like “This theoretical framework part needs it’s own chapter.” It won’t actually be creating a whole chapter from scratch, but it does feel a little like it will. And so my jerk brain is like, “Why didn’t you write that? Why haven’t you done that already? Why didn’t that occur to you? UGH. Your dissertation is frivolous, thin, unimportant, has nothing to contribute, and is basically just you dicking around. You’ll graduate probably because you have a kind committee but what subpar work.”

My brain doesn’t seem to know we’re in a pandemic.

Before I go on, here are the stats: in its current iteration, my dissertation is 155 pages and 31,084 words. I started data collection in April. I went from initiating data collection to a finished draft in 6 months, working on it for half-days, while caring for my child in the morning and writing in the afternoons.

This is no small achievement, regardless of the contribution my research makes to the field.

And I simultaneously worked on my assistantship, which involved designing a semistructured interview protocol, conducting 3 interviews, and coding 14 interviews.

I had planned to start my data collection earlier. I had planned to be writing close to full-time hours, because I had expected to get a dissertation fellowship, making this a non-service year. Things have gone very differently than I planned, and I have a first draft of my dissertation to show anyway.

I may kick off my revisions with a dissertation bootcamp Jan 11 - 15. We’ll see.

–

Something that only occurred to me yesterday, although of course it’s been going on the whole time I’ve been a mother, is that I hold my child’s emotions in my body. So when my kid sobs three or four times in one morning and throws a couple of tantrums, I can’t just hand him off to my mother-in-law and then sit down to work. My body just won’t allow it.

Giving myself permission to recognize the impact my kid’s emotions have on my body is something I sorely needed, and I really hope it will help me moving forward.

Okay. Gonna have lunch and then maybe go to Bean Traders to get some curbside pickup “I did it!” treats.

I may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

I’ve spent my whole life on campus. Before I even entered elementary school, my mother was enrolled at community college working on her associate’s degree and I would sometimes go to campus with her. (This is how I had my first taste of Raisin Nut Bran: it was in an orientation package she got.)

When I was 7, my parents enrolled at Florida State University, my mom to get a BA in Religion and my dad to get his MLIS. My dad got a job at Duke Law after graduation and my mom stayed at FSU working on a Master’s in Theology and my sister and I alternated living with them; when she finished her coursework, we all moved to NC, where my mom started a Master’s in Divinity at Duke. My dad was still working at Duke when I graduated from high school and moved to college; I did a one year MAT after college and then worked as an educator for 5 years before returning to get my MSLS, then worked another year as an educator and three years in higher ed outreach before returning to get my PhD.

I have a deep working knowledge of what education is really like.

And yet I still romanticize it.

As part of my foray into the aesthetic that is dark academia (which involves many fewer contingent laborers than you might expect), I have joined a readalong taking place on Instagram and Discord. We’re on our last book now, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Early in the book, a father narrates to his daughter his time as a grad student, spending hours locked in a university carrel writing about 17th century merchants in Amsterdam, sneaking in to hear the end of his advisor’s lectures to undergraduates, sitting in his advisor’s office…

And I swooned.

I wonder if it’s because only the first year of my PhD was really spent writing in carrels on campus? Because the rest of it has been in public libraries, cafes, and co-working spaces, places I could briefly slip away without a long bus ride while someone else was with my kid. (Commute to UNC: minimum 40 minutes. Commute to closest public library branch: 10 minutes. It only takes 10 minutes to drive to UNC, but it’s cost-prohibitive to park there more than once a week or so.)

I had this same wistfulness when I read A Discovery of Witches. What is it that I love so much about this life? And is it my love of this imagined academia and my understanding of how very imaginary it is part of what keeps me from pursuing the tenure track?

I wonder all of this, but really, what it comes down to, is this:

I love this imagined academia, and regardless of what academia really is, I love this imagined version anyway, and it brings me joy. So I will keep reading books and watching movies about tweed-clad scholars in their gothic architecture reading rooms, debating the finer points of Latin grammar (an activity I actually hated as an undergrad, an attitude that won me scorn from my Latin professors), spending time in cozy offices, and secretly learning that imaginary monsters are real. (The Sunnydale High School library is 100% Dark Academia; don’t @ me.)

I know Hanukkah is not a major religious holiday. But my connection with Jewish heritage and culture has never really been religiously driven. I am, according to the most recent AncestryDNA update, probably 43% of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. I believe it’s been 3 generations since anyone in my family was strongly connected to this heritage, but I’ve felt Jew-ish as long as I can remember.

And I want all the foods, y’all. All the Hanukkah foods.

I looked for other people with a similar experience to mine, and found this helpful blog post called “So You’ve Just Found Out You’re Jewish. What’s Next?". I’ve always known about my Jewish heritage, but felt a bit stymied about connecting with it, so I appreciate this especially for its links to a lot of resources.

Including and especially The Nosher.

I think there will be some russet potatoes in an upcoming grocery order for me.

Also probably the ingredients for easy sufganiyot.

The end of a PhD is a weird time, especially if you don’t have your eyes set on the tenure-track. (I recently decided that I probably won’t apply for what will likely be the only tenure-track job remotely related to my expertise for the foreseeable future, because my gut said no.)

For more than a year I’ve felt a desperate need to figure out what’s next. In January, I gave myself permission to wait until August to even think about it, but of course that’s not how brains work. In April, I realized that whatever expectations I have would likely be exploded by the pandemic. More and more, I started to feel like I wanted to set out and do my own thing, because I don’t believe that job security is a thing anymore.

So I want to do my own thing, though I’ll still look at jobs in the library and publishing fields. And research comms - both communicating to researchers and communicating about research.

When I try to figure out what my own thing is, there are many possible directions to go in, and I think I’m just going to try some of them.

In a Self-Employed PhD strategy session, one of my fellow participants asked me what I want.

I said I just want to rest.

But more and more what I want to do is read books and make stuff.

In our lab meeting today, I talked about how making stuff is a vulnerable act. I can’t remember exactly what I said. Maggie (or Dr. Melo if you don’t know her) was taking notes and I sure hope she captured some of it. But I’m going to keep thinking about that idea for a while, I think.

Austin Kleon says to write the book you want to read. If I were to write a book in this moment - more that I need, than I want - I would title it, “You Are Not a Piece of 💩.” I need this book because whenever my anxiety gets stronger, this is the mantra it says to me. “You are a piece of shit.” Now, this is untrue in both a literal and figurative fashion.

This morning it was because of, what else, pandemic parenting. My kid has decided that he doesn’t like his preschool Zoom calls. He doesn’t like that his new friends aren’t his old friends. I think there’s something else going on here, but I haven’t gotten it out of him yet.

He woke up late this morning, so we took the Zoom call in his room. All three of us, W, M, and myself. And then at the end of the call W asked, “So what’s the plan?” because he needed to get to work and we needed to transition. But I didn’t have a plan and I hadn’t eaten breakfast. So I said I was going to invite M. to listen to an audiobook while I ate breakfast, and W. pointed out that in the future, I can grab breakfast while he and M. are on the call.

This is when the anxiety spiral started.

He said, “That would be a good time for you to grab breakfast.”

My brain replied, “THINK OF EVERYTHING THAT IS WRONG AND YOUR FAULT RIGHT NOW, KIMBERLY! The toilet is broken with a music wire auger sticking out of it. You only put up half the Christmas decorations and the rest are kind of all over the place. Your bedroom is a walk-in floordrobe. You and your child don’t eat right. You already contributed hardly anything to the household and now you don’t even cook and you certainly are not overburdened by parenting responsibilities. YOU ARE, CLEARLY, A PIECE OF SHIT.”

Anyway, I suggested reading, and M. and I watched a video of his teacher reading a book. W. snuck out, and when M. realized W. had gone to work, he cried for probably less than a minute before saying, “Why does the water coming from my face feel like rain falling?” Then we did a bit of clay work, read and got dressed (a huge achievement these days), and then he suggested going downstairs to play Legos.

I was so overwhelmed and so sad. I began to feel like I had right before starting anxiety meds last fall: that each new challenge was a heavy brick laid on top of my already-about-to-break back. I said to myself, “SELF. Let’s break out of this.”

But first I let myself cry.

And then I couldn’t make the anxiety go away, but I could look at my task list and see if there was anything a person could accomplish while her child was playing with Legos. Because if there was, and I did it, that’d be fewer bricks, anyway.

So he played Legos and I scheduled the plumber and the exterminator. Then I went in our basement storage room and got a bin full of juvenilia and empty notebooks and started clearing that out. And in the middle of doing that I talked with him as he threw stuffed cat toys around, and then he told me he was ready to watch TV. I checked the time and it was well past my time when I try to wait until to start TV-watching, so I said yes.

And now I feel like a person who can do some things.

I’ll feel like I’m a piece of shit again. After all, this is the most resonant song from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend for me:

But maybe I’ll remember to look at my list and see if I can knock something off of it.

Here’s hoping.

I woke up this morning to an email in my inbox from Leonie Dawson’s newsletter, sharing that Leonie is going to be pressing publish every day in December: writing a long-form blog post every weekday, at least until Christmas. A lot of the things Leonie says she’s been feeling, I’ve been feeling too:

I’m out of practice with writing. And sharing. And formulating thoughts into words, string them into sentences and patch them into prose.

I’m obviously writing writing writing, but that academic writing has so consumed me and I really miss the more easygoing flow of blogging.

I like this. This part where the page expands before you, and you have no idea where it will go.

I don’t need a clear plan of what to say, I can find it as I go.

And it can take as long as it likes. And I can intersperse it with pictures. And I can keep it forever.

In a word, it’s… MINE.

Attempting to write on social media feels much more complicated. It’s in their space. In their tiny windows. With their tiny limit. It’s not my place for my best work.

Leonie’s embracing the spirit of the IndieWeb, as she has done for ages.

Just like Leonie, I’ve got a way for you to receive these daily posts if you like. Just get on my email updates list if you aren’t already. They’ll also be available by following me on Micro.blog or Twitter. I’m not sure how reliable Twitter will be about surfacing them in your feed, so you may want to go to my timeline directly or add me to a list of everyone whose stuff you want to be sure to see.

That’s all for today. I’ll see you back here tomorrow.

My goal for November’s #AcWriMo was to write the discussion chapter for my dissertation. After finishing that chapter, all that would be left would be a couple of pieces of my introduction that should go quickly.

I’m revising my plan, in light of Pat Thomson’s post about rebooting #AcWriMo2020 goals.

This chapter has been a beast. I had no idea where to begin. I looked at advice. I looked at other people’s discussion sections. I pondered while putting my kid to bed and came up with good ideas. I’ve been snatching odd moments here and there to jot down notes when something occurs to me. But figuring out how to put it all together? That has been a beast.

Today I Googled “dissertation discussion chapter stuck.” This brought me the gift of a couple of posts from The Thesis Whisperer. “The Difficult Discussion Chapter” helped me understand that my problem is common, that it is likely attributable to exactly what I thought it was (the difficulty in turning my data, which is easy to describe, into a set of knowledge claims, which requires more creativity).

“How do I start my discussion chapter?” gave me permission to reconsider my dissertation structure. In it, Dr. Mewburn says,

Before you worry about the discussion chapter too much, consider whether you need to treat the discussion as a separate section at all.

This confirmed a gut feeling I started having yesterday as I was plugging away at the five pages I did manage to get written. It felt so weird trying to talk about my data’s meaning pages and pages away from where I represented the data itself. The similar studies I looked at had integrated their discussion sections with their findings sections. I felt like I needed to do the same thing. So trying that is my next step.

I emailed my advisor to let her know that I would be integrating the discussion into the findings chapter, and that the conclusion chapter would be shorter and focus on implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research and practice. I also told her that this change, plus the fact that I lost two weeks of November to election anxiety and a multiday migraine, meant that I was pushing my self-imposed deadline out from November 30 to December 4. (It will probably be December 6, now that I think about it. I get a good chunk of quiet writing time on Sundays.) I then plan to take one week to finish the introduction, and then will take from December 14 - January 18 off before launching into a month of revisions before sending the dissertation to my committee to review ahead of my defense.

I don’t know if this is going to make things easier. I hope it will. I’ll let you know how it goes. (I also totally will write up my data analysis process eventually, I promise.)

Six months ago today, Inger Mewburn published the post, Where I call bullshit on the way we do the PhD. From where I sit, things are not better or different six months later. In the post, Mewburn encourages PhD researchers to shift their focus from traditional markers of academic success such as publishing in peer-reviewed journals to other activities that might be more helpful in a career beyond academia. I thought I’d write about how I’ve done this over the course of my PhD and the kinds of things I learned.

Performance Production

In my first year and a half of the PhD program, I produced improv comedy. I produced an independent improv team as well as a monthly show that invited other independent teams to play. I got no publications out of this (though I did build relationships that supported four class assignments during that time). I did, however, learn about managing groups of people’s schedules, keeping in contact with performers, and keeping people motivated when stuff was not going well. These are skills that I could use in any event management capacity, especially one that involves speakers or performers.

Podcasting

I started a podcast about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This podcast is not at all about my research or my data. It does, however, require the technical skills of recording and editing, the social skills of recruiting and managing guests, and the analytical skills of viewing the episode and determining topics of conversation. I created what is essentially a theoretical framework of BtVS that rests on three pillars:

• the literalization of the saying “high school is hell”
• the deliberate disruption of horror film tropes
• the manifestation of what I call “Spiderman moments,” when Buffy faces and must resolve a conflict between her responsibilities and desires as a teenager and her responsibilities and desires as a Vampire Slayer

This will work for Seasons 1 - 3. If I keep the podcast going, the framework will probably need revision from Season 4 on.

Blogging and Web Development

In the spring of my second year, I first learned about the IndieWeb and have since then been working to build my website as a true home for me on the web and expand my blogging practice. It led to my first keynote invitation and allowed me to share my experiences with dissertating and PhD work. My blog post, “A Start-to-Finish Literature Review Workflow,” is by far my most viewed post. I don’t know where I would publish something like this but it’s definitely not my disciplinary journals. It helped so many more people than I would have helped publishing an article about school library leadership or something in a journal that school librarians don’t even have access to.

Developing Self-Employment Ideas

I’ve been engaging with resources like Katie Linder and Sara Langworthy’s podcast, Make Your Way, and Jen Polk’s Self-Employed PhD strategy sessions. These have helped me learn so much and make connections that have led to potential freelance gigs.

Going to Conferences that Sound Interesting

If I were looking to be really tenure-track ready in my field, I would be going to ALISE or ASIS&T, and I may go to those someday. But left to my own devices, I recently chose to present at the Fan Studies Network North America conference. Not only did I have an awesome time and meet great people, I also connected with an editor at an academic press who expressed interest in receiving a book proposal from me based on my dissertation research. If I focused on disciplinary expertise, I wouldn’t have attended this conference.

Identifying Models of the Kind of Scholarship I’d Like to Do

Dr. Mewburn discusses the importance of current scholars modeling behavior for future scholars. I’ve been following the work of Casey Fiesler since encountering her via the Fansplaining podcast. Dr. Fiesler does a great job modeling a variety of ways to engage as a scholar, including public writing and experimenting with TikTok.

The Moral of the Story

Get to PhDone, but as much as possible, spend time doing the things you want to do, because they will give you marketable skills, build your network, and lead you to more of what you want to be doing. If you focus on what people steeped in the old ways of academia tell you, not only will you still have a hard time finding a job, you also won’t have any fun.

From September 8 to October 2, I attended a virtual dissertation writing boot camp.

I have childcare each day from 1 pm to 6 pm. I have standing meetings on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 2. The Bootcamp ran from 2 - 5 each day that week, so my Tuesday and Wednesday meetings were moved back to 1. I had no time between my mother-in-law’s arrival and my meetings to do any getting set up. On the other days, I spent that first hour transitioning my kid and getting everything I needed together for the boot camp.

Every day that week at 5 I was too exhausted to take advantage of that last hour of childcare for anything but rest.

I wrote an entire chapter of my dissertation that week; it was probably about 25 pages by the time I was done.

At the end of the boot camp, we talked about what we were going to do to carry our momentum forward. I blathered about my little routines to help me settle in at the beginning of my workday.

I took a week off from dissertating after the boot camp. I did none of my routines.

The following week, I spent most of the week at the Fan Studies Network North America conference, which was amazing. But the schedule was such that, again, I didn’t really do any of my routines.

The week after that, I filled in the remaining gaps in the three dissertation chapters I had written. This was not heavy work, and it’s a good thing.

I told myself I was going to write my discussion chapter as part of NaNoWriMo, but as we all know, the US election was on November 3 (not just presidential; I was concerned about down-ballot races too, esp. NC senate). And then there were days of waiting. Who could get work done during that time?

Not me. Not on my dissertation, anyway. (Throughout all of this I have continued doing work for my assistantship.)

Over the weekend I thought to myself, “Monday will be the day. Monday will be the day that I get back into my routines.”

Reader, I did not get back into my routines Monday.

I didn’t on Tuesday, either.

Only today did I move in that direction: I meditated for 3 minutes with Headspace. I wrote a couple of “morning” pages (but not a full 3). I did a Tarot card pull.

I got The Star. It was the right card for today.

I started generating ideas for a process for creating my discussion chapter.

It feels silly to say. But that’s where I am.

Image is a detail of the 10 of Wands from the product image for the Wayhome Tarot at the Everyday Magic website. It’s a great deck. I highly recommend it.

It’s here! The long-awaited all-librarian episode of my Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast! Transcript & show notes forthcoming.

I “went” to the Fan Studies Network North America conference last week. It was awesome. It was invigorating. I feel energized coming out of it.

I am not going to do a round-up of relevant content right now. I’ll be unpacking that over the next week or so, trying to consolidate some notes and ideas. I “met” a bunch of cool people. But for now, I want to talk about the structure and process.

The conference used five tools: Discord for conference-only chat and posters, Conline as a general conference platform, Zoom for live sessions, Vimeo for archived sessions, and Twitter for sharing ideas with the public.

The Discord space and the Zoom chat were the highlights of the event for me, and I want to write briefly about them and some possibilities I think they offer for future conferences.

Ideas for the layout of the Discord space were borrowed from CON.TXT 2020. I love physical spatial metaphors for digital spaces, so this was a delight to me. Here’s what the structure looks like:

• FAN STUDIES NETWORK NORTH AMERICA
  • Start Here
  • Check-in Desk
  • Announcements
  • Help Desk
  • Self-introductions
• IMPORTANT
  • Code of conduct
  • Safety
  • Meeting etiquette
  • Twitter policy
  • Tech resources and info
  • Schedule of events
• MAIN
  • The lobby
  • The hallway
  • Coffee tea and sad cookies
  • The bar
  • Safer spaces
    • There were a number of spaces for people to go based on their own identity to decompress. For example, I was in a space for people with mental illness. You signed up for these spaces by clicking a specific emoji, then the organizers would add you to the relevant channel. You could not see any of the channels that you had not been admitted to.
• POSTERS
  • Each poster had its own channel. Posters were uploaded as the first message in the channel.
• SPECIAL EVENTS
  • Each event had its own channel.
• WORKSHOPS
  • Each workshop had its own channel.
• SALONS
  • Each salon had its own channel.
• RECORDINGS
  • There was a channel here for each session of any type with a link to the recording on Vimeo.
• PARTICIPATING PUBLISHERS
  • Each publisher had their own channel where they could share discounts and answer questions.
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  • In this section, the organizers offered thanks to a bunch of people and organizations.

The MAIN section was especially valuable because it made me feel like I was at an actual conference. And because it was a chat and not real life, I could jump in on conversations without feeling too awkward and share resources whenever I saw a place where one might be valuable. The posters, events, workshops, and salons sections were vital, too, because they allowed conversation to continue after the session. You know how you want to talk to the presenter but you have to clear the room for the next session? No worries here! Just take it to Discord!

The chat channels in Zoom were where a ton of awesome activity took place. There was a lot of backchanneling with varying degrees of on-topicness, but also lots of sharing of ideas and asking of questions.

One of the things Discord made possible was the creation of new channels on the fly, so the organizers were able to be responsive to topics that came up in Zoom chats and create new channels for things like fan tattoos, people sharing animal photos, job-listings, a space just for graduate students, ethics and resource methods, sharing syllabi, and sharing fanfiction recommendations. This was a brilliant way to keep conversation going and make the whole conference extra congenial.

I hope other virtual conferences can learn from the wonderful organization of this one, but more than that, I think this provides an opportunity for both conferences and conventions to leverage virtual tools to enrich the experience of attending.

I’ve been big into backchanneling since I started library school in 2009. If implemented wisely, it has the potential to add vibrancy to an event. It works best with someone to moderate or observe the chat, an enforcable code of conduct, and time for processing the chat. #FSNNA20 had all of this.

I see no reason why face-to-face conferences couldn’t have it as well. Obviously, the difficulty of the task depends on the size of the conference. But for smaller conferences especially, I hope people will continue using these sorts of tools once they go face-to-face again.

I also hope over time to find ways to incorporate wikifying into the process, because so many resources are shared and fly by so quickly. I kind of would love to be an official conference librarian, grabbing all the resources everyone mentions, capturing and organizing them, and putting them in a place where other people could add their impressions and ideas. This is basically how the IndieWeb wiki works - chat in IRC, documentation in a wiki - and more and more I like it as a way of operating. (The IndieWeb wiki can be overwhelming. I don’t know if a conference wiki would be or not.)

I’m so impressed with the work the organizers put in, the way that attendees used the space and tools, and the promise this has for the future.

I’m experimenting with podcasting about whatever I want. Here’s episode 2 of my Buffy podcast, Things of Bronze. This is episode 2, “Witch.” Or is it episode 3? IS IT TWO OR THREE? I know what Wikipedia says, but what do you think?

It’s my kid’s birthday today, and thus my birthing day. It’s interesting that the author of the linked post wrote it as her kid was turning 4, since that’s how old my kid is today. I haven’t shared my birth story with very many people, because it is private and traumatic. I’m wondering if I’ll be ready to, soon. I feel like I might.

Before I gave birth, I made a cute comic about my brother’s birth 22 years earlier and said “I wonder what my hilarious birth story will be!”

Friends, very little of my birth story is funny.

It felt like a Campbellian journey.

My sweet mother-in-law texted me today to say she honors me on this day, too. It’s so appreciated.

Next time you celebrate a kid’s birthday, try to be mindful of how it might be impacting the kid’s grownups, too. If the one who gave birth is around, it’s almost certainly a time of complex feelings. BUT PRIDE AND JOY OF COURSE! But also lots of other complex feelings. Other grownups might be having big feelings at that time, too.

Until I feel comfortable writing my birth story, just watch this SNL digital short and know that I cry every time I watch it, because it’s funny because it’s true.

I’m experimenting with podcasting about whatever I want. I’ve got 3 finished episodes of a planned Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast called Things of Bronze, so I thought I’d go on and upload the pilot for it and see how it goes. Show notes and transcript coming soon!

Has a book ever broken you? By that I mean, all books after it suffered in comparison for some indefinite period of time, regardless of their quality. It hasn’t happened often for me. It happened a bit with Patrick Rothfuss’s THE NAME OF THE WIND. Well, more than a bit. Even the next book in the series didn’t scratch my NotW itch.

Now I’ve discovered a new thing - not when a book breaks you, but when a book sticks to you like a heavy meal, when a book leaves you too full to try anything else for a little while. I finished Donna Tartt’s THE SECRET HISTORY a few days ago. It is still sitting with me, and I think I’ll probably need to take a break from fiction for a while, while I continue to digest this book.

I found it immensely compelling and stayed up way too many nights reading it. It was a ton of fun and then maybe the last 10 - 25% wasn’t as fun but was still compelling.

This is the book that is at the heart of the Dark Academia aesthetic. It’s about a bunch of beautifully pretentious early-20-something college students living in the early-mid 1980s, attending a college that is a very thinly veiled version of Bennington College, a small, private liberal arts college located in North Bennington, Vermont. (Last year, Esquire published an amazing oral history of the school during this time period). We know from the start of the book that one of the friends in the clique has been killed by the others, but not why. We learn why through a narrative of the months leading up to the murder.

One of the things Tartt does so beautifully in this book is describe the physical environment: the sounds of leaves crunching under feet, the quality of sunlight streaming through trees, the luxuriousness of a professor’s artfully appointed office. I think that it’s really this, and the characters' intense obsession with classical Western literature, especially Greek and Latin, that attracts people to the aesthetic it inspired.

The pacing of the book contributes to its power, too. It begins quickly, with the narrator Richard getting out of his mundane California existence to go to this beautiful New England school, where he at first is not permitted to register for Greek because the only professor of it hand-selects his students. Richard begins to carefully observe the students who are in the class, and endears himself to them somewhat by assisting with their Greek homework. Eventually, the professor accepts him into the class and he comes into the inner circle of a group that seems elegant and mysterious to him but, as I read it, strikes the rest of the school as mostly… weird. The pacing once he’s in the group becomes languorous, with descriptions of visits to a countryside mansion, gentle boat rides across a lake, days spent lounging around reading. This is the stuff of dreams, my friends. But then, as we approach the murder mentioned at the beginning, the pace picks up, becoming more frantic, and by the end of the part describing Richard’s college life, it is frenzied. This is the part where I had less fun - but again, it was still compelling to read.

Someone who has been acquainted with the book longer than I have has probably done an analysis of the ways in which its structure mirrors Greek tragedy.

It’s a literary thriller, technically historical though almost contemporary with when it was written. If it sounds like you’ll like it from what I’ve already said, you should definitely check it out.

I was reading some of Jen Polk’s blog archives a while back and came across a post about a career coach giving her this visualization exercise:

She asked us to picture a skier on top of a peak, unsure of what lay ahead. After taking three deep breaths, I imagined myself as the skier and was soon stretching out my arms. I started to fly off the mountain top, and when I looked down, nothing was clear. I realized that flying, looking around, and exploring are what I need to do right now. That is the next step for me.

I found myself trying to imagine this, and I kept getting hung up on the fact that I don’t even know what a skier might see going down a slope, except what I’ve seen in movies. Trees? Bears? I don’t know. So instead, I pivoted the exercise to think of some more familiar experiences.

I asked myself: What if I were diving in the ocean? (I haven’t been diving but I have a lot more of an idea about what might appear if I were.) What if I were ambling in the forest without a plan? What would I do?

I realized that in both cases, I would trust my intuition and focus my attention on whatever seemed interesting. In the ocean, I would trust that whatever I find will have its own beauty and magic, even if it’s dangerous or scary, and I have ways of coping if it is dangerous and scary. Walking in the forest, I would amble about cheerfully, relying on my intuition to guide me to where I want to be, enjoying the filtered quality of the light, the greenery, noticing interesting plants and animals and either noting them to use later or if I had the technology, using a nature app to learn about them.

Just as this exercise led Jen to realize that she needed to spend her time in exploration, my responses to my altered versions of this exercise reinforce what I kind of always know to be true about myself: things go best for me when I follow my intuition and pursue whatever seems interesting.

What if you do some variation of this exercise? What will you learn about yourself?

Image by PublicDomainImages from Pixabay

I’ve flirted on and off with #100DaysOfCode over the past few years, and always quit when I get to Javascript (which may never change, really), but I have learned some about the learning process itself by playing in that sandbox. In particular, reading about how other people have engaged with the challenge, I realized that one possible way to categorize learning experiences is to think of them as coming in three flavors: passive learning, active learning, and social learning.

Passive learning is essentially consuming content: reading books or articles, watching videos or lectures, listening to lectures or podcasts. This is a great way to get a lot of information in your head fast, but in my opinion is best paired with one or both of the other types of learning. You can make this more active by note-taking, summarizing, or teaching it to someone else, but the learning itself is still pretty passive.

Active learning is when you’re actually doing a thing: actually coding, actually writing, actually cooking, actually flying a plane, whatever it is you’re learning to do. This might involve activities structured by an expert to gradually increase your mastery, or it might involve jumping right in wherever you feel like it. Either way, the practice is taken on either independently or with a more knowledgeable other.

Social learning is when you’re learning in community with others. As with active learning (or passive learning, for that matter), the social aspect can be organized by a more knowledgeable other, an expert. It can, however, be 100% peer-driven. This might involve reading groups that take on a text together, hobbyists who engage in serious leisure in a social context, or individuals studying who answer questions for each other, for example.

I have an intuitive sense that the fastest and most effective learning will incorporate all three flavors, like a Neapolitan ice cream of learning, but any combination of more than one will be more effective than just one.

Image from blackillustrations.com

This book is SO GOOD, but I don’t feel I can write a review that does it justice. It is a pitch-perfect gothic novel and also super gross. After reading all the secrets revealed, I want to go back and re-read, looking for signs. Every layer of gross and spooky in this book has an even grosser and spookier layer underneath it.

I’ve been a bit stuck with my dissertation, and only partly due to parenting and chronic illness. I wasn’t quite sure what had me stuck before. I thought it was a need to develop a solid workflow. John Martin told me about a really cool writing tool called Gingko. It overwhelmed me at first because I could stand to see all those columns on screens at once, but once I found the keyboard shortcut for writing in fullscreen, I decided I would try using it to write my dissertation.

I started to get a new “tree” ready, and looked at another dissertation to help me model my structure.

But as I did that I realized…

Usually, a person’s dissertation proposal can become a significant chunk of the dissertation itself, with some expansion.

My dissertation proposal as originally written does not represent my dissertation as executed anymore.

I need to re-write my proposal, but for me.

I’ve been pulled deep into Dark Academia’s orbit, because it is the aesthetic I’ve been unknowingly building my whole life, and because of this I watched DEAD POETS SOCIETY for the first time in a very long time last night.

Sometimes I’ll watch a movie that I haven’t watched in a long time and realize that it is one of the threads woven into the fabric of my very being. It’s true of LABYRINTH. It’s true of Tim Burton’s BATMAN. And it’s true of DEAD POETS SOCIETY.

I don’t know when I first saw this movie, only that in the ten years between its release and my high school graduation, it came to hold a special place in my heart. It was a constant cultural presence.

On the day our textbooks were issued in AP English, our teacher pointed out that there was an essay introduction not unlike that written by the apocryphal J. Evans Pritchard, PhD. He said that we would not be ripping it out of the book, but that we should ignore it.

To keep from having the dull inflected practice of the Latin teacher’s declension lesson in the movie, my Latin teacher had us stand on the desks as we shouted verb endings. When I became a Latin teacher, I did the same thing. In my first year of teaching, my students O Captain My Captained me after I assigned DPS for them to watch on a day that I was out sick. I thought, “Well, I have achieved a teacher’s dream in my first year, guess it’s time to retire.”

When I started this viewing, I thought, “Surely it won’t be as amazing as years of distance have made it seem,” but it is. (Is it without flaw? Of course not. And yet, still stunning.)

No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.

Mr. Keating said this and I held my breath. Here he had articulated something that lives at the very core of who I am.

I don’t want to spoil too much, though I feel like a 31 year old movie should be past the statute of limitations, but I’ll say this: a student dies in the film. And when the prep school administrator is speaking to the other students about this death in an assembly, here is what he says:

“He was a fine student. One of our best. He will be greatly missed.”

I got a little ragey. A fine student? I got a little horrified, as that’s kind of been my identity for much of my life. I got a little…

WHAT IS IT ALL FOR?

Why are people fine students, and why is THAT the thing you would remark on? This same character was kind, joyful, welcoming, compassionate. Isn’t that more important than being a fine student?

Looking at it from a realistic perspective, the administrator probably didn’t know the student well enough to know anything about him except that he was a fine student.

But in the moment, that’s not what mattered to me. I looked at myself and I asked myself, “Why? What was I a fine student for?” This character, I think he was a fine student out of duty, a sense of obligation to his family. When I talked to W. about it, he pointed out that I enjoy learning more broadly, and that there is value in learning. But I tossed back, “But you can learn a lot without being a fine student.”

I guess this is what it took for me to crack after devoting almost my entirely life to education in one way or another, especially my professional life. Here I am approaching the end of a PhD, and asking myself WHY DO WE EVEN SCHOOL?

There are reasons, and I’ve also been reading about unschooling, and I’m not going to break with school.

I just want to be sure it’s not the only remarkable thing in my or my family’s life.

For the first few years of my doctoral program, I defined myself as a “doctoral student” and “research assistant.” This seemed like an appropriate designation, despite my experience as an education and information professional, because I was taking classes. I kept calling myself that as I was working on my comprehensive literature review, because there didn’t seem to be anything better to call myself than that. It was very exciting when I got to change my email signature to “Doctoral Candidate” in December, because now I was someone who had met all the requirements for a doctoral degree except for the dissertation. But I kept the designation of “research assistant.”

This summer, though, I started thinking about how that designation doesn’t really communicate much to anyone not steeped in academia. And also that it doesn’t say anything about what I do. So as of this school year, I started referring to myself as a “doctoral researcher.” This fits much better. I am doing what researchers do: I am running my own study as PI (my dissertation study) and I work in a lab with two other researchers, designing interview protocols, collecting and analyzing data, and writing reports based on the data. There is no part of my work that is really the work of a student. While I am technically assisting the PI of a research lab, the work I do is not so much assistive as collaborative. So.

I am a doctoral researcher.

For more thoughts on the distinction between a doctoral student and a doctoral researcher, see Pat Thomson’s blog post, “what’s with the name doctoral student?”

Image by Dariusz Sankowski from Pixabay.

One of my responsibilities in the Equity in the Making lab is to create an interview guide that will help us learn what makerspace leaders in the UNC system consider to be defining features of a makerspace. I originally thought this was going to be a survey, so I came up with a list of about ten questions and then in conversation with my colleagues on the project, added four more. I realized in that conversation, however, that it was an interview guide for a semi-structured interview, not a survey. I told my colleagues I’d take our list of questions and hone it so that it was “more interviewy, less survey-y.” What did that look like?

Each question was getting at a larger issue of the spatial arrangement of a makerspace, especially as it would relate to one of the five senses. The next phase of the project involves using VR to build an imagined “definitive” makerspace, so we want to capture the kinds of things that should be included in that VR environment; this is why I focused on sensory input specifically. The questions were designed to draw out specifics that participants might not think of as falling into these categories; for example, we might be hoping they’d talk about equipment and they would instead talk about the mood or vibe of a space.

I learned from Dr. George Noblit, who taught my advanced qualitative methods class, that if you’re doing an interview for about an hour, you probably should stick with a few big questions. He once gave us an assignment to interview another grad student using only these three questions:

1. Before grad school?
2. During grad school?
3. After grad school?

I interviewed a friend and indeed, just those three questions took an hour for us to talk through. For my dissertation, I had 6 major questions, and that usually took 30 minutes to an hour depending on the participant. Dr. Melo said she wanted these interviews to run about 45 minutes, so I stuck with five questions.

I collapsed the original 14 questions into 5, but I then detailed potential follow up questions. This is, in my experience, the best way to be sure you get the kind of detail your hoping for if you’ve got a reticent participant. You start with the big question and see what they say. Then you can dig deeper if something they say is really promising, or bring in one of the prepared follow-up questions if they answer you quickly and you need more detail.

To see what this looks like, you can look at the interview guide for my dissertation. I’m setting up the EITM questions in a similar format.

In addition to the five questions I developed for this interview guide, I also added two more that I learned about in my qual classes, though I can’t remember if it was with Dr. Noblit or with Dr. Sherick Hughes:

1. Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn’t?
2. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?

These are some of the richest questions you can ask, so I highly recommend including them as the last two questions before the demographics questions in any semistructured interview. In the case of my dissertation interviews, my second participant answered that first one by asking if I’d like to know the specifics of which resources she uses, and of course I wanted to know that and then I incorporated that into every interview afterward. When I was doing a coursework project and interviewing someone about a project they were working on, they answered these questions with “Don’t you want to know why I’m doing this?” and “Wouldn’t you like to hear my plans for [the term of the project]?” and of course the answer to both was yes, and that probably added another 30 minutes to an hour to our interview. (This won’t always be the case. Some participants are more forthcoming than others.)

I hope this has been helpful. If you’re working on a semistructured interview project, how is it going?

Publisher’s Summary:

After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses a magical attack her very first night on campus.

A flying demon feeding on human energies.

A secret society of so called “Legendborn” students that hunt the creatures down.

And a mysterious teenage mage who calls himself a “Merlin” and who attempts—and fails—to wipe Bree’s memory of everything she saw.

The mage’s failure unlocks Bree’s own unique magic and a buried memory with a hidden connection: the night her mother died, another Merlin was at the hospital. Now that Bree knows there’s more to her mother’s death than what’s on the police report, she’ll do whatever it takes to find out the truth, even if that means infiltrating the Legendborn as one of their initiates.

She recruits Nick, a self-exiled Legendborn with his own grudge against the group, and their reluctant partnership pulls them deeper into the society’s secrets—and closer to each other. But when the Legendborn reveal themselves as the descendants of King Arthur’s knights and explain that a magical war is coming, Bree has to decide how far she’ll go for the truth and whether she should use her magic to take the society down—or join the fight.

What I Love:

Um, everything? Seriously, I’m so thrilled to share this book with the world. Everyone should preorder it, right now. It’s full of Black Girl Magic and Arthuriana. If you’re looking for a Dark Academia vibe, it brings that with its Secret Societies, but it gives it a distinctly Southern flavor that is missing from most DA media I’ve seen. It’s got a LOT of representation: a Black young scholar, a Black botanist, a Taiwanese-American young scholar, a Black father insisting his Black daughter take care of her mental health, a Black psychologist, men loving men, women loving women, men loving men and women (thus far only sequentially, no polyamory here), women loving men and women (same), nonbinary people, archers, swordfighters, staff users, African heritage magic, European heritage magic, and kiiiind of something that I personally anyway interpreted as a magical metaphor for chronic illness. Also, mostly the representation is nonchalant and/or joyful, rather than focusing on misery.

And that’s before you get into its unique relationship with its setting, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This book leverages the most interesting things about the school (i.e., its proliferation of societies, both public and secret) and reckons with the university’s cruel history and less-than-stellar attempts to address it. In May, I will finish my fourth degree at UNC, and between my two most recent degrees, I worked on campus for three years. Before I began my undergrad career there, it seemed like a fairly magical place; once I started, it turned fairly mundane and stayed that way until I picked up this book, which reminded me of the magic and mystery it held for me in the past and added new layers to it.

I’m trying to work out how to address this next bit without getting it wrong, but I don’t know how, so I’m just going to risk being called in/called out because it’s worth the risk. This book is an excellent example of the power of an Own Voices text, because it lets readers in on some of the daily considerations, slights, and trauma that a young Black woman has to deal with. Deonn handles these bits of narrative so matter-of-factly; they are everyday realities in Bree’s life and as a white woman, I understood better how persistent these experiences are than I ever have before. It’s not that I didn’t know, intellectually, that this is the constant weight a Black woman must carry; it’s just that it hits differently when it’s narration from inside a Black woman’s head, rather than explanation directed at me as someone who is privileged to not have the same experiences.

Also there are hot boys and swoonworthy romance but that stuff doesn’t take centerstage and that is as it should be.

I really can’t praise it enough.

What I Want More Of:

There is nothing missing from this book. There was one climactic part that was a little confusing for me, but a later part explained it. (And I understood what was going on in the climax, I just thought maybe I was wrong.)

Deonn is working on the second book now, so here’s a quick wishlist for what I’d like to see in it:

• the Lady of the Lake
• the Forest Theater
• lots more of Sel

What I Need to Warn You About:

There’s nothing about taste that I need to warn you about - this book is fast-paced, simultaneously lyrical and plainly written, and I really believe it would be a rare reader who wouldn’t enjoy it. If you’re not into fantasy, I guess, then it’s not for you.

I will provide a content warning, though: LEGENDBORN contains instances of both covert and overt racism, slavery, and rape.

Bonus Links:

If you read this and are interested in the history behind it, check out these resources:

Old East This is Bree’s dorm.

Wilson Library This is the library where Bree has to hide behind a column and calm down.

The Order of Gimghoul (definitely totally not the Order of the Round Table, NOPE, just a secret society at UNC with a castle in Battle Park and customs based on the ideals of Arthurian knighthood and chivalry)

Unsung Founders Memorial Deonn relocates this from McCorkle Place to the Arboretum, but otherwise it is exactly as described in the book. More here.

Davis Library This is the other library mentioned in the book.

The Old Chapel Hill Cemetery Deonn adds a mausoleum section that isn’t really there, but otherwise her description of the cemetery is accurate.

Confederate Memorial and Julian S. Carr The tragic parts of this book draw on real Carolina history just as much as the fun parts do.

Davie Poplar I’m not saying I’m just saying that maybe possibly this might be a tree with a hidden door in it, if UNC’s campus had such things.

Final Word:

Go preorder this right now. What are you waiting for?

Book: Legendborn
Author: Tracy Deonn
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Publication Date: 2020
Pages: 512
Age Range: Young Adult
Source of Book: Digital ARC from NetGalley

Recently, I squeezed some of my Shea Moisture African Black Soap Soothing Body Wash on a washcloth while I was in the shower, and then rubbed it across my upper arm, as one does when washing one’s arm. It felt like it was scratching me. It’s got oats in it, which act as a gentle exfoliant. It felt like scratching, though. I think my nerves are just done, you know? I think it’s probably a fibromyalgia thing, and now my body is just immensely sensitive to the tiniest stuff. My kid pokes me with his elbow in a way that I wouldn’t even notice in the past, and now his elbow is just the sharpest thing and OW. So my skin was like “No, oats are not gentle, actually, please stop using this.”

So I thought about it. I said to my skin, “Okay skin. You know what skin? We are done with exfoliants.” What are exfoliants for, anyway? I’ve never had a good experience with them, and I’ve been using them since I was in middle or high school. All they do is feel like scratching to a greater or lesser degree. And why would I do that to myself?

For the same reason we do all kinds of things: self-improvement. But you know what?

I’m already pretty great.

I’m letting go, for the length of this pandemic if not longer, of the idea that I need to be improved upon in any way: that I need to acquire some skill I don’t have that will suddenly make me employable, that I need to scratch my skin to make it healthy, that I need to eat cleaner than my doctor suggests or my medical conditions require.

Anyone who has worked with me will tell you that my talk about not being a perfectionist and working up only to my own standards, not perfectionism, is some kind of nonsense and that my standards are too high to be reasonable during a global crisis.

“I’m going to set the bar low,” I said to myself. “All I’m going to do is completely fix my kid’s eating and sleep patterns so they don’t make me crazier than I naturally am, enforce a school-like schedule for him, meditate, do yoga, read a lot about possible next steps in my career, and start embodying my middle-aged-version-of-dark-academia aesthetic more fully. It’s basically doing nothing.”

AHAHAHA.

Kimberly: that is not nothing.

Yesterday, I told W. that I didn’t really do anything with my time during M., just let him watch TV and play games and just kind of play. He said, “You built him a Thor hammer.” (There may have been an intensifying expetive between “a” and “Thor,” and he might have said “Mjolnir” instead of “Thor hammer.” I don’t remember.) And I said, “Oh yeah, I did, didn’t I?”

Apparently turning a box, tape, construction paper, and aluminum foil into a cosplay prop is doing a thing.

I have some cognitive distortions, is what I’m getting at here.

So. I took that metaphorical bar and I put it ON THE FLOOR.

This happens once in a while: I decide to just not be so harsh on myself anymore. Let’s do it together.

In that light, I’m getting rid of all goals that aren’t basic living needs or dissertating and graduating. I said I was doing that already, but I hadn’t really done it. But now, maybe I am? I’m declaring that I am. Hold me to it, will you?

Now I’m going to go lie in a hammock.

Today, I’m excited about:

• The Oxford Handbook of Methods for Public Scholarship
• the first meeting of our Equity in the Making team. The scope document for this phase of the project includes “Project newsletters, social media, website updates”

“Have you ever felt pain in literally all of your joints at once?” I asked W. last night.

“No,” he said. “No, I never have.”

“Oh. That’s how I feel right now,” I told him.

On fibro pain days, the pain is most noticeable in my fingers and toes. (On thyroid/autoimmune pain days, it’s in my knees and ankles.) There are 30 joints in each of my feet. There are 27 in each of my hands. (If you have more or fewer than 10 fingers or toes, you have a different number of joints.) I can feel each one a little bit as I move. As I type. As I walk. As I wiggle my toes. The pain isn’t intense, but it is pretty much constant. It disrupts my day.

I often don’t tell people how I’m feeling, physically, because I’ve gotten to the point where it’s a baseline of not great (but, like, kind of okay? tolerable, we’ll say) and I just assume they’re tired of hearing me enumerate the ways I feel not good. But I thought it might be useful to get specific, today.

So today, yes. I feel all the joints in my fingers and toes creaking. My knees, elbows, shoulders, same thing to a lesser extent. I can feel all of my cervical vertebrae stacking on top of each other. I have a headache mostly concentrated over my left eye. It’s like a migraine, but I think it might not be a migraine. All of this is, I believe, because my muscles just sit in a constant state of tension, without my having much control over it.

Please don’t suggest your favorite remedy: I have a plan of action and am working on it. My doctor gave me some advice and I’m working through The FibroManual: A Complete Fibromyalgia Treatment Guide for You-and Your Doctor.

In other news and kind of related, I got some really good work done on my dissertation yesterday, tackling a problem that I’ve been struggling with for about two months. I think a couple of shifts in my working process are responsible for this:

I’ve given myself permission to work in bed. All the sleep hygiene people will tell you that you should only use your bed for sleeping and sex. That’s all well and good, but I think that advice is for people who aren’t dealing with chronic pain. Esmé Weijun Wang has a bed in her home office, which is brilliant, but I’m not about to buy an extra bed. (The home office doesn’t have room for it anyway.) Leonie Dawson was put on bedrest because of hypermobility problems and stayed productive in bed:

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Anyone else love working from bed?⁣ 🛌 ⁣ I just had a wildly productive work session in bed.⁣ ⁣ 🧠 Brainstormed a brand new course 💡 Networked with my mastermind 🗯 Told my accountability partner the HUGE new business and money insights I'm getting ✏️ Did some illustration work ⁣ Did you Get Shit Done today too?⁣ ⁣ #getshitdone #money #moneymaker #mastermind #ecourse #illustration #productivity #goals

A post shared by Leonie Dawson (@leonie_dawson) on Jul 21, 2020 at 4:46pm PDT

I did some reading of journal articles in bed the other day and it was brilliant.

I’m doing my thinking in a different space than I do my research and writing. I’ve been thinking while lying on a hammock, looking up at green leaves and blue sky. If you can get into nature for your thinking, I highly recommend it. But even if it’s just that you move from one chair to a different chair, I think that might work. Having my laptop in front of me, I feel like I need to be producing. But thinking time requires a different mindset. Lying on the hammock was more productive than many of the hours in front of my computer have been.

Next steps: So my next step is to embrace this mindset. I’m going to keep a backrest pillow and a lapdesk under my bed. At the end of my work time, I’m going to shut down my laptop, put it in my backpack, and carry it up to my bedroom so that if I’m struck with inspiration at 3 in the morning I don’t have to go downstairs to get to work. I asked for The Book Seat and got it for my birthday, so even when my arms are weak or achey, I can read.

I’m feeling really optimistic about the effect this set up will have on my productivity. We’ll see.

via GIPHY

In this piece that is mostly a review of Jacqueline Rose’s book Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, Parul Sehgal offers more titles to add to the motherhood reading list.

“Mothers “are not in flight from the anguish of what it means to be human,” Rose writes. She quotes Julia Kristeva: “To be a mother, to give birth, is to welcome a foreigner, which makes mothering simply ‘the most intense form of contact with the strangeness of the one close to us and of ourselves.’”

Isn’t it pretty to think so? Recent books on motherhood, however, frequently and sometimes unwittingly, illustrate a different phenomenon: how motherhood dissolves the border of the self but shores up, often violently, the walls between classes of women.

Sehgal names some of these walls: pay gaps and maternal health outcomes, both hinging on race. She points out:

…so many of these books (almost all of them are by white, middle-class women) seem wary of, if not outright disinterested in, more deeply engaging with how race and class inflect the experience of motherhood.

The books listed in this article and in Elkin’s are a beginning. As a canon, the list has glaring gaps, most noticeably around race and queerness. The following articles seek to fill those gaps, and I’ll be discussing them in depth in the coming days:

• Why Are We Only Talking About ‘Mom Books’ by White Women? by Angela Garbes for The Cut
• We Need to Talk About Whiteness in Motherhood Memoirs by Nancy Reddy for Electric Literature
• As A Queer Woman, I Can’t Afford To Be Ambivalent About Motherhood by Katie Heaney for Buzzfeed

I’ve been sitting on Lauren Elkin’s article asking “Why all the books about motherhood? for a year and a half and only read it fully for the first time today. It offers an immense reading list of books related to motherhood. Many of them are written by mothers, and so I think by default curating their writing counts as curating stories of creative mothers.

Elkin quotes Jenny Offill in an interview with Vogue:

“Early on, I took my colicky baby to one of those new-mothers’ groups. I wasn’t sure how to connect with them, but I desperately wanted to. But the affect seemed odd. The new mothers seemed to be talking in these falsely bright voices; all the anecdotes were mild ones of “the time she lost her pacifier on the bus” variety. No one seemed to feel like a bomb had gone off in their lives, and this made me feel very, very alone. Gaslighted, almost. Why weren’t we talking more about the complexity of this new experience?”

This resonates immensely with my new mom group experience. I would go. I would not know what to talk about. Our babies would be cute. I would feel awkward. I would leave knowing it was good that I got out of the house, but only feeling a little less lonely. I didn’t know how to reach out. Maybe the moms in these books will reach me.

Elkin says:

The new books on motherhood are a countercanon. They read against the literary canon with its lack of interest in the interior lives of mothers, against the shelves of “this is how you do it” books, and against the creeping hegemony of social-media motherhood.

I welcome this countercanon.

Despite receiving multiple rejections from radio station editors, journalist and author Hillary Frank kept her podcast about parenting, “The Longest Shortest Time,” going for three years before it was picked up by WNYC and then Stitcher.

She learned a lot making the show:

That parents can be civil with one another on the internet. That naming an episode “Boobs” will make it your most popular one ever. And that there is a special kind of misogyny reserved for mothers.

Her success with the show didn’t halt the misogyny, but it does show that moms can create success in their creative endeavors. Not only did she keep the podcast going without outside funding for three years, she continued to host it for four more years before transitioning to the role of executive producer. She also wrote Weird Parenting Wins, " a collection of personal essays about parenting, as well as crowdsourced parenting strategies from the worldwide LST community" (source).

During my son’s first few weeks, I spent most of his naps reading about matrescence (the process of becoming a mother) and identity crises. What did I even care about anymore, besides keeping him alive? Writing? Performing? I’d spent the past three years developing an identity as an improv comedian. Where had that identity gone? Would I ever get it back? Did I even want it back? What about all the other creative identities I’d had before? I’d been a writer, singer, actor, dancer, cross-stitcher, crocheter… Were those people still inside me? At some point in all of my browsing, I ran across Austin Kleon’s recommendations for books on art and motherhood. I’m still on the first book on his list, but the fact that he could make a list gave me some hope that I could figure this out.

I’ve been looking for ways to read more books and talk to more people about them, so when the Book Riot piece, Will You Join The Sealey Challenge? came across my radar, it made sense to answer YES.

During the month of August, participants read a poetry chapbook or full-length collection a day for 31 days while sharing their reads on social media using the hashtag #TheSealeyChallenge, named after poet Nicole Sealey and coined by Dante Micheaux during its first year.

Here are several links where you can learn more about the challenge and find suggestions of what to read:

• Nicole Sealey: Why I Read a Poetry Book Every Day For a Month (Bookmarks)
• The Sealey Challenge: An Expansive Way of Reading Poetry (Lithub)
• 31 Poets Recommend 31 Poetry Books to Read Every Day in August (Electric Literature)
• Every Poem Is a Love Poem to Something: An Interview with Nicole Sealey (The Paris Review)
• On the value of reading poetry together—and apart—in the current moment. (Lithub)

I myself will be reading a combination of library ebooks selected from recommendations linked in the Book Riot piece, e-chaps from Sundress Publications, and whatever I’ve got lying around the house. So you can expect that in addition to modern new-to-me poets, there will be some children’s collections of e. e. cummings and Emily Dickinson, one day of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and maybe even a YA verse novel or two.

Let me know if you decide to join in!

Yesterday, I talked about my project, Genetrix: Curating Stories of Creative Mothers and how I would be incorporating it here into my personal site rather than keeping it in its own place anymore. Today I’m posting the introduction to the project that I wrote a year and a half ago, with some notes afterward on things that have changed in the past year and a half.

How did we get here? I’d been collecting articles and books about motherhood and art for months when Electric Literature published Grace Elliott’s “Why Do I Have to Choose Between Being a Writer and a Mother?” in which she writes:

I am having such trouble finding narratives of women who are mothers and artists, or mothers and musicians, or mothers and writers — stories in which women are both, without their struggle to be more than a mother overwhelming them… [I am] looking for a narrative in which creative women do not have to choose between abandoning their work or their children. I hope to find a story of women who live as men do: loving and ambitious, child-raisers and artists.

As a mother and a writer, this spoke to me on a soul level. Reading this immediately followed my participation in Kim Werker’s Daily Making Jumpstart Live, two weeks of attempting to make something daily. In the course of that process, two weeks during which sometimes my two year old son didn’t nap, I found my relationship with creativity and making changing. At first, I had ambitions of crocheting rows and rows a day, preparing elaborate meals, maybe taking up woodworking. In the middle, I started to count mixing some chai concentrate with almond milk as my making for the day. But by the end, I was, in fact, chugging along with crochet, knocking out a giant doily shawl over the course of a week. Some days I could be a mother and a creative person, and other days I couldn’t.

Elliott’s writing and this experience confirmed for me that I needed to seek out the stories of other creative mothers. And my natural inclination is to share the stories I find.

What are we doing here? Like motherhood itself, creating and curating this project will be a process of trial and error. I’ll be sharing links to blog posts and articles that inspire me and can serve as a launching point into our journey at the intersection of creativity and motherhood. I’m hoping to include reviews of relevant books and media, and conversational interviews with actual creative mothers. But please tell me what you would like to see in this space. I’m especially interested in ideas for how we can build a community of people interested in stories of creative mothers.

Who am I? I’m Kimberly Hirsh, and I’m a mother, performer, writer, and crafter. Most of my creativity these days is used to produce academic writing as part of my doctoral work toward a PhD in information and library science. If you want to get to know me better, you can check out my website.

I’m a white, American, raised Christian but currently agnostic and a little witchy, chronically ill but without other disabilities, vaguely straight, monogamously heterosexually partnered, legally married, postgraduate educated, middle class cis woman. I’m a full-time graduate student with a part-time assistantship.

My son was conceived after three years of PCOS-driven anovulatory infertility via intercourse with no medical assistance other than metformin, born of my body, delivered vaginally, and while the labor, birth, and aftermath definitely came with some trauma, it was relatively uncomplicated.

I’m blessed/lucky/privileged to have my parents, my partner’s parents, and our siblings all living close by and able to help with our son. He and I spend five mornings a week at a coworking space/Montessori School, but I am his primary caregiver. We live in a suburban neighborhood in a medium-sized city with many organizations and activities designed to support young children and their families.

A note on inclusion… All those characteristics and experiences mentioned above obviously affect my lens on creativity and motherhood. I’m going to deliberately seek out perspectives different than my own, but I’m also going to mess up. Please feel free to let me know when I do and to share stories and perspectives I miss.

Who counts as a creative mother? For our purposes, a mother is anyone who identifies as a mother. As for a definition of creativity, well, I’m thinking here of writers, artists, performers, designers, architects, crafters… But that definition is a floor, not a ceiling.

What has changed since January 2019? My son is three, almost four now, rather than two. Our Montessori/co-working space closed at the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic and will not re-open in the time we had left to spend there. We are socially distanced from most of our family members, though my husband’s mother does come over most days to help with our son so I can get literally any work done on my dissertation at all. The many wonderful organizations and opportunities for families with young children in our city are not currently available to us, either because they are closed or because we are continuing mostly to stay at home, as I may be at higher risk of complications from COVID-19 if I should contract it.

Thank you for joining me. If you’re interested in receiving a weekly email that includes all of my Genetrix posts, please sign up here.

Exactly a year and a half ago, I started a newsletter called Genetrix after reading Grace Elliott’s article, “Why Do I Have to Choose Between Being a Writer and Being a Mother?” for Electric Literature. It lasted exactly 2 issues before I got overwhelmed by my own perfectionism and stopped sending it out.

In March of this year, I planned to resurrect it, as an automatically generated newsletter with a feed from a tumblr. Then the pandemic happened.

But today, as I was reading Avni Doshi and Sophie Mackintosh in conversation about writing about motherhood, I realized that I need these stories. I crave them. And I know other people do, too. So I’m going to use the lowest-friction way to share them.

And that way is a category here at kimberlyhirsh.com devoted to them, with its own RSS feed that goes out to an automatically-generated newsletter. More and more, I think everything of mine is going to come from this one space, and I think it’s for the best.

Anyway, more on this project tomorrow.

Posting this list of books here in case others might find it useful. It will probably grow with time.

• ‘Making it’ as a contract researcher : a pragmatic look at precarious work - Nerida Spina, Jess Harris, Simon Bailey, Mhorag Goff
• Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers - Kathryn E. Linder, Kevin Kelly and Thomas J. Tobin
• The Freelance Academic: Transform Your Creative Life and Career - Katie Rose Guest Pryal
• Succeeding Outside The Academy: Career Paths beyond the Humanities, Social Sciences, and STEM - Edited by Joseph Fruscione and Kelly J. Baker

Last updated: August 1, 2020.

By far, my most visited blog post ever is my Start-to-Finish Literature Review Workflow and honestly, I return to it myself fairly often. I sent it to my EdCamp friend Allison Rae Redden when she was writing her first critical lit review in grad school. I also tweeted a couple more advanced lit review tips at her, and I wanted to gather those here. So here goes!

Make a concept map before you outline. If you haven’t concept mapped before outlining, go back and do that. (I scoffed at my prof who suggested this. I thought I was so good at lit reviews I didn’t need it. I was wrong.) I like to use bubbl.us, which I learned about from Dr. Summer Pennell.

Synthesize. It’s tempting and easy to just summarize studies, but putting them in conversation with each other is much better. Synthesizing the results of multiple studies is a good way to bring them together. Focus on grouping them by findings and briefly mention context and methods as you introduce each article.

Explicitly articulate critiques of studies. Identify gaps and point them out. I usually say something like ”It’s worth noting that none of these studies address…" or similar. I try to be descriptive rather than speculative - noting what’s missing - without directly pointing to how a specific study could be improved, but that’s just me.

If you simultaneously synthesize instead of summarize AND provide a strong description of each study’s context, methods, and results, you’ll be way ahead of most people.

I hope in the future to provide more specific examples for these tips like I did in my earlier post, but I decided it was more important to go ahead and get this out in the world than to wait until I had perfected it.

Cross-posted to: Twitter

What if we considered our creative time to be meditation time? Repetitive crafts like knitting, crochet, and cross-stitch can have that effect. (The scholar-librarian in me wants to track down a reference/link for this. The human in me is granting me a pass.) What if this wasn’t an indulgence, but a matter of health? What if it were like a dietary supplement or a daily medication?

I think the circumstances of my learning crochet help me think this way. I bought my first hook, yarn, and pamphlet while I was stopped at Wal-Mart to grab supplies to help with a migraine that was debilitating enough I had gone home from student teaching because of it. I took them back to my boyfriend’s house (I don’t think he was there, but I preferred his house to mine, always. Now he’s my husband and we have just one house between us) and in addition to my usual migraine remedies, I applied crochet. I think having it to focus on helped me ignore the pain, almost. So I really do think of crochet as an OTC migraine remedy.

If you aren’t motivated by the capitalist notion that your productivity is the highest good (I am, though I’m trying to break myself of it), what if you think of your creative time like food, exercise, or a nap? Something that, if you grant yourself the time to do it, will leave you renewed, with fresh vigor to apply to your other tasks?

This post is lightly adapted from a post in Kim Werker’s Community of Creative Adventurers. If you need a community to support your creative adventures, please come join us! You can join for free. We’ve got a forum and weekly Zoom hangouts. And if you choose to be a patron and support Kim’s work, you get access to her amazing classes and extra forums.

I think a lot about dreams. Following them. Achieving them. Making new ones.

The first dream I remember - one that felt aligned with my life purpose - was to be a big sister. I achieved that at age 4 1/2.

There was a very long time when my dream alternated between being a celebrated science fiction and fantasy novelist and being a Broadway star. I think that dream was, I don’t know, from maybe ages 8 to 18?

I toyed briefly with a screenwriter dream when I was in college, and then after that I kind of didn’t have a dream for a while. After a few years of teaching, being a librarian became my dream. And when I went to school to achieve that dream, I found a new dream: working for LEARN NC full-time, instead of in my position at the time as a graduate assistant. I spent a year working as a school librarian and then achieved the dream of getting a full-time gig at LEARN NC. I had that job for two years before it became clear that our supporting department’s priorities were changing and the organization would not be supported in the coming years, so I left for what I thought was maybe a dream, but was definitely an interest, getting my doctorate.

Getting my PhD wasn’t actually a dream and still isn’t, but it does remain an important interest, and one that I intend to achieve by May. But I still HAD a dream once I started on that one and confirmed it was more interest than dream, and that was to be a mom.

Of all the dreams I’ve achieved, that one was the hardest to accomplish. But I did it, and it has been every bit as fulfilling and exhausting as you might imagine.

So for 3+ years, I’ve been flailing a bit for a new dream. Was it to swim in a mermaid tail? Or with manatees? No. Those were more interests than dreams. (The difference between an interest and a dream in my mind/experience is the level of visceral desire involved. If you think in your head, “Wow, that’d be cool! I hope I get to do that!” it’s an interest. If you feel in your gut, “That would fundamentally change who I am and how I define myself in a way that I really want to be changed,” that’s a dream.)

But today I found it. I was reading Derek Sivers’s description of his book Hell Yeah or No in which he writes that after selling the business CD Baby and realizing that rather than just building a business again he could make a real change in his life,

For the next ten years, I wrote for hours a day in my private journal, asking myself questions and answering them. Then often taking experimental and radical actions based on these thoughts.

The thoughts and experiences that seemed useful to others, I’d share on my website, which are now collected here in this book for you.

I read that and I thought to myself, “I want to write useful things.”

Then I thought about the word “useful” for a moment.

I decided no, that’s not it.

I want to write helpful things.

It might seem like a small distinction, but to me, if something is useful, its value is defined purely by utility. What can you do with this information? Something that is helpful might be useful. But its value might be defined by something else. It might be defined by how it makes you feel: less alone, understood, moved. That’s a little different than useful.

Writing these things, of course, isn’t enough if they just stay with me. Rather, I want to write them, but I also want to share them.

So that’s the dream.

I want to write and share helpful things.

Let’s get started.

I binged the Netflix Babysitters Club series last weekend. Growing up, I was not a Babysitters Club obsessive like many of my peers. They were one of the many series on offer that I enjoyed. The main thing about them that thrilled me was that, unlike many of the other books I read, they were books that other kids had also read and would talk to me about.

So. Not obsessive. But I’m still filled with nostalgia for them. And, unlike many of my peers seemed to do, I read them mostly in order, so the Netflix series sticking with the order for the first few episodes made me really happy. I told W. the other day that much as women older than us did with Sex and the City, many girls my age strongly identified with a particular BSC character. (In case you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, the main characters on SitC were Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda, and you could buy lots of merch that proclaimed things like “I’m a Samantha.” In case you’re curious, I’m a Charlotte with aspirations of being a Carrie.) Lucy Aniello, director of the Netflix BSC series, describes herself as “a Kristy with a Stacey rising” (and in case you aren’t familiar with that, it’s a reference to astrology. I’m a hard Mallory with some Kristy tendencies, who wished to be Claudia but was too good at school and bad at art to come close. (I did wear coordinated-but-mismatched earrings and hide candy all over my bedroom, though.)

I loved the show. Its tone is amazingly perfect. The performances are great. I would like Alicia Silverstone to be my co-parent, please. All of the things done to update it are beautiful and none of them feel weird. I don’t have a lot to say about the show itself besides that.

What really hit me this time around was Stacey. When I read the books, I was relatively poor, unfashionable (though not without style), and the only big city I had ever been to was Miami. Stacey was so far out of my reach. (By the way, the costume designs on the new show perfectly evoke the original characters; of all of them, though, Stacey’s outfits look the most like I think Stacey’s outfits should.) I was sickly, catching every virus that came my way and maxing out my 10 allowed absences before I started being considered truant, but I wasn’t ill.

Life is different now. Now I’m diagnosed with four chronic illnesses (two mental), with another one undiagnosed but likely. While illness doesn’t define me, it strongly shapes my experiences and decisions. And watching Stacey deal with that moved me so thoroughly. Stacey’s not wanting anyone to know about her diabetes, because then she won’t be a person anymore, she’ll be a sick person. Fearing the consequences. And, the point that actually brought me close to tears: after Stacey goes into insulin shock on the job, her having to face a room full of clients (along with her fellow BSC members, blessedly) and listen to them say things like “Do I even want her watching my kids if something like this could happen again?” (I’m paraphrasing here.) Y’all, the impact of chronic illness on work and hireability is real, and to see it in microcosm for a twelve-year-old was every bit as affecting as seeing it for an adult would be, if not moreso.

Anyway. That was a new perspective. A part of me wants to go read the books again and pay close attention to how my feelings about Stacey are different now.

So. I didn’t have a lot of insight to offer on the series, just my personal response, but if you want to read more about it, here are a bunch of interesting and relevant articles:

• ‘The Baby-Sitters Club’ Is Back: Help Yourself to the Fridge (New York Times)
• The Baby-Sitters Club Taught Me Everything I Needed to Know About Literary Fiction (New York Times)
• ‘The Baby-Sitters Club’ Defies and Exceeds Expectations (New York Times)
• How The Baby-Sitters Club raised a generation (Vox)
• ‘The Baby-Sitters Club’ Gives Us Intersectional Feminism Without the Angst (Gen)
• Why THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB Netflix Series is Even Better Than the Books (Book Riot)

On my last birthday, I set out a list of things that described who I wanted to be in the coming year. I’m pretty satisfied that those describe who I have been this year and who I will continue to be. So a couple of days ago, I asked myself again, Who will I be next?

So here’s who I want 39-year-old Kimberly to be:

I want to be someone who brings all of herself into play as often as possible. I want to pick up parts of me that I’ve let lie fallow for a while and nurture them again. As Austin Kleon says, “Don’t throw any of yourself away." See: Me taking CS50x. Me remembering that OH RIGHT I LOVE MUSICAL THEATER.

I want to be someone who connects with her friends. I spend more time than is fair to anyone feeling like people don’t respond when I reach out, but when I take a look at myself I see that I, too, am prone to not responding when friends reach out to me. So I want to be a more responsive friend, to respond to my friend’s bids by turning towards them, not away from them. And also to remember that when people don’t respond to my bids, it’s not necessarily because they don’t want to be friends anymore.

Loftier:

I want to be a civic hacker.

I want to start a microbusiness (the business will be called Kimberly Hirsh; I’m currently considering two possible income-generating projects for the business called Kimberly Hirsh, and may end up pursuing both of them).

Not so lofty:

I’d really like to be a doctor of philosophy by my next birthday. 🤞

About 10 years ago, when I shared that I usually take at least a week to celebrate my birthday and consider it a season, my friend Dr. Alison Buck suggested that I refer to this season as Kimbertide, and so I do. I usually plan several different celebratory possibilities so that if friends can’t make it to one event, I still get to celebrate with them at another. (If you have questions about why a woman as grown as me still celebrates, you can email me and we’ll talk about it.)

This year, obviously, is a bit different. At first I was going to try to coordinate a number of virtual activities, some synchronous and some asynchronous, but instead I’m going a bit more free form. So instead, I’m providing a menu of possibilities for fun things you might do to celebrate. If you do any of these, I’d love it if you comment here and share a link!

1. Bake something. Bonus points if it’s cupcakes. I’m going to be making myself chocolate cake using this gluten-free vegan mix and vegan frosting that I discovered at Target. I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to have a gluten-free, corn-free, potato-free cake mix that I don’t have to create myself. And canned frosting! That’s something I never thought I would eat again. (If you know me, you know that I tend to be a cake and frosting snob, due to having a strong obsession with cupcakes when I was getting my MSLS. But more than a cake and frosting snob, I am a tired doctoral candidate looking for something easy to make as an activity with my kid, so. Mix and can.) I’d love to see what you bake!

2. Cosplay. I’m planning to spend tomorrow morning painting the belt buckle for my Kitty Pryde cosplay. You can go elaborate or casual. Whatever you want. Closet cosplay is always a good option. My favorite fandoms are anything Whedonverse, X-Men, and Disney. I haven’t decided yet what I’m going to wear tomorrow. But if you dress up, SEND ME PICS!

3. Have a Darkwave Dance Party. You can put on this Spotify playlist created by my friend, author Nathan Kotecki/DJ Twentieth Century Boy. Grab a little video and tell me where to find it! Or just do it and tell me you did, you don’t HAVE to make a video or anything. Alternately, you can attend the Zoom party [Facebook link] he’s hosting tomorrow night, which may be more just strange and a little less dark.

4. Watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’m probably going to watch “Once More with Feeling” in the next couple of days, because I’m just feeling that vibe right now. (Hulu is probably the best place to stream BtVS.) Never seen it before? Need a starter episode? The double pilot is a solid introduction, but if you can’t commit to more than 45 minutes, you can jump in with the Season 1 finale “Prophecy Girl,” Season 2 Episode 7 “Lie to Me,” or Season 3 Episode 11 “Gingerbread”." If you want to have the full Kimberly Hirsh experience, start with Season 4 Episode 8, “Pangs.” (I’m pretty sure that was the first episode I ever saw. It’s possible it was an earlier one but I think what I’m recalling when I recall bits from the earlier episodes is probably what was in that night’s “Previously.")

5. Watch The Little Mermaid. For my ninth and twenty-ninth birthdays, I had The Little Mermaid-themed parties. For my thirty-ninth, I might try to talk my kid into watching The Little Mermaid, The Little Mermaid II, and the prequel. (Well, maybe not the prequel.) I’ll be all IT’S MY BIRTHDAY! and he’ll be all I WILL WATCH ANYTHING YOU’LL LET ME!

6. Play a game. Video or board, your choice. I’m actually thinking about trying to pull together a Jackbox games remote play, maybe for Sunday, 7/19, around 2:30 pm ET. Let me know if you’re interested.

7. Make something. My go-tos are cross-stitch or crochet, but you make whatever sounds fun to you.

There you go, seven ways to celebrate my birthday/excuses to do something fun. Thanks for joining me!

I started reading Because Internet, by Gretchen McCulloch, this morning. I first became familiar with her work when I listened to her on an episode of the Fansplaining podcast. I’m not quite sure what pointed me to her Weird Internet Careers series of blog posts, but I have read and re-read these posts, working toward building a roadmap for myself to have a Weird Internet Career. Because it seems like of all the people in the world who could have a Weird Internet Career, I’m one of them.

In her bio for the book, McCulloch says she “lives in Montreal and on the Internet.” Me too, Gretchen. I mean, I live in Durham rather than Montreal, but also on the Internet. We are of a kind, Gretchen McCulloch and myself.

So. Go read those posts. If you’d rather read them all smooshed together in one Google Doc, you’ll get a link sent to you after you sign up for Gretchen McCulloch’s newsletter.

Do you know of any people with Weird Internet Careers? Here are my favorites, besides Gretchen McCulloch.

Kim Werker - Kim Werker started the online crochet magazine Crochet Me back in the early 2000s, which led to an offer to be editor of Interweave Crochet. She did that for a few years, and moved on to other work. She is a freelance editor who probably gets most of her clients from Internet interactions. She is a speaker and instructor. You can sign up for her latest class, Crochet for Challenging Times and get access to an ever-growing library of instructional videos and patterns, as well as access to a class-specific forum on her Community for Creative Adventurers, which she crowdfunds through both Patreon and the community software. Use code STUDENTLOVE40 to get 40% off the cost of Crochet for Challenging Times through the end of July. Now’s a great time to buy, since the cost of the course is going to increase in the future. Kim has a lot of other classes you can find on her website. too. And if you join her online community, you can jump in on video calls, which are a great source of delight and help to stave off loneliness in these super isolated times. Kim has also edited and written books; all of this has been fueled by stuff she does on the Internet.

Austin Kleon - Austin Kleon’s first book, Newspaper Blackout, was the result of him posting a newspaper blackout poem on his blog every day starting in 2005. He is one of the most generous people online and has four other books you can check out, videos of him that you can watch, and is currently experimenting with doing more online speaking.

Leonie Dawson - Leonie Dawson is a freaking rainbow hippie goddess, artist, writer, and multimillionaire. Her career started because she was a blogger; she created custom artwork for clients she met online, hosted women’s retreats for Internet friends to meet in person, and for many years offered a subscription community that included access to everything she made, including ecourses, ebooks, and meditations. Now she offers several ecourses and, like both Kim and Austin, is immensely generous.

So these are my favorite people with Weird Internet Careers and the thing is - NONE of them monetize their blogs through ads. While they might do some affiliate marketing, it’s unobtrusive and not their main source of income. I’m thinking if I want to have a Weird Internet Career, too, these are the models I should look to.

Who are your favorite Weird Internet Careerists?

Please note: Robin DiAngelo says she’s writing for a white audience, and I’m white, so my perspective on this book will likewise be more about its usefulness for white people. Author and scholar Lauren Michele Jackson states that for her (a Black woman, I think), “much of the material felt intuitive.” I don’t feel remotely qualified to tell any BIPOC if this would be a valuable book for them to read.

I read White Fragility over the weekend, only reading it so quickly because my university library limits checkouts of the eBook to a 24 hour loan period. The book reinforced a lot of the things I learned as I was working on Project READY.

I would especially recommend it if you need an introduction to the concept of racism as a systemic force rather than a personal failing. Whether it will be helpful for you will depend on where you are in your journey. If you have done some Racial Equity Institute training, a lot of the concepts will feel familiar, I think. (It’s been a few years since I did mine, and I think they’ve changed a bit, but certainly some of the ideas are related.)

I’ll share some quotes in a bit, but as a person who has been (slowly) increasing my awareness in this area for a few years, the most valuable part for me was when DiAngelo offered a specific example of a time when she made an unintentionally racist joke in front of a Black colleague who had only just met her and later worked to repair the breach this caused. I don’t want to summarize because I don’t want this to be seen as a set of tips, tricks, best practices, or lifehacks. I’ll just say that much of the book is introductory concepts and it’s all leading to the discussion DiAngelo offers of what to do next.

One of the articles about the end of the girlboss that I mentioned last week in my post about Naomi Alderman’s The Power critiques the book as “the Lean In of the 2020s, a book by a white woman, for white women, that says: See this big systemic problem? Start by working on yourself.” I think this is a well-made point, one that I’d like to unpack in the future so I will keep thinking about it. The article’s author, Leigh Stein, then points out that “White Fragility is social justice through the lens of self-improvement and, as is always the case with self-improvement programs marketed to white women, there’s money to be made here.” Stein cites DiAngelo’s speaker’s fee of $30,000 - $40,000. I’m keeping my eyes peeled for more people writing about this but haven’t tracked it down yet. But, as a point of comparison, see Ijeoma Oluo’s Twitter thread about the pay gap between white speakers on race and BIPOC speakers on race; Oluo’s fees are $0 - $12K+, depending on who’s asking. I’ve just bookmarked a Slate article about “White Fragility” to read for later.

What I think both Stein, and Lauren Michele Jackson, author of the Slate article, worry about is that people will read this book and think, “Cool. I am antiracist now. I did it, I read this one book, I’m done.” It’s a reasonable fear. I urge you not to be the person who says that to yourself. This book is a fine introduction to systemic racism. I don’t think it can begin to touch on the larger project of dismantling that, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t value in improving your own day to day interactions and working to be more conscious of the ways you can’t help but be influenced by a system centuries in the making.

That said: here are some bits I found especially noteworthy. All page numbers are from my ePub edition.

“…we don’t have to intend to exclude for the results of our actions to be exclusion.” (p. 14)

I did not set this system up, but it does unfairly benefit me. I do use it to my advantage, and I am responsible for interrupting it." (p. 126)

“…stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don’t have them.” (p. 129)

As I continue to read and work through Project READY at my own (very slow) pace (because working on a project is not the same as actually trying its outcome), I hope to write more about why this is work for white people, the tricky balance of honoring BIPOC knowledge without demanding BIPOC labor (pro-tip, lots of BIPOC scholars and thinkers share their work in easily accessible spaces, so you can learn a lot without asking anyone you actually know to do this work for you), and why (unfortunately) white people seem to receive this kind of thing better from other white people than from BIPOC.

Here are my goals for 2020 Q3:

School goals

• Complete my dissertation data collection.
• Write two chapters of my dissertation: Ch. 2 Information Horizon Maps and Ch. 3 Information Literacy Practices.

Life goals

• Read for fun, a lot.
• Find my relaxation response triggers as described in Ginevra Liptan’s book, The FibroManual: A Complete Fibromyalgia Treatment Guide for You and Your Doctor.

I’m keeping it light. I had many more goals in mind but these are the most important things right now.

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading Dr. Kelly J. Baker’s book, Grace Period: A Memoir in Pieces. I read it very quickly, over the course of maybe two or three days. I would stay up late reading it and walk around the house in a bit of a daze, squinting at my phone (I read it via Kindle Unlimited and have no Kindle, so).

I read the book hoping it might illuminate post-ac options for me, particularly the path of a freelance writer. I found that it struck me on a much more visceral level than that.

It’s interesting that it touched me so deeply, because Dr. Baker and I are very different. Dr. Baker came into academia with a dream of being a tenure track professor. She worked as a contingent instructor and a full-time lecturer, spending six years on the academic job market before determining she needed to take her “grace period.” I came into the PhD program focused on getting good at both conducting and understanding research, without my heart set on a specific professional outcome. I assumed there would be no tenure track job for me, and as I watched my tenure track, highly respected advisor deal with all that this professional life entails, I determined that it wasn’t something I was interested in.

AND YET.

In spite of that, so much of this book resonated with me.

Baker talks a lot about love, the way we are supposed to love our work, discipline, scholarship. She says,

I both adored and loathed my training. I see-sawed from romantic highs (seminar discussions, research, theory) to tortured lows (self-doubt, impostor syndrome, research). I almost quit multiple times. Yet I trudged through, because love is about compromise, or so they say. (p. 28, Kindle edition)

This resonated with me so strongly. I had my first PhD meltdown, as I call them, in the first week of my program. I remember it well. I was working on my back deck, enjoying some unseasonably tolerable weather on our hammock, and I realized that in the first week I had already fallen dreadfully behind. “I can’t do this,” I thought. I even told W. that maybe I should quit.

“Maybe I should quit” and “I’m going to get kicked out” were constant refrains from me that first year.

And yet. When people ask me if they should do a PhD, I say “YES TOTALLY!” followed by “No, definitely not.” Because you totally should; when else are you going to have time to prioritize deep learning? But you totally shouldn’t; it’s almost impossible financially without a supporting partner. (Two of my fellow SILS PhDs that I can think of and I myself have lawyer husbands, and I don’t imagine any of those three could do this otherwise.)

The love we feel for this deep learning, as Baker points out, allows us to be exploited. The minimum graduate stipend in my program is about $7000 below the minimum cost-of-living for one person in the town where the university is located. That exploitation, Baker says, “doesn’t make us love our work less. Instead, it often pushes us to love that work more—to consider it something deeper, a vocation instead of just a job.” (p. 30) I’ve fought against this sense, pretty successfully, but I suspect that’s because I’ve already experienced that vibe as a K-12 educator and I’m so burned out from it that I won’t let it happen again.

Baker writes about how most years, her birthday was a day to mark all the ways in which she failed in the past year, but after she began her grace period, “My birthday became a day that showed I made it through another year. For once, that was enough. It always should have been.” (p. 78)

My birthday is two weeks from now. I do use it to reflect on the past year often, but mostly, I celebrate it with great fanfare, because it is worth celebrating that I made it through another year. Both Dr. Baker and myself live with mental illness; sometimes I feel that I’m connected to life by a very fragile thread. For that thread to hold up for a whole year is always a cause for celebration.

I’m working from my Kindle notes and highlights here, so things are getting a bit fragmented and disjointed.

As I mentioned earlier, the chapter “Writing Advice” as a whole felt worth noting to me. In particular, how no one had suggested to her that writing could be a career. Me either, no one who I trusted on career matters, anyway. Baker writes,

At 18, 19, or 20, I wished someone took the time to tell me that my perspective was unique. That the only person who could write like me was me. That I shouldn’t try to be someone I wasn’t. That background, the place where I landed, made me who I was. That this place that birthed me might not be New York City or San Francisco or Boston and that was okay. That this place, that no one had ever heard of, created me and pushed me to be a writer. That I shouldn’t try to be someone I wasn’t. That I could emulate other people’s writing styles on the way to finding my own. That there was something about my voice that needed to be heard. That writing would give me the chance to speak and be heard. That my voice mattered. That my writing mattered to me and that was enough.

Finally, Baker says some things that remind me of my favorite Kitty Pryde quote from Astonishing X-Men. Baker notes:

Maybe I’m seeking something big when I should focus on something smaller, like a chubby toddler hand in mine.

I used to hate waiting, but now, I wonder if waiting is where living resides.

Life is about how we weather our transitions.

Reading all those bits inspired me to reply to her in this Twitter thread:

Also, also, I'm getting a little weary of the "Kelly's gotta figure out her life & work again" thing I've been doing for the last 7 years.

I'm extra. And maybe tedious.

— 💀Dr. Defund the Police💀 (@kelly_j_baker) June 17, 2020

Maybe... maybe figuring it out is all life is. Maybe that's "the fuck" Cheryl Strayed is talking about.

— Kimberly Hirsh, Future Library Doctor (@kimberlyhirsh) June 17, 2020

So. This is a book that shifted a lot for me. I highly recommend it to anyone at all connected to academia or just trying to figure out what’s next.

I read Naomi Alderman’s The Power very quickly (well, what passes for quickly now that I’m a mom) over the past week or so. I found it riveting; it was the first fiction book in a while that actually kept me from going to bed at a reasonable time.

The framing device is that one writer, a man living 5000 years from now, has written a historical novel set in roughly our time, and has asked his colleague, a woman and another writer, to read it and give him feedback. A quick bit of epistolary writing introduces that set up; the book then immediately jumps into the novel proper. In the history of this world, sometime around our time, teenage girls began to discover that they had the power to discharge electricity from their bodies similar to the power electric eels have. They are also able to awaken the same ability in adult women. And, as you might imagine, this changes the world a fair amount.

It’s an interesting book to read in the middle of a pandemic and widespread protests; each step of the way you see how the world is changing due to this new power, how a paradigm shift happens. It often felt like I was reading about right now, though of course the details are different.

What’s more interesting to me, though, is how it begins as a bit of a power fantasy.

I mean, just imagine. Imagine being able to walk down a dark street alone and not fear for your safety.

I didn’t realize until I had read this book that I never feel safe doing that. (What a privilege to have this fear at the back of mind than at the front, I know.)

As I read it more, this seemed more and more like a power I would like to have. Oh, I wouldn’t use it except in self-defense, I would tell myself.

I don’t want to spoil much, but as you might imagine, a lot of things that currently are things we expect of men become, in this book, things that women do. (What’s that saying about absolute power? Oh yeah, it corrupts absolutely. Though maybe it doesn’t, according to the study described in the linked article. But in this book, it definitely does.)

Layer upon layer of recognition settled in as I read the book, even close to the very end, constantly saying “Oh, THAT is a parallel to THIS thing that happened in our world…” and as I read, it reminded me of a recent Atlantic article, The Girlboss Has Left the Building (as well as The End of the Girlboss Is Here in the Medium publication Gen).

When I read the Atlantic piece, I highlighted this quote:

…when women center their worldview around their own office hustle, it just re-creates the power structures built by men, but with women conveniently on top.

And that’s what we watch happen again and again in The Power. It begins as a fantasy and ends as a dystopia.

More quotes from the Atlantic article:

Slotting mostly white women into the power structures usually occupied by men does not de facto change workplaces, let alone the world, for the better, if the structures themselves go untouched.

Being belittled, harassed, or denied fair pay by a woman doesn’t make the experience instructive instead of traumatic.

Making women the new men within corporations was never going to be enough to address systemic racism and sexism, the erosion of labor rights, or the accumulation of wealth in just a few of the country’s millions of hands—the broad abuses of power that afflict the daily lives of most people.

And Amanda Mull, the author of the article, concludes:

Disasters disrupt the future people expected to have, but they also give those people the space to imagine a better one. Those who seek power most zealously might not be the leaders people need. As Americans survey a nation torn apart and make plans to stitch it back together, admitting this, at the very least, can be an easy first step in the much harder process of doing the things that actually work. Structural change is a thing that happens to structures, not within them.

I have never been all in on the hustle, but I’ve had a waxing and waning admiration for girlboss behavior. The idea of making your way to the top appeals to me; the idea of treating your employs poorly - of firing them for becoming pregnant, harassing them, berating them - that appalls me. The Power is entertaining as can be, and also a reminder to watch myself. Watch myself for the ways that, when I want to dismantle a structure, I might end up reinforcing it instead. Watch myself for the ways I can use what power I have to help rather than to hurt.

Still would love to walk down the street at night with no fear. I don’t think the dismantling of the structure that prevents that will be finished in my lifetime.

We’re coming up on Q3 of 2020 and I don’t know how the year is going for you (except to the extent that I totally do), but 2020 has gone differently than I thought it would back in December 2020. Most years, I buy Leonie Dawson’s My Shining Year Life Goals Workbook, and indeed I did at the end of 2019. If I’m remembering correctly, it was my gift to myself for finishing writing my dissertation proposal.

I never get all the way through the workbook, and that’s fine. This year, I set myself a goal of finishing it by March 21 in time for the astrological New Year but, guess what, it didn’t work out. I still got pretty far though, and today I’ve been looking at it and noticing where I’ve been sticking to these even though, due to the pandemic and the vibe it’s given me, I haven’t looked back at the workbook since I last worked on it in early March.

I wrote in the workbook that this year, I want to feel creative and connected. I’m moving in those directions, but only recently recommitted myself to both of those desired feelings, even though I didn’t remember that I’d put it in the workbook. I said, 2020 will be the year that I defend my dissertation proposal and it’s possible I wrote that down after I’d scheduled the defense for early February. (By the way, I finished writing the proposal at the end of November but didn’t get to defend it until February. THANKS FOR NOTHING, HOLIDAYS. j/k, holidays can be great.)

I said I wanted to learn more about web development and build a foundation for my own business. These are both things I’ve been taking steps toward and will keep working on.

I brilliantly didn’t have any conferences or workshops in mind to go to, so that’s worked out fine. (I did get to travel to Charleston in February, which was lovely.)

I said I wanted to invest in Leonie’s Money, Manifesting + Multiple Streams of Income ecourse and that was my reward to myself for defending my proposal successfully. I haven’t completed it yet, but just working on the first parts has helped me save a lot of money and be a more responsible financial custodian.

I also said I’d like to read books that Dr. Katie Linder and Dr. Sara Langworthy recommend on their podcast Make Your Way, and I’m doing that. Again - without looking back over the workbook.

I wanted to reuse or buy used instead of new more, and I’ve done that. (Ask me about the $17 Nook battery I got on eBay rather than replacing my Nook with a $170 Kobo eReader.)

Hilariously, I said I wanted to do Zoom calls with friends. And guess what? I HAVE.

And I said I wanted to do my dissertation research, on which I’m making good progress.

Is there a bunch of stuff I haven’t gotten to yet? Of course. Am I going to get to everything I wrote down? Probably not, and that’s okay.

I’m still really impressed with what I’ve done so far this year. What about you? What things that you wanted to do this year have you already done?

I’m re-reading Jeff Goins’s book, You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) and I came upon a bit that I highlighted and made a note on. Goins, writing about legacy, quotes Steve Jobs:

we all long to “put a dent in the universe”

And in my annotation I respond:

I would rather have a legacy of having added something to the world rather than damaging it. Is Jobs’s language here reflective of the tech industry as a whole? Disrupt. Move fast and break things? How is that working out for us? What if instead we moved gently and restored things? Pretty sure I’m stealing this idea from Jenny Odell.

Jenny Odell writes in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy about how our current American society values growth over maintenance. She writes about the value of restoration and care. Her writing makes me want to mend and tend and fix.

I’m going to keep thinking about this. I think if I keep reading and thinking, I can connect it to visible mending, Kintsugi, the idea that women respond to stress with a “tend and befriend” approach, and the New Domesticity. Stay tuned.

1. Kelly J. Baker’s book Grace Period, which I devoured over the course of 2 days. I want to say so much about it, but my brain just won’t get it all together right now. For now, I’ll point you to the post that is the source of the chapter about which my only note/highlight was highlighting the title with the note, “This whole chapter”: “Writing Advice.”

2. Max Temkin’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation in 40 Hours.” The best of the show selected for you. As Temkin suggests, if you like these 40 hours, go ahead and watch the rest. I watched the show as it aired, so after about 8 of Temkin’s recommendations I felt confident that I still love the show now as much as I did then and went back to the beginning and am slowly making my way through. Great crafting TV, as well as incredibly soothing and full of delightful characters and truly, if you ever need to understand me, imagine if Data had the big feelings of a toddler and the empathic abilities of Deanna Troi.

3. Dr. Olivia Rissland’s thread about learning from reading a paper a day. I’m going to start this today (though I’ll be mixing in book, thesis, and dissertation chapters) with my key areas of interest: where information science and learning sciences intersect and where LIS and fan studies intersect. (And then I’ll keep researching and writing at the intersections of those, I hope.)

4. Alexandra Rowland’s thread about growing and caring for super long hair, written right before Alex got a haircut that is short and very cute. (Alexandra Rowland is probably my favorite Internet person discovery of the past couple of years; I maybe ought to write Aja Romano a thank you note for this.)

Okay, that’s all for today, I can now use the restroom and get back to data analysis. (SO INTERESTING! Like, no sarcasm, it’s really cool finding out where cosplayers go to find and share information!)

A little over a year ago, M. and I were in Atlanta to accompany W., who was attending an organizational meeting there. On our second full day in the city, we visited the Center for Puppetry Arts and their Worlds of Puppetry museum. They have a Jim Henson gallery there, and there’s a video tour of it on their Facebook page.

You enter through a lovely entrance and move through spaces dedicated to Jim’s early life, his office and earliest work, and Sesame Street. There’s a really cool Sesame Street-style set that you can actually work on yourself, with monitors so other people with you can watch your performance. And then leaving that space, you turn a corner and directly in front of you is…

Yes, Kermit.

M. and I turned that corner and my breath caught in my throat. “Hello, friend!” I wanted to say. It felt like seeing a dear friend you hadn’t seen in a long time, which was something I had done the day before, so I had a very recent memory to draw on. I wish I could have hugged Kermit, but you can’t really, through that plexiglass or whatever it is box. But I could look at him and smile. It was such a feeling of homecoming. Somehow, though he is but felt and foam, I feel like Kermit gets me.

Lately, I’ve been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. It also feels like visiting with old friends, in the moments when I’m not amazed by my own new middle-aged-woman lust for Jean-Luc Picard. (And that’s all I’ll say about that.)

Geordi. Riker. Troi. Not Data, because I am Data. Data knows so much and always shares more than is useful. Why wouldn’t you want to know the intricacies of how this ship is constructed, or the details of that culture’s expectations surrounding honor? Oh, right, because we’re all about to die, or at least one of us has been abducted, and you probably would rather only have the information you need to handle the situation. Oops.

Yes. Data and I are one.

But the others, they feel like my friends, in the same way Kermit does. When Jonathan Frakes showed up on Patrick Stewart’s Sonnet-a-Day video, I was like, “YES! FRIENDS! Let’s all sit outside and read Shakespeare, MY FRIENDS!” (And also know, I was not imagining them as Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes. Sorry, my dudes. You inhabit those other guys in my heart forever. And reading Shakespeare together is totally a thing your characters would do.)

I’ve been wondering about why I feel this way about these imaginary people/frog, and why I don’t feel quite the same way anymore. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my favorite show, and I wrote a Self-Insertion Mary Sue expressly so I could imagine what it would be like to be friends with the characters on it, but when I watch it, it doesn’t feel like visiting old friends, or even seeing people I visit with daily. It feels like watching a TV show I love. Same thing with 30 Rock, New Girl, How I Met Your Mother, Difficult People, and Happy Endings. Is the difference that I encountered The Muppets and ST:TNG as a kid? I don’t know.

Was I a lonely kid? I’m not sure. I changed schools about every two years until high school, when I stayed at the same school the whole time. I had good friends from 6th grade on. I was verbally bullied and came home crying almost every day in 5th grade. I don’t know. Maybe these characters feel like my friends because they were there for me in those times?

Regardless of why, I think I’m just going to lean into it and embrace it. As I’ve mentioned before, our family is all-in on Muppets these days, and I’m loving TNG. It’s nice to visit old friends.

I saw this tweet today:

Want to succeed #withaphd?

Don't disappear into an academic bubble while you study:
-work #altac jobs
-do placements
-volunteer
-network

Do this during the #phd and it won't be as hard to reinvent a career after. Don't get locked in the ivory tower
@AcademicChatter

— Chris Cornthwaite, PhD (@cjcornthwaite) June 16, 2020

This is excellent advice.

BUT.

It might not be for every PhD student.

For the past year or so, I’ve been reading and re-reading Karen Kelsky’s The Professor Is In. Most of the book is about what you need to do if you want to be competitive in the academic job search (in a pre-COVID world, mind you). I have done very few of these things, and that’s okay.

I came into this hoping to get really good at research - especially qualitative research. I have started doing this and will be lucky enough to get to do it for another year, working on both my own project and someone else’s.

In my interview for the doctoral program, the admissions committee asked me, “What do you want to do after you graduate?”

I said to them - honestly, but calculatedly - “I would love to be in a situation where I could research and teach, but of course I’m realistic about the job market.”

One of the committee members said, “You might have to move to get a job.”

My once-and-future advisor said, “You might have to go wherever W.’s job is.”

W’s job is here, where we already are.

I won’t say we definitely will never move. But I will say that it’s very unlikely any job offer I might receive would draw us away.

I came into this program already attached to this particular geographic area - which is saturated with both higher education institutions and scholars. And I came in viewing it much more as continuing education than as job training, which I think has only benefitted my mental health.

I say all this to let you know that I really don’t need to do all the things Karen Kelsky says to do for the academic job market. And yet I would look at her lists and think, “OH NO! I HAVE DONE NONE OF THESE THINGS!” Like… It doesn’t matter. Those aren’t the things that will get me a job I want. But I still worried about not having done them.

I came in from an alt-ac job, and had every intention of returning to a (different, because my department was dismantled) alt-ac job after graduation. Now, alt-ac is probably not going to be much of a thing, so I am turning my attention to post-ac possibilities. The advice in the tweet above applies equally, I think, to both alt-ac and post-ac. But it’s another list of things I haven’t done, with the exception of having taken on one metadata analysis contract gig.

I didn’t disappear into the academic bubble, though. For the first year of my PhD I disappeared into improv, but after that I disappeared into my family.

I got pregnant in my second semester of the PhD program, and while it was not expected (because I was dealing with PCOS-driven infertility and had only pursued minimal interventions thus far) it was very much desired. My son was born in October of my second year.

I started to make a list of all of the things that have happened with my family in the time between when I started my PhD program and now, but giving specifics felt too much like violating privacy, so I will alternate between specifics and being vague, depending on the level of disclosure I feel okay about.

Here are things that happened in my household or family of origin during my time in the PhD program:

• My adult autistic brother tried living on his own for much of the summer that I was pregnant, with only myself and my sister as support. A mile from my house, and more than a few miles from my sister’s house. In the end, my mom moved in with him, and now he and both of my parents live in the house we bought right before he was born.
• I had a baby who grew into a toddler who grew into a preschooler, for whom I have been the primary caregiver in terms of weekday care and invisible labor (though I will say I’ve had amazing support from my partner, who often gives me long stretches to myself on weekends, and our extended family; we’ve also had part-time childcare either from family or at a Montessori since he was about 12 weeks old).
• Two family members were rushed to the ER with chest pain on the same day, several states away from each other. (They’re both alive still, thank goodness.)
• One of those family members has had five surgeries, four of which happened while living in close proximity to me. More than one of these made that family member unable to drive, and I became the driver of choice for this family member.
• A different family member was diagnosed with cancer and had surgery to remove the cancerous organ. That seems to have gone well, but you know, recovery from that is not nothing, and required a little support from me.
• One of the aforementioned family members was hospitalized on suicide watch for a few days, and has since taken on a lot more medical appointments in response to that.
• Another family member has dealt with mysterious digestive issues and only in the past year has figured out the reason; this family member hasn’t needed much from me in material or physical care but there’s still a toll that providing emotional support takes.
• I myself have had mysterious fatigue and pain that persisted even when my diagnosed conditions were well-controlled.
• I spent about 8 months figuring out how to get my kid settled at his Montessori school, because his body would not conform to their schedule. (In the end, we switched from afternoons to mornings, and it made everything easier immediately.)

And also, until the past year or so, my husband traveled for work A LOT, which was only a problem in that I was so focused on child caregiving during those times that I couldn’t get much PhD work done.

I essentially became a member of a sandwich generation 5 - 10 years before I expected to have to do so. This period of my life is inextricable from caregiving for other members of my family.

So I look at those things and consider that my childcare was devoted at first exclusively to attending class (that’s right, I worked the writing around the baby), then to attending class and writing, then to writing. I consider that often by the time my childcare hours came around, I didn’t have the spoons left to do good work for my PhD, much less the time for extra jobs, volunteer opportunities, or networking. And I ask myself, when? When on earth would I do those things?

And the answer is, I don’t know. If I wanted to devote more energy to finding fault with myself, I could answer that question. But for today, anyway, I’m over it. I’m over blaming myself for life being what it is. I take control where I can, and do well with what I’m given; I have an internal locus of control and rarely feel powerless about micro-level life stuff. But I’m done being harsh to myself about it.

I’m done.

Addendum: the author of the above quoted tweet followed it up with this tweet:

I should have added this! I was really just thinking about some ideas, not a laundry list.. I'm just adding pressure

— Chris Cornthwaite, PhD (@cjcornthwaite) June 16, 2020

So like I said - good advice that you can use if it works for you, but don’t need to feel pressure to take on.

I should also add that it’s easy for me to say I’m done, because I have had some of the uncertainty around settling the next year resolved for me. Details on that to come later.

Last Friday, I finished correcting the AI-provided transcripts for my dissertation interviews. This process didn’t go as I’d originally imagined it would. When I wrote my proposal, I expected to conduct these interviews over the course of the entire summer, at various fan conventions. I expected to first explore online to find where cosplayers hangout and only then recruit participants. But then COVID-19 happened, and face-to-face research was no longer an option. (It was prohibited by my university. Cons were cancelled. I’m at high risk of severe complications, so even if there had been cons, I wouldn’t have been able to go to them.) So I changed my plan significantly, starting with sampling and recruitment.

I originally was going to use purposive sampling, identifying cosplayers through my online exploration who were local to me and might be able to provide valuable insight into their information literacy practices. Once I was in quarantine, it became clear that this wasn’t going to be an option. In my revised IRB proposal, I stated that I would use convenience sampling, recruiting cosplayers with whom I had contact in the past, either because I met them in the cosplay area of the con where they were guests, or because I attended their panels. I reached out to cosplayers from two local cons I attended last year. I also used snowball sampling, asking the first several cosplayers I interviewed to recommend other people for me to talk to. At first, they were all recommending the other people I had already invited to participate, but later participants introduced me to more cosplayers I hadn’t known before, and I rapidly ended up with a group of about 12 or 13 confirmed participants, of whom 10 actually scheduled interviews.

So how did I do it? Let me take you through the process…

Recruitment

All of the cosplayers I met at the two cons I attended last year were on Instagram. I have a dedicated cosplay Instagram account that I use both for personal and research purposes. Using this account, I DMed several cosplayers with a message similar to the following:

Hi [Cosplayer Name as Listed on Instagram],

My name is Kimberly Hirsh and I am a doctoral student from the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I also go by Luna Wednesday Cosplay. I am writing to invite you to participate in my research study about how cosplayers find, evaluate, use, and share information. You’re eligible to be in this study because you are a cosplayer I encountered at [Name and Year of Con] when I attended your panel, [Title of Panel]. To be eligible to participate, you must have cosplayed at least once since 2012 or be currently working on a cosplay project; you must also be over 18 years old.

If you decide to participate in this study, you will draw a diagram and participate in an interview that will take about one hour. We will conduct the interview using Microsoft Zoom. I would like to record your interview and then we’ll use the recording to ensure I understood your answers to my interview questions correctly.

Remember, this is completely voluntary. You can choose to be in the study or not. If you’d like to participate or have any questions about the study, please email or contact me at kimberlyhirsh@unc.edu or @lunawednesdaycosplay.

Thank you very much.

Sincerely,

Kimberly Hirsh

kimberlyhirsh@unc.edu

@lunawednesdaycosplay

The text of this recruitment message was approved by my university’s Institutional Review Board.

If the cosplayer responded that they were interested, I would say something like,

Great! The next step is to schedule a time for an interview. You can do that here:

And provide them with a link to a special type of event using the scheduling service Calendly. This was useful because I gave Calendly access to my Google Calendar, and participants could see what times I had available and sign up directly. In most cases, we didn’t have to back and forth. A few participants weren’t available during the times on the calendar, so I worked with them to set up special times. (The limitations on my time were about childcare, and it was easy to leave M. alone with W. for an extra hour on a Saturday or Sunday to do an interview.)

If you’re curious, you can read about Calendly’s security and privacy policies and practices. Calendly is a black-owned business, though I did not know that when I selected the service for my scheduling. I am happy to know it now and plan to continue using Calendly to schedule meetings.

The Calendly event description included the following text:

For our interview, you’ll need to have paper and something to write with, and the ability to take a picture of your diagram and send it to me via DM, text, or email. You’ll also need to have the Zoom app installed; if you’ve never worked with it before, it’s probably easiest to install on a phone. If none of the times on this calendar work, message me or email kimberlyhirsh@unc.edu and I’ll find a custom time for you.

Feel free to use your cosplay name rather than your real name when signing up for an interview slot.

Once we settled on a time, I would schedule a Zoom meeting in my University’s Zoom instance and send the details to the participant by email if they had signed up for a meeting in Calendly, or by DM if they hadn’t. Calendly does have Zoom integration, but I chose to do this manually because I wanted to fine-tune the security settings in Zoom. I used Zoom not because it is my favorite service of this type, but because it has integrated recording and is supported by my university.

I made sure to use the following security features to prevent Zoombombing:

• Password-protected
• Waiting room
• Locked room after the participant arrived

Conducting the Interview

The day before or the day of the interview, I would contact the participant either by email or DM to remind them that they would need paper and a writing utensil for the interview. I would also include a link to the consent document and release form, so I would know what name to call them in our communications, what name to call them in my writing, and what information I collected was okay to share. I created this consent document and release form in Qualtrics, another piece of software supported by my university.

This was the text of the consent document:

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Research Information Sheet
IRB Study #: 20-0351 **Principal Investigator: Kimberly Hirsh **

The purpose of this research study is to explore how cosplayers find, evaluate, use, and share information. You are being asked to take part in a research study because you are a cosplayer over the age of 18 who has cosplayed at least once since 2012 or is currently working on a cosplay project.

Being in a research study is completely voluntary. You can choose not to be in this research study. You can also say yes now and change your mind later.

If you agree to take part in this research, you will be asked to draw a diagram of the sources you use for finding, evaluating, using, and sharing cosplay-related information and participate in an interview about your diagram and experiences. Your participation in this study will take about one hour. If you choose, I may contact you with follow up questions sometime in the next 6 months. Each follow up question should not take more than 15 minutes of your time and I will not ask you more than 3 follow up questions. We expect that at least 10 people will take part in this research study.

The possible risks to you in taking part in this research are:

• Feeling uncomfortable discussing your information process
• Having someone else find out that you were in a research study
• Potential loss of confidentiality of data

The possible benefits to society from this research are:

• Making it easier for cosplayers to find, use, share, and evaluate information in the future
• Helping information literacy educators understand how people work with information when they pursue their own interests

To protect your identity as a research subject, the researcher(s) will not share your information with anyone unless you choose. In any publication about this research, your name or other private information will not be used unless you request that it be. If you have any questions about this research, please contact the Investigator named at the top of this form by calling [my phone number] or emailing kimberlyhirsh@unc.edu. If you have questions or concerns about your rights as a research subject, you may contact the UNC Institutional Review Board at 919-966-3113 or by email to IRB_subjects@unc.edu.

The release form included the following questions:

Please state your initial requests regarding the use of your name and the information you provide, as well as any media I collect. You can change your requests at any time! If you agree to be recorded, you can tell me to turn on and off the recorder at will. If you permit me, I may record your interview. You may choose whether I use your information horizon map as an example in my final dissertation report or not.

All recordings and photographs will be stored on secure UNC servers, password-protected, and accessed only through a Virtual Private Network.

What name should the researcher call you? Is it okay to identify you in the project? (This included a space to write the name that should be used for identification in the project.) Is it okay to record you for the project? Is it okay to use videos of you in the project? Is it okay to use photographs of you in the project? Is it okay to publish your information horizon map, the diagram you will be creating in our interview?

About fifteen minutes before the interview, I would get set up in the space I was using, either my home office or my bedroom depending on what W.’s schedule was that day and whether he needed a more private space (the bedroom) to give a presentation. I would plug in my headphones. I would load up Firefox with the following tabs:

• My interview guide
• The Qualtrics survey
• Instagram
• My school email

The Qualtrics survey was so I could refer to it and make sure I used the correct name for the participant and that it was okay to record. Instagram and email were open so that I could see if the participant needed to communicate with me last minute (this happened at least once, when we ended up delaying the interview by an hour or two because of the participant’s work schedule) as well as so participants could send me their information horizon maps.

We began each interview with greetings and introductions, followed by the information horizon maps. I’m really excited to share with the world how different they all are from each other. They’re so cool, and while my participants have many shared practices, each of them represented those practices in a unique way.

Then I would ask several questions, depending on what the think-aloud process alongside the drawing of the information horizon map revealed.

At the end, participants had a chance to revise their maps. My original intention was to allow them to do this only if they chose to do so, but I found that most participants tended to be general in their map and specific in their interview, so I often took notes on resources they mentioned in the interview and then asked them to add those resources to their map. I’m not sure how this is going to affect the trustworthiness of this research method, but I thought it was worth doing this to make sure I had the richest data possible and could understand not only what resources they used, but the relationships between those resources.

The end of the interview consisted of demographic questions.

A note on pronouns, gender identity, and demographic data more broadly

I asked the participants to identify their gender in the demographic questions, but failed to ask most participants if they would like me to use specific pronouns. Some participants voluntarily offered pronoun possibilities along with their gender, especially if their gender and the pronouns that might go with it weren’t the only pronouns with which they were comfortable.

I had one genderfluid participant who prefers different pronouns at different times. I asked this participant, given the fact that the dissertation will be published a long time from now and this participant might be using different pronouns at that point, what would be the best way to handle this. The participant told me that using he/him pronouns would probably be fine, because he tends to be using those consistently lately, but we both agreed that I could also simply refer to the participant by name, just in case the participant’s pronouns have changed by that time.

Asking a person to give their pronouns in a classroom setting can be fraught; sharing your own and making them option to share can mitigate this some. I don’t know if much work has been done with this for studying research group demographics. (I had a disagreement once with some other researchers who created a survey and only offered two gender options.) If you know of any, I’d love to look at it.

My goal is always to respect participants’ wishes with respect to their identity, but at the same time there is value in disclosing the ratio of participants in different groups. To try and straddle the line between these two things, I offered all participants the option to skip any demographic question they wished, skipping to the next question with no further discussion of the skipped one.

There are some identity markers that may have been relevant that I didn’t include. In my next study, I will probably include more varied demographic questions.

Transcription

I used the service otter.ai to transcribe the interviews, uploading the video files, correcting the transcripts on the website, and downloading PDFs to share with participants. (I downloaded .docx files for the purpose of importing them for data analysis, but I’ll talk about data analysis another time.) Otter.ai offers a generous student discount (50% off I think?) so be sure to look for that.

Member Checking

The final step I took in the interview process was member checking, in which I gave each participant a chance to review the transcript of their interview and add or correct anything they wish. I emailed them a PDF; this meant that for the participants who hadn’t used Calendly to sign up, I had to DM them and ask for their email address. So far, no participant has requested major changes; one participant noticed filler words in her own speech patterns and asked me to mitigate that, which I will certainly do when quoting her.

The End!

Whew! This was a long post! Thanks for reading. I’ll give you the same thing I give anyone who reads something lengthy that I write: Neil Patrick Harris riding a unicorn (on the Harold & Kumar 2 poster, the poster for a film I have not seen). Also, please feel free to ask me questions about my process. I love talking about process!

In November 2018, I had respiratory inflammation that was on its way to becoming pneumonia when I traveled to Charleston with my husband and then 2-year-old son. (He’s 3 now.) My husband was presenting at a conference, so my son and I touristed about; I was exhausted and stressed caring for a toddler alone for much of the day, away from home, while dealing with respiratory trouble. One of my favorite places to visit in Charleston is the South Carolina Aquarium. As I sat in front of their Great Ocean Tank and my son climbed up and down the steps that double as stadium seating, I felt an immense sense of calm come over me. Dr. Wallace J. Nichols would attribute this to what he calls “Blue Mind,” and he’s not wrong, but in that moment, I felt that Blue Mind was enhanced by the beautiful soundtrack playing in that exhibit.

So I sought out aquarium music. I don’t know what the soundtrack was there, but I learned that Douglas Morton composes music for aquariums, and put together all of his aquarium music on Spotify in a single playlist. (He has other ocean-themed music as well that you may wish to check out.) Enjoy!

I’m still in a mostly flow, very little stock place.

I’m coming up with ideas for blog posts all the time, and keeping a list of them in Notion:

Most of these blog post ideas are for helping people, for sharing ideas related to work. I do tend to and intend to blog about everything, and work is part of everything. But I never feel like writing these posts, even though I have all these ideas. And I think it’s because I mostly conceive of this as a personal blog. And those topics all feel only personal-adjacent. Not impersonal, mind you, but they’re just not where I’m at right now. Maybe I’ll get to them later.

My friend @tiff_frye posted her first substantive post here on Micro.blog yesterday, saying

I guess this is a personal blog, and through it I want to explore the things I think about every day in an effort to clarify and examine my thoughts.

That’s what I mean to be doing here, but instead I’ve been coming up with lists of things like I was trying to create an SEO-optimized, super pro, Darren Rowse-approved (let’s be clear, I love Darren Rowse, I think he’s great) blog. And that’s NOT what I’m doing. I’m trying to create an old-fashioned, late ’90s/early ’00s online diary. Jennicam, but with words.

Maybe clearly stating my intentions in that fashion will help me stay where I mean to be.

Maybe this is an impromptu manifesto.

I added a page to the index section of my Bullet Journal that tracks Reading Notes. I don’t like to use collections; I inevitably end up ignoring them. So Reading Notes get stuck in my notebook on the day that I did the reading, and then I add the book title to the Reading Notes bit of the index, along with the numbers of pages where I’ve taken notes on that book.

Here are all the books that one might consider me to be “currently” reading right now:

• Getting Started in Consulting
• Dracula - a gorgeous edition illustrated by [Edward Gorey]
• Ghostlands
• Moby Dick
• Writing with Power
• A Choir of Lies
• How to Do Nothing
• Jim Henson: The Biography
• The Artist’s Way
• Steal Like an Artist

I’ve actually finished reading at least 5 books in the past couple of months, which is impressive, I think. But I’m really having trouble deciding which one to read at any given time. So I still count this as having trouble reading.

Austin Kleon has some advice for if you are having trouble reading. I think I will pay attention to it. I’ve been doing some of these things, but I might benefit from doing even more.

Leonie Dawson challenged herself to only read books she had in her home before buying any new ones. I’ve been flirting with this challenge but I think it might not be right for the current moment. I don’t know. I do have a lot of awesome books lying around.

My son is registered to start at a Quaker school in August. I don’t know what that will end up looking like, but one practice that they (and Quaker meetings) have that I’m thinking about today is settling in. I first encountered this practice when my advisor, whose son attends the same school that my son will attend, introduced it to a class for which I was serving as teaching assistant. This is time at the beginning of a gathering to settle in silence, to transition from the world to the meeting. It’s a practice that I have done without realizing it at the times that I consider most sacred.

Usually before getting ready to perform. I like to get to the theater early. Preferably before everyone else. (For my first community theater show, I got there so early that the company ended up being charged for extra time in the theater. Whoops.) I need this time to transition between spaces.

Early in my teaching career, the only teaching job I could find was part-time - 30% I think? I taught two Latin III classes in the afternoon. I needed more money than that paid to pay my bills, so I took a customer service representative job. I was a CSR in the morning and a teacher in the afternoon. I had a 15 - 20 minute drive between my two workplaces that served as the beginning to a transition, and then lunchtime in the teacher workroom to complete the transition. I needed that time to shift my headspace.

I have 2 - 3 jobs now, too. I spend about half the work day momming and the other half the day scholaring. Which one I’m doing when varies depending on the day, but either way, I need to transition from one to the other. And there’s no physical space where I can transition, because everyone who can works from home right now. So I need time.

I get frustrated at myself for taking the time. Why oh why, I think to myself, can’t I just hand my kid off to another caring adult, then plop in front of my laptop and jump into my research?

Because I need time to settle in.

So I’m giving myself permission to settle in. Today, I’m writing this blog post, and that’s how I’m settling in. Do you need transition time? How do you settle in?

How’s your day going? Aside from the continuing world situation + its impact on higher ed (and thus my possibility of being funded for next year) and an ongoing I-think-it’s-fibromyalgia flare-up, things are going well from where I’m sitting.

Yesterday was W’s birthday. He’s 42 but not a Douglas Adams fan, so it was not as thrilling a birthday for him as it might have been otherwise. He doesn’t seem more enlightened than he was on Monday but he might be keeping the reason why 42 is the answer to the life, the universe, and everything to himself. I made him his favorite casserole for dinner and he ended up with two cakes (this is the advantage of having the mom who gave birth to you and the mom your dad married after the one who gave birth to you both in town).

We’ve been experimenting with standing in the driveway talking to local family members. We try to keep the 6 feet between us. I fear we don’t always succeed, but we try. It feels so nice to see them in person instead of through a screen. It’s just more jovial.

There are some lovely cardinals that have been courting in our yard. I just saw the female hop down some stone steps. Apparently bird watching has become a huge hobby since folks started staying at home, and I get it. I was already noticing birds (and other wildlife) more after reading Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, but I’ve started noticing them a lot more lately. Birds and bunnies. And bees. I really paid attention to a bumblebee for the first time the other day. It flew like a hummingbird does, zooming and stopping to hover. I watched it eat some clover. I noticed how whenever anyone walked by it on the trail, it would get up and fly away and seem to lose its place before returning to the same bit of clover after they had passed. If you’re looking to learn more about birdwatching, DCist has an article about How to Get Really into Birdwatching While You’re Stuck at Home.

We propagated some rosemary from a plant in our front yard. I took three cuttings and put them in water, changing it every day, for several weeks. Eventually the cuttings grew roots and this week we planted them in 6-inch pots. I’m planning to do this with mint next.

I’ve been crocheting my first sweater. It’s the Sailor’s Moon Cropped Sweater. I’m hoping to wear it over camisoles once it’s finished. I’m also creating a bundle of all the size-inclusive crochet sweaters I can find on Ravelry. KatieBea’s Sweaters for All group inspired me. I tend to be a uniform dresser, wearing a black dress or t-shirt with black or more interesting leggings. I’m adding black bike shorts to the mix for summer. My hope is that if I crochet a bunch of sweaters and cardigans for myself, I can wear those to make my wardrobe a bit more interesting.

I’ll save what I’m reading, watching, playing, and listening to for another post. Let me know how life is looking for you!

Are you at loose ends? I’m at loose ends. I have a number of projects on the go but I am not doing a good job of organizing them. I am steeped deep in impostor syndrome as I try to figure out how I will contribute to my family and my community in both the immediate and distant future. Since beginning my doctoral program I have felt that all I’m good for is literature searches and giving presentations, and that nobody would want to hire me for those things.

As I consider what to do next, I find myself wishing that my last full-time job were still a thing. Of course if it were, I might be in it. It was my dream job, an alt-ac position as Managing Editor/Public Communications Specialist for a web-based university outreach program serving K-12 and, later, B-16 educators. It was a great hybrid example of what Emilie Wapnick calls a “group hug” job, which leverages several of a person’s interests, and a “good enough” job, which still leaves a person time and energy to pursue interests outside of work. I ended up leaving it to go to grad school, after institutional priorities shifted and all of my immediate colleagues were either laid off or transferred to a different department. But had it stayed the same, I expect I would still be there now.

As I’ve asked myself who has a career path that I admire, I find myself looking to people with alt-ac careers who have started their own businesses. Some maintain their on-campus alt-ac positions while others go full-time with their own business. Examples include Dr. Katie Linder and Dr. Margy Thomas. They’re both incredibly generous about sharing their experiences and advice. And at first I thought, “I gotta get that alt-ac job before I can move into my own thing.” Then I remembered: I already had an alt-ac job, and that job is exactly the kind of work I want to have again. So the next step seemed to be nailing down what the activities associated with that job were, so that I can position myself to build a career that involves them again.

Fortunately, I have a Google Drive folder full of documents from that time, so I was able to go back and look at what I did. When I learned at those documents, I realized:

Impostor syndrome is nonsense. I know how to do many different things. I am a person with skills who can complete projects and collaborate with others. I am not just a literature search robot.

Here are the kinds of things I did in that job:

• develop new content for the web: digital books, articles, lesson plans, other large-scale web publications, blogs, webinars
• edited that content from initial development through final proofreading
• published that content using a custom content management system, HTML, iBooks Author, WordPress, and Blackboard Collaborate
• maintain a huge collection of over 10K digital objects, both handling metadata and coding the objects themselves, using a custom content management system, custom taxonomy, and HTML
• present on a wide variety of topics at individual schools or organizations as well as large conferences
• maintain and implement an editorial calendar across multiple channels, including press releases, a monthly newsletter, 3 blogs, a website, social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, Edmodo, and Google+), a podcast, and videos
• collaborate with subject matter experts both on campus and in the community to develop the aforementioned content

Those are all things I would love to do again, and I have no professional commitments this summer and am on the market for positions that fit that description right now. If you need a person who does those things, I can consult for you; if you have a job for a person that does those things, please feel free to email me at kimberlyhirsh (at) kimberlyhirsh (dot) com and let me know.

In the meantime, I’m going to approach my current projects with this renewed sense of my own competence and by implementing some of the tools I used to use. I’m Managing Editor of my own personal organization now, and I’m going to start acting like it.

For the past couple of years, I’ve felt like I was having a Hashimoto’s thyroiditis flare. But aside from a small dip in my thyroid hormones which was easily corrected by L-tyrosine and iodine supplementation, there hasn’t been any evidence that that’s what was making me feel like garbage. When I asked my doctor about it, almost a year ago I think, she said that maybe it was a food sensitivity or a new autoimmune disease, and asked me to track my symptoms and things that might be triggering them. That tracking got very overwhelming, very quickly, because I was trying to track food and sleep and and and.

I’ve been feeling even more flarey recently, especially since I started sheltering in place, and the other day had extra terrible pain. I’ve also had laughably frequent urination, like, more frequent than when I was pregnant, and in the past I thought maybe that was a sign of diabetes but I wasn’t diabetic. So I started Googling around and discovered that frequent urination can be a symptom of fibromyalgia. (Hi yeah if you don’t believe fibromyalgia is a thing, kindly see yourself away from my comments/replies, because I don’t want to hear it.)

My doctor is also my sister’s doctor, and told her a while back that she probably had fibromyalgia.

So I started talking to my sister about it and researching more. A while back I installed a sleep app on my phone to track my sleep, and it showed that even when I was “asleep,” my movements and breathing indicated that my brain activity was similar to that of an awake person and that I was only getting about 15 minutes of deep sleep on a given night, even if I slept for 7+ hours. My kid only wakes me up maybe once a night anymore, and sometimes not even that, so this isn’t a parent thing. Guess what that sort of sleep pattern is a symptom of?

Did you guess fibromyalgia?

It’s fibromyalgia.

Now is a terrible time to try and get a new diagnosis of a chronic illness if you don’t need pharmaceuticals for it, so I’m not pursuing one right now, even though I’ve got a bit of a Crazy Ex-Girlfriend “A Diagnosis” vibe:

The main thing that is valuable about focusing on treating fibromyalgia over autoimmune stuff is that the books I trust for autoimmune focus on food first, but I’ve been so exhausted I can’t even deal with food prep most of the time. Which, guess what? Is a problem a lot of people with fibromyalgia have. The autoimmune protocol I have has four steps: 1. Food 2. Stress and rest 3. Digestion 4. Detox. Whereas the fibromyalgia one from the book my sister recommended has four similar steps but in a different order: 1. Rest (Stress included) 2. Repair (Digestion + Food combined) 3. Restore (I think this might be the detox one, not sure yet?) 4. Reduce (taking care of lingering symptoms). This re-ordering of things is a revelation for me. Of course if I am not sleeping I don’t have energy to meal plan and shop and cook. OF COURSE.

I feel silly writing it all out, but whatever.

Anyway, I’m acting like a person who’s trying to do as much for her fibromyalgia as she can on her own. First thing, biofeedback via Hearthmath.

Today’s #100DaysOfCode progress:

I completed all of the “Basic HTML and HTML5” challenges at freeCodeCamp.

I also read/watched the following:

• How I got my first developer job at age 40 after 10 months of hard work
• The tools and resources that landed me a front-end developer job
• Join the #100DaysOfCode
• How to Get a Developer Job in Less Than a Year
• 100 Days Of Code - The Rules #100DaysOfCode - YouTube
• Learning to Code: When It Gets Dark

I forked the 100 Days of Code repository to make my own 100 Days of Code Log.

I also set up a Dev page in Notion, with subpages to track goals, deadlines, schedules, a reading list, tools and resources, and notes about things I always forget. (Like how to do forms in HTML5. Because I’m very old-fashioned and not used to it being so straightforward.)

But Kimberly, why are you doing this now? Aren’t you getting a PhD in cosplay or something?

I’m getting a PhD in Library and Information Science. Knowing how to code has rarely made anyone’s life worse.

But one of the main reasons is that, though I’ve been developing websites for about 25 years, I have almost never made money off of it. Which is kind of ridiculous, when you think about who gets paid what for what. It occurred to me that perhaps my potentially lucrative hobby might be a thing that could make me money.

And why I’m doing it right now, is that yesterday I started watching the BeyondProf webinar, “3 Things You Should Do Now to Maintain Momentum in Your Job Search.” BeyondProf is always putting out great stuff and this is no exception. Maren got real about what higher ed might look like in terms of hiring in the near future. And sure, the likelihood of getting a tenure track has been tiny for years.

But until recently, alt-ac seemed like a very good option. A preferable option, even, in my case maybe.

And in this webinar, Maren confirmed what I began to suspect when I heard about hiring freezes at local institutions: that Plan B (or, again, in my case, probably Plan A) well is about to dry up. She talked about having to take odd jobs while you figure stuff out.

And I asked myself in what industry I could be content taking an entry-level position at age 40, with a PhD in LIS and 9 years of experience in education, aside from the cough number of years I’ve spent in grad school. (When I graduate, it will be 9. I will have spent half of my post-grad time in full-time work, and half of it in full-time school.)

The answer was immediately apparent: tech. The nice thing, too, about gaining web development skills is that it doesn’t actually chain you to the tech industry. Lots of library vendors, socially conscious businesses, and non-profits need web developers. And pay them better than they pay librarians. (I know money shouldn’t be a thing or whatever but I have a lot of loans and health care expenses and a 30+ year old house that needs maintaining, so. Also, hi there, we live in late stage capitalism, it means we need money to survive.)

Anyway.

My goal is to have all the skills needed to be a full stack developer by the time I graduate in May 2021, so that if necessary, I’ll have my pick of front end, back end, and full stack jobs.

My deadline for some kind of employment is November 2021, when my student loan deferment grace period will end.

Is it ambitious? Yes, but I’m not starting from scratch.

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been sitting on an accepted-with-revisions paper for well over a year. (I know. I know. Okay?) The paper needs major revision, which I will do.

I’m actually kind of glad I let it sit for so long, because it gave me the opportunity to look at the reviews again with fresh eyes. I went through this thing when I first got the decision where I was very excited to be accepted with revisions. Then I read Reviewer 2’s comments.

Reviewer 2 says things like, “This feels like the work of a beginning researcher ‘writing one’s way’ into a topic.” Reviewer 2 is not wrong. I wrote this my first semester of the PhD program, sat on it for 3 years, and revised it minimally before submitting. (I KNOW. I had a baby, okay? And then he turned into a toddler. SHH.) I re-read it before reading the reviews this time, and REVIEWER 2 IS NOT WRONG.

I also took Wendy Belcher’s point that reviewers who take the time to offer detailed comments think something is worth working on until it’s better and can be published; if they thought it was worthless, they would simply say it should be rejected. (The decision recommendation from Reviewer 2 was “Not acceptable as is; needs major revisions as indicated.” There is an option for straightforward rejection; Reviewer 2 did not take it.)

The first time I looked at these reviews, I read Reviewer 2’s comments and got all “BOO you don’t get me, you’re wrong” and now I’m like, “Oh, Reviewer 2, you’re so right, thank you thank you thank you.” Because Reviewer 2 said:

The conclusion’s intriguing ideas indicate that perhaps the author, after writing the paper, has discovered a few trends in the review that, if revisited, could reshape the literature review to be more powerful and deliver more impact, finding deeper insights than those that are listed here. I hypothesize that this is one of the first research pieces written by a student doing first forays into scholarly writing, and that now that this preliminary work is done, a second attempt would be more nuanced and in-depth.

And Reviewer 2 also said:

It may be that focusing on three topics meant that all three issues could only be covered in a cursory way within the page limitations. It might be interesting to consider going deep in just one or two of these areas, which might open up more space for that deeper understanding to happen.

This is a brilliant idea. My original audience for this was a professor, who needs to know different things than other researchers and library professionals might.

From now on, I think I’ll think of peer review as getting free editing.

I have a lot to think about. This is going to be a lot of work to rewrite. But it’s going to be really good work to do, and will (I hope) break me of my distaste for/impatience with revision. (As an editor, I’m super into deep revision. As a writer, I’ve already moved onto the next thing…)

Time to be my own developmental editor, I think.

Since the beginning of my doctoral program, I’ve struggled to situate my work and research interests. The role of libraries in learning. Interest-driven learning in libraries. Connected learning. Information literacy and learning. In particular, geeky interests and their relationship to learning. Nothing felt quite right.

Last year, a new journal called Information and Learning Sciences launched. I noticed. I maybe signed up for table of contents alerts? I don’t know. But I kind of forgot about it for a while.

I remembered it again when I needed to read a couple of chapters from the book Reconceptualizing Libraries: Perspectives from the Information and Learning Sciences for my comps, but then once I was done with that, it slipped out of my mind again.

People have only been embracing the interdisciplinarity of these two particular fields for the past few years; nobody really would have thought to use them together before that. Now, this is a defined interdisciplinary intersection with a growing body of scholarship, and it is a place where I can actually plant a flag for my own work.

It’s funny, because right before I started my PhD program, one of my colleagues at LEARN NC, Joseph Hooper, and I would talk about the intersection of LIS and LS all the time. And if you look at my coursework choices, one of the only courses I’ve taken that was about content rather than theory development and methods is Intoduction to Cognitive Science and Sociocultural Perspectives on Learning. It feels like I should have arrived at the realization that this is where my work sits much earlier.

But it doesn’t really matter. I’m there now, and I’m looking forward to immersing myself in the relatively small body of literature about it and seeing how it relates to my dissertation work and other research plans.

I’m reading Dr. Katie Linder’s blog archive. One of her earliest posts is titled 51 Tips to Help Academic Writers Be More Productive. It’s a very different sort of set of tips than the kind I was complaining about yesterday. The latter is all about telling you what kind of work you ought to be doing. Not, here are actual tools to help you get the work done, but just… remember all this work you could be doing. Don’t forget how you could use this time wisely.

(Phrases I hate: “use your time wisely” and “live up to your potential.” Blargh. If I want to fritter my life away reading fantasy novels and only be an A- student, that’s my business, middle school teachers. Oops, sorry, went to a dark and distant place there.)

Dr. Linder’s post, on the other hand, doesn’t remind you that there’s work you could be doing. Instead, it gives you tips for how to tackle the work you’ve decided to do.

Her first tip is to start a daily writing practice. I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, and struggle to build up consistency. So I went beyond Dr. Linder’s help, and went to another favorite scholar of mine, Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega. He offers four strategies, both for creating a good container in your schedule for writing, and for deciding what to write when you’re making it a point to write daily so you don’t just stare at a blank screen for 15 minutes a day.

The first of his tips involves working to deadline like Wendy Belcher suggests in her book, Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks. So I “got out” my ebook copy of that book and looking through the table of contents, discovered that she has a whole chapter dedicated to responding to journal feedback.

Well, I’ve been sitting on an accepted with revisions article for well over a year, and it’s pretty embarrassing. The other day I sat down to make the revisions and got overwhelmed quickly. I ordered a print of both the article and the reviewer comments from Staples, so that should be here soon. And now I have this schedule from Belcher’s book that’s got me ready to actually get down to it.

So here I am, essentially going to do Dr. Jo Van Every’s 15 minute #acwri challenge, using this revision to launch my daily writing practice. Guess what Internet? You’re my writing buddy and you’re going to keep me accountable.

Here’s the schedule:

4/15 - 4/19, Read through p. 298 in the book and follow the instructions for reading the editor’s letter and reviewers’ reports.
4/20 - 4/26, Identify which journal decision was made and decide how I will respond.
4/27 - 5/2, Prepare a list of recommended changes and how I plan to respond to them.
5/3 - 5/9, Revise the article.
5/10 - 5/16, Draft my revision cover letter and send the article back out.

Basically, a month to turn this thing around. And I’m going to try to have my (sadly at different times of day, thanks coronavirus) work schedule be:

First 15 minutes: Settle in, review to-do list. Second 15 minutes: Write. Remaining time: Work on data collection and other tasks.

We just finished up week 4 of staying at home. In one sense, I didn’t have much going on before this; grad school and parenting a young child don’t really leave much space for doing things. But I’m realizing now how I do have even less going on, because I’m not even going on playdate outings or whatever.

We started watching Animaniacs with M, just in time to get excited for new episodes coming sometime ever.

Like so many other people, I’m growing weary of doing all of my communicating with people who don’t live with me via Zoom call. I do like being able to see people’s faces; I hate phone calls. But it’s wearying, right?

I found out that I didn’t get a dissertation completion fellowship from my school. That would have covered my tuition, fees, and health insurance, and given me a (very modest) stipend to cover living expenses. Because life, I have missed the deadlines for all similar awards. (Though I only found 4 I was eligible for anyway.) This has prompted a lot of questions for myself about what comes next, specifically in terms of being able to contribute to my family’s financial wellbeing, which is going to need a lot more help because our childcare costs are more than doubling next year. I’m reluctant to take a (eventually) face-to-face full-time job, because I want to be with my kid in the afternoons. He’ll get out of school at 3:15 and I want to be there to pick him up, not put him in aftercare or delegate that to somebody else.

So, what can I do, that will pay me, lets me work from 9 - 3, and is flexible enough to accommodate both dissertating and chronic illness? I’ve landed on freelance editing, which I did for a few months after getting my MSLS. (And maybe a little writing, but it doesn’t pay as well.) My current assistantship contract ends on May 15; I’m open to taking on new work any time after that. If you need an editor, get in touch. I’m hoping the university will be able to work with me to at least fund my tuition and fees, but tuition doesn’t buy groceries or pay preschool teachers, soooooo…

That was kind of the biggest thing that went down this week. I spent a day moping about it and not feeling like doing much else. But I did read some Internet things. Let me share them with you!

I will be soothed, actually

Why We Turn to Jane Austen in Dark Times I love Jane Austen. This does a great job of explaining how her works are soothing without denying that life is hard sometimes.

I try to check Tumblr’s Week in Review most weeks, because I want to know what people are fans of. When I saw #cottagecore pop up, I was intrigued. It’s kind of like… hygge with more fairy rings and fawns? And also, from what I’m reading, a queer-friendly aesthetic in a way some other Internet aesthetics aren’t.I wanted an explainer, and the Internet gave me one. And then it gave me two more. This has me pondering Internet aesthetics. I’ll let you know what I’m thinking about those as I develop my thoughts further. (But FYI, two of my favorites are vaporwave and [seapunk]aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Seap….)

Also, I’m fairly certain the appeal of cottagecore/farmcore is related to phenomena like the Joy of Missing Out and the general consumerist move toward coziness more broadly. (I even briefly thought, “Maybe I should crochet big cozy blankets and sell them for exorbitant sums.” None of us are immune to this sort of thinking, I fear…) Also I got a little grouchy reading about grandmillenials, who I guess seem to me to be wee babes rediscovering the New Domesticity and sharing it online as though Gen X didn’t already do that over 15 years ago…

Currently

📖: Blue Mind by Wallace J. Nichols, A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland
🎬: ST:TNG in 40 Hours
🦸‍♀️: The Power of X
🎮: Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask, Lego Marvel Superheroes 2

My preferred comedy format, though I’ve not really performed it, is sketch. Yes, I did improv for years, but basically because a sketch teacher was like “It’s like sketch if you didn’t write it first.” It was only recently in conversation with my mother-in-law and W that I realized that this love of sketch dates from when I was around 3 years old (like so many things!), and that aside from my parents' churchy sketch parody show “Sunday Night Live” (which was one of my favorite things my parents ever did when I was a kid), this love of sketch also came from Sesame Street and The Muppet Show.

(A friend signed my high school yearbook, “Maybe you will become a writer for Saturday Night Live and then I can start watching it again.")

Now that M is deep into Muppets and I’m more familiar with comedic structure, I’m noticing how good Sesame Street and The Muppets are at these things. This sketch with The Martians is a great example of a fish-out-of-water situation, playing the game of the scene, the rule of threes, and breaking the pattern.

Kind of makes sense that Muppets would be the source of solid comedy, given their background on SNL and everything.

I submitted proposed changes to my research design to my committee today. I had to make these changes in light of COVID-19 eliminating the possibility of in-person fieldwork and the fact that my work has been both delayed and slowed due to not having my regular childcare/daily rhythm.

Here are the changes I’m making:

CONSENT

The consent document will be distributed to participants as a form in Qualtrics; they will certify that by submitting the form, they are consenting to participate in the research.

SUMMARY

1. Information horizon interviews will be conducted remotely via Microsoft Zoom, rather than in person. Participants will draw their information horizon maps, photograph them, and send them to the researcher via email or text. 2.The interview protocol will include a question about the anticipated impact of COVID-19 on the cosplayer’s future information practices.
2. Instead of inviting broad participation from the cosplay community, the research will use convenience sampling, inviting participation from cosplayers that she met at a con in 2019 and use snowball sampling to find additional participants to invite. She will only open up broad participation if she is unable to meet the minimum number of participants (10) through these methods.
3. Artifacts for the artifact analysis component will be selected, not based on the sustained, systematic observation of affinity space ethnography as originally described, but based on the responses of participants during the information horizon interview. Historical artifacts may be more prevalent than current artifacts, as most conventions are being postponed or canceled and cosplayers may not be working as intensely to meet cosplay deadlines.
4. There will be no participant observation.

First, some cute things my kid said.

He was talking about flushing the toilet and said that the contents go to the “water landfill.”

Also, I don’t like poop jokes, but he does. He asked if he could tell me a pee joke. I said, “No, I don’t like those either.” He said, “Why don’t you like waste jokes?”

So cute.

It’s the end of week three of social distancing over here, and we’re still relatively okay with each other as a family. M. is doing normal three-year-old stuff, W. and I aren’t sleeping well but at different times of night (he stays up late, I wake up and can’t get back to sleep). I’ve moved from anxiety into depression but am combatting it with as much sunlight as I can and it seems to be helping.

I had a week full of video calls: one with some Bronzer friends (the first two guests on my still-not-available-yet Buffy podcast, not especially coincidentally), with my BFF from middle and high school (that’s a link to her photography portfolio with a picture she took of M. when he was 6 days old). It was so lovely to see her face and chat, and I hope to do it again soon. I did Quarantine Book Club with Austin Kleon. I used Marco Polo to wish another friend’s cat well and was rewarded with a video of said cat making amazing cat sounds.

Today I did a video call with my advisor and another committee member, and we made a game plan that has soothed my concerns about being able to complete my research. It involves revising my methods some and scaling back the scope of the study. As my advisor said, “Would it be cool to do what you said you were going to do? Yes. But you can’t.” Eyes on the prize: me graduated in 2021.

I’ve been reading a lot online (I always read more articles when I spend less time on social media), adding to my ever growing pile of books I’m reading, enjoying watching Picard, and often having chocolate oatmeal for breakfast with a bit of peanut butter added. (It’s like having a no-bake cookie for breakfast; highly recommend.)

With that, let me recommend some online reading you might find fun or valuable.

Supporting Independent Bookstores

McSweeney’s has some thoughts and some advice on how you can help independent bookstores. I don’t have a ton of money to throw around, but I did buy myself and my kid books from our local independent bookstore, which is having their distributor ship the books directly to me.

One way you can support those independent bookstores is by buying books for your book clubs, which are apparently flourishing right now.

Funny Stuff

Speaking of McSweeney’s, their funny stuff often hits exactly the right spot for me. Witness:

• I Know There Is a Pandemic, but I Am Leaving You for Bob Ross - A friend told me that ASMR videos always help her when she has a migraine. They didn’t do anything for me, but when I started poking around in the broader ASMR world I found the suggestion of watching Bob Ross, and he DOES help my migraines. I’m not leaving W. for him, but if I had a partner like the (I sure hope imaginary) narrator of this does, I might, in spite of his being dead.
• Self-Isolation or Graduate School? - In case you missed it when I shared it earlier. Comedy gold, if you are in its very narrow target audience.
• Frog and Toad Are Self-Quarantined Friends is perfect and beautiful, and now M. doesn’t want to play regular Frog and Toad, he wants to play Quarantine!Frog and Toad.

But they aren’t the only ones! Vulture brings it with If I Wrote a Coronavirus Episode. The 30 Rock, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, andYou’re the Worst offerings are perfect and oh my goodness Jane the Virgin actually filmed part of theirs. Will this prompt me to write fanfiction? Very possibly, because I’m sad that New Girl wasn’t in there.

Scary Stuff

Skip this section if you don’t want to read scary pandemic thoughts, but I found these pieces really helpful.

• How the Pandemic Will End(The Atlantic)
• The Four Possible Timelines for Life Returning to Normal(The Atlantic)
• It’s the End and Nothing Feels Fine Apocalypse/zombie scholar and my new post-ac hero Kelly J. Baker talks about how this thing that feels like an apocalypse is very different from the apocalypse stories we tell ourselves.

Cut Yourself a Break

Okay, that’s enough scary, here’s some posts to convince you to give yourself some grace.

• I Can’t Write About the Pandemic, But I Can’t Write About Anything Else “…avoid thinking like a careerist… Use your creative time to escape the zeitgeist… write the book that you most need to write.”
• Against Productivity in a Pandemic “This is not a time to optimize or stoically pretend nothing has changed… This is a time to sustain.” “We do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive…” - Jenny Odell in How to Do Nothing I’ve been thinking more about maintenance and care since I read How to Do Nothing last summer, and I think right now especially it is where our focus should be. Which brings me to…
• Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure This is a brilliant map, especially for academics, for how to get through this time. I am taking it to heart fully; once I get my revised research plans in place, I’m going to get some of my home stuff sorted out before trying to get back to work. I will be reading and re-reading and re-reading again this piece over the coming weeks.
• Now Is the Perfect Time to Lower the Parenting Bar Sometimes I do elaborate activities with my kid. It’s usually to keep me from being bored. The rest of the time, we’re reading or he’s playing while I rest. Sometimes we watch TV, but I try to save it for when I need it. “Unlike the running joke that every working parent, single parent, or stay-at-home parent has uttered at some point, that ‘everyone was alive’ at the end of the day, that is actually the real job we all have right now. Trying to keep people alive. Even people we don’t know and can’t see, at the end of the day, every day, until this thing is done.”

Poetry

April is National Poetry Month. I highly recommend signing up for the Poem-a-Day newsletter from Poets.org. I’ll probably start listening to The Slowdown and watching Patrick Stewart read sonnets, too.

• The Function of Humor in the Neighborhood “I wrote this poem in response to criticism that my work is ‘too funny to be taken seriously.’ I wanted to explain that I am writing in a Jewish tradition where nothing is more serious than humor.” - Allison Pitinii Davis This resonated so strongly with me. It also reminded me of that old Mel Brooks quote: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
• Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale”Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope, where you can rest and wait.“ This is a great reminder for those of us who are privileged enough to be in a situation where we can rest and wait.
• Probably you should check out my friend Kit’s Instagram because he is writing a haiku a day and just… well, go get to know him that way. You won’t regret it.

What pandemic?

This post about Jessica Drew Spider-Woman’s costume (and Batgirl too) speaks much of what’s in my heart. As I’ve been planning cosplays, I’ve been thinking about both the extent to which I feel like playing up my sexiness (I don’t, not in cosplay, really) and also what’s comfortable (hint: not most superhero costumes, especially the ones for women). The awesome moto Spider-Woman costume here is one of my planned cosplays for whenever I can cosplay somewhere. (Still need to put together gloves and glasses.) I was so excited when I learned there would be a new Spider-Woman book, because I’ve been missing her, and so sad when I saw what her next costume will look like. Seems like with every iteration, it gets closer and closer to being less like spandex and more like body paint. I don’t mind unrealistic proportions. I do prefer outfits that look easy to fight in, though.

Until next time!

• All you have to do this month is allow for things to feel uncertain.
• Now is a good time to construct a solid home inside yourself so that you stop looking for a home in everyone else.
• Now is the time to find beauty in what’s cracked or broken.
• Resist delusional thinking when it comes to productivity.

This is part two of a series in which I’m writing up how Austin Kleon’s work particularly relevant for scholars, researchers, and academics. For a quick overview of his book Steal Like an Artist, you can watch Kleon’s TED talk.

You can find the previous post in this series here.

2. Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started. Kleon argues that it is in the act of making stuff that you discover who you are. This is true for research and academic writing, as well. It’s possible that this applies mostly to early career scholars, but I think scholars have the opportunity to reinvent themselves many times in a career, so it can apply more broadly.

Don’t wait until you have a research design to start thinking and writing about a topic. If there’s something you’re interested in, go ahead and start reading in that area. Write up your reading notes. They will come in handy when you’re ready to design your research.

Don’t wait until you have a narrow field of expertise to conduct a study. My first study was on the leadership practices of school librarians. My second was on school library preparation program’s special education courses. My dissertation is about the information literacy practices of cosplayers. These are not all related at all, but I learned different things during each one. (Or, in the case of my dissertation, am still learning.) The first study used a survey methodology, the second content analysis, the third ethnographic methods. I also conducted two small-scale studies for my coursework. If I waited to find my one true calling until I started designing studies, I probably never would have designed any studies. (I’ve actually designed many more than I’ve completed; maybe I’ll use those designs eventually. I really like designing studies. I’ve thought about hiring myself out as a sort of “research best friend” to talk people through their study design process.)

Kleon encourages creatives to copy their heroes. Scholars can copy - but not plagiarize - the work of others in a variety of ways. My favorite is to apply someone else’s research methods to a new population or scenario, adding on something extra to make the study uniquely mine. For my Master’s paper, I copied Daniella Smith’s methods, using the Leadership Practices Inventory. Dr. Smith used this to measure the self-perceived leadership practices of preservice school librarians, people who were training as school librarians but were not yet employed as such. I used the same instrument to measure the self-perceived leadership practices of National Board Certified school librarians - school librarians with at least three years of professional school library experience who had submitted to a rigorous certification program. This is a very different population, but I used the same instrument. I also added a second instrument, which I had developed to measure school librarians' ability to implement professional guidelines, then investigated the relationship between leadership and that ability. I copied, but it was not a perfect copy. (And as Kleon points out, it never can be - in the case of research, something about your settings or materials or analysis is bound to be different.)

For my dissertation, I am building on the methods of Dr. Crystle Martin’s dissertation, using her interview and online artifact analysis methods with cosplayers. She used these methods with World of Warcraft players. Again, a different population. I also, in my original design, added face-to-face observation - something that built on her work but made it my own. (In the wake of COVID-19, I am sadly not sure how much face-to-face observation I will be able to do. We’ll see.)

Next time: Write the book you want to read.

Austin Kleon is one of the creative people who have had the greatest influence on my thinking about art, life, and parenthood. I actually had a bit of a freakout tonight whenI couldn’t find my copies of Steal Like an Artist and Keep Going. (I’ve loaned my copy of Show Your Work to a friend.) They turned up, though, and thank goodness.

For years, I’ve thought someone should write up how his work is particularly relevant for scholars, researchers, and academics. (Often, one person is all three, but it felt worth listing them separately here.) Maybe somebody has, but I haven’t seen it, so I’m going to do it. For a quick overview of Steal Like an Artist, you can watch Kleon’s TED talk.

I’m going to do this as a series of 10 posts, one post per point on Kleon’s list/chapter in the book. First up:

1. Steal like an artist. Kleon points out that nothing is wholly original. With scholarship, it is a key part of designing research to situate our planned work in the work that came before it. We have a whole section of most scholarly writing devoted to this: the literature review. Kleon suggests that we build a family tree of thinkers, finding one who influences us and then learning everything about them, then learning about three people who influenced them, on and on up the chain as far as we can go. This is basically what citation chaining is. Kleon focuses on backward citation chaining. I wonder if the academic’s process of forward citation chaining might be useful for other creatives; what would Kleon think about finding other people who have the same influences as you and exploring their work downstream? I imagine this wouldn’t be as easy to do as it is for researchers, who can simply pop a reference in Google Scholar, Scopus, or Web of Science and track down the things that reference it, but it might still be valuable to do.

Kleon recommends saving your “thefts” for later. Scholars can do this by keeping up with the work in their field (I’m personally a fan of subscribing to journal table of contents by email and setting up Google Scholar alerts), skimming it, and keeping a research notebook to help them keep track of all of the things they’ve read.

One thing that applies perhaps more uniquely to scholars - though maybe works for other creatives, too - is to look for places where other scholars have explicitly called for work that builds on theirs. I don’t know to what extent other people mine the “Future research” sections of studies for their own work, but I have found it immensely valuable. Both my Master’s paper and dissertation topics came from paying close attention to where other scholars have called for work that builds on theirs. It’s been particularly rewarding to do this with my dissertation, as Dr. Crystle Martin, whose dissertation inspired mine, is on my committee and this is the first time she’s really seen someone build on her work. Why do we do all of this work if all that is going to happen is that it will sit unread somewhere? I suppose some people do it because they have to for job security or being competitive on the job market, but I like to imagine that most of us at least started with a plan for doing our research because we thought it could improve the world somehow. Drawing on other scholars’ work to build ours brings that work out of archives and into the world.

As Kleon quotes Mark Twain saying,

It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.

Next time: Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started.

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about what I consider the golden age of blogging - probably 2001 - 2004. Some people might consider this late, since the first blogs showed up in 1997. Other people would consider it early; I’ve recently seen people refer to 2008 and 2009 as the best time for blogging in their memory.

Regardless, as soon as comments were a feature people could have on their blogs, they became a part of what made blogs special. Reverse chronological order, single posts, sure sure, but also the comments.

When I had my first blog, back in 2001, I longed for comments. My blog was hand-coded HTML and CSS, and I just didn’t have the chops for making comments happen. So as soon as I realized I could (probably when I switched from a free host to a paid host), I switched from hand-coding to using Greymatter, almost entirely because it handled comments.

I started kimberlyhirsh.com in 2009 on WordPress, so it always had comments. When I moved it to Micro.blog at the end of last year, the comments didn’t come with it. People could @-reply on Micro.blog itself. They could reach out to me via Twitter, Tumblr, or email. But they couldn’t comment directly on the post.

In an ideal IndieWeb world, everyone would have their own site, and write their replies on their and send webmentions here and, now that Micro.blog displays conversations on posts, they would magically appear and it would be beautiful. But most of the people who want to interact with me online are not steeped in the IndieWeb. They might like to comment, but it is an extra-extra step asking them to communicate not on the post directly, after they’ve probably already taken the extra step to click over to the post from wherever it’s syndicated that they saw it.

As long as I’ve been here, Micro.blog has had a help document with information on enabling Comments with Disqus. I’ve been getting used to Micro.blog and tweaking my space here incrementally, and this is the latest increment. I really hope people will use it. Looking at other peoples' blogs and the conversations that have gone on in their comments makes me hope for times when that’s how things will happen again.

I’m trying a new thing with a weekly round-up on Friday.

This has been the second week of social distancing for us. We order our groceries via Instacart, always tipping 10%. I’m wondering now if we should tip higher. If they go on strike, we will find other ways to get groceries, but as someone who is potentially high risk for COVID-19, it has been such a blessing/privilege to be able to get groceries this way.

This was our first week “back” from M’s earlier-than-expected spring break, which means Zoom calls with babies, toddlers, preschoolers, parents, and teachers at 9:30 am every morning. It’s been such a balm to see all those precious faces, to hear the kids say each other’s names and say hello. M and I also did a call with the family of one of his dearest friends. He wasn’t super interested, so it was mostly me talking to them, but it was still nice to do. (Moms trying to talk to each other while the kids are around, though, isn’t really a thing that can happen.)

I have stolen a few moments here and there to work on both my dissertation research and the research for my assistantship. I’m hopeful that next week I’ll be able to dig into those more.

Very little gets done aside from keeping the kid alive. I have had a couple of glorious baths with sea or Epsom salt in them. Media gets consumed. Sleep happens, though often poorly. We eat, and the food mostly isn’t junk (my Hershey-bar-with-almonds habit notwithstanding) but I wouldn’t say there’s much cooking going on. W makes tacos, or I toss some chicken and potatoes in the Instant Pot.

It’s been beautiful outside. Going out and sitting on the deck, it’s easy to forget what a scary time we’re living in. People walk their dogs on the trail. Kids ride bikes. M and W’s mom play in the yard with a beautiful set of fairies and animals that she got for M.

I am trying to blog daily. I spent a late night using every resource from holisticism that mentions purpose or career to help me think about what’s up with my life. While I don’t think the movement of the heavens controls what we do, I think astrology and human design are valuable tools for interrogating ourselves. If we’re reading a description that is supposed to be of us, we can ask ourselves whether it resonates or not. Mine usually does.

Between those resources and Co-star, I am coming to terms with the fact that while I want to do meaningful and helpful work, my priority in life is more home and family and less career. Not that I don’t want one, but that career doesn’t define me. I’m realizing that spontaneous self-expression is very important to me, as is interrogating identity and how it is constructed. I’m embracing the fact that blogging is the most accessible form of spontaneous self-expression for me, that it’s one I’ve been carrying on in one form or another for almost 20 years, and that it’s a very fine hobby to have as one’s primary hobby. The others wax and wane, but blogging is always here.

This is a nice segue into what I’ve been reading online this week, because as I decided to really embrace kimberlyhirsh.com as a personal blog rather than a professional blog or something aimed at getting me jobs or providing income, I’ve been reading about personal blogging and its value. Here are some of the things I read that stuck with me:

• How blogs changed everything This is a post from 2009, but still has a lot of value today. My favorite part is when Rosenberg says, “Blogging allows us to think out loud together.” I love the concept of blogging-as-thinking. Every time I run across it, I go, “Oh YEAH! THAT’s why we do this!”
• Personal Blogging Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me This more recent piece, written in 2015 and updated in 2017, references the earlier one. The author writes:

Personal blogging does not require you to become an expert at anything but your life. We’re all experts at our own lives, and sometimes we have experiences that are universal that would bring like-minded people together. We share these experiences on a personal blog in the hopeful attempt to reach out and make other people who are going through the same thing a little less alone.

This helped me think about the purpose of my site/blog. It’s three-fold: first, it serves as a way for people who meet me to get to know me deeply. Whether we meet face-to-face or online, it has value because I try to be myself here. I’m old enough that I’m kind of done pretending to be something I’m not. If people see what I write here and don’t want to work with me or be friends with me, we weren’t going to be a good fit anyway. Second, it serves as a set of reminders to myself. My future self is the primary audience for this blog. Over and over I search its archives for things I’ve written, whether about health or academics or something else entirely. Third, it is a way to help people, to make them feel less alone, or to illuminate processes that may be opaque to them. This is really what this quote is getting at. (You’ll notice the new description, with both Helpfulness and Transparency included in it. That’s what this is about.)

• The Personal Blog This piece, from 2014, claims that there is a renaissance of personal blogging happening. I like to imagine that’s still the case, or perhaps even moreso now than it was them. (For more on this question, see The blog is dead. long live the blog, The Death of the Blog, Again, Again, and Blogging is most certainly not dead.) This quote resonated with me in particular:

There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.

This is happening more and more, especially with technologies like webmentions supporting it. (Hat-tip to @c, author of that article.)

And this is an especially valuable moment for it, for focusing on this small bit of the digital world over which we have control:

• Let a website be a worry stone.
• Outlet

Finally on the personal blog front, Robin Sloan and Colin Walker really get at the reason I’m embracing kimberlyhirsh.com as a fully personal blog (which will necessarily include my work, because it’s part of who I am):

The thing about blogging is, you can just write about the things you love. A “professional” “critic” (scare quotes because who even knows what words mean anymore) has to do something else, something more difficult: manage a kind of unfolding… aesthetic… worldview? Balance one thing against the other? A blogger suffers no such burden. A blogger can simply

1. love a thing, and
2. write about it.

In that aforementioned new tagline, “Enthusiasm” is the first word. It’s placement is very deliberate, I assure you.

And one more thing. Because it’s All Muppets All the Time (my DVD set of Season 1 of The Muppet Show just arrived!), I really appreciated this article asking Why Doesn’t Disney+ Have More Muppet Stuff?.

Last but not least, current consumption:
🎵: Labyrinth Original Motion Picture Soundtrack/The Muppets (2011) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
📖: Blue Mind by Wallce J. Nichols
🎬: Picard
🦸‍♀️: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures
🎮: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Lego Marvel Superheroes, Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask, Lego Marvel Superheroes 2

The other day I mentioned how I named my sister after a preschool friend.

When I was 3, I was looking at a catalog - maybe a toy catalog or a catalog for a baby supply store a la Babies R Us - and I found a picture of a blonde toddler girl in it. My friend Elizabeth was older than me, and blonde, and I thought she was great and that her name was the best name. (I have no idea what her last name is, what became of her, etc.) I had been telling my parents that I wanted a baby sister. I took the catalog to them, pointing at the picture of the toddler with blonde hair and light eyes, and said, “I want that baby to be my little sister. Her name will be Elizabeth.”

My parents, both dark-haired, one with brown eyes and one with blue, said, “We’ll do our best, but we might not be able to get that exact baby.” I was adamant.

I did get a little sister. When my mom went into labor (we were in the middle of having pizza for dinner, and her water broke, and she said, “Oof! My water broke!"), I went to my grandmother’s house and spent the night with her. In the morning, I talked with my parents on the phone. “You have a baby sister,” they told me. I was like, DUH. “Her name is Mary Elisabeth.”

I was LIVID. I scolded them for giving her the wrong name. Elizabeth, with a Z, was supposed to be her first name. And they’d made it her middle name? That was untenable. (I wouldn’t put it past my four-year-old self to know the word untenable, but I don’t think I did.)

They explained that “Elisabeth Mary” didn’t sound as good. I don’t know if I ever found out why they went with the S instead of the Z. I prefer the S now anyway.

She was born with light brown hair and light eyes, but it quickly became apparent that my parents had, in fact, produced a blonde baby sister for me. Eventually I forgave them for getting her name wrong.

After realizing that 1. The Muppets (specifically those of The Muppet Show) is pretty much my first fandom and 2. I got into them when I was the same age M. is now (3) and they still bring me immense joy, I’ve been thinking about what other things I was super into at that time, and trying to bring them back into my life.

In addition to The Muppets, I was very into swimming and going to the beach. I can’t do either of those things right now, but I have been reading [Blue Mind] while taking salt water baths, and it is scratching that itch.

I went to see my first musical when I was three. It was A Chorus Line. I remember not understanding how speakers work, so I kept insisting to my parents that there was a performer behind me. It’s weird to realize that these are the days that will be the foundation of M.’s earliest memories, memories he’ll still have when he’s in his 30s and beyond. I’ve been listening to cast recordings more lately than I have in a while. (It’s taking me forever to get through Hadestown. It’s gorgeous, but so long.) Broadway HD has a 7 day trial, so I’m planning to get that and maybe keep it for a month or two.

I’m pretty sure I was super into Star Wars already at this age (and so is M.). I’ve been systematically consuming ALL THE STAR WARS CONTENT thanks to the Star Wars Canon Timeline (in release order, of course, because I’m me). I’d taken a break to dig into some other stuff, but I’ll probably get back to it soon.

The other things I know I liked when I was three including imagining what it would be like to be a ballerina (but not actually doing ballet, apparently I was creeped out by the mirrors?), and this one girl named Elizabeth. Who I ended up naming my sister after. But that’s another story for another blog post. (Maybe tomorrow.)

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Challenging @ailuruscosmos to join me for a #showtunesisters duet. An anecdote: one time after one of my improv student shows, ME came out with the class to the brewery. Someone told us we sound alike. When one of us mentioned that our voice teacher said we had all the same vocal problems, someone said, "You sing? Will you sing for us now?" I said, "Sure, what do you want us to sing?" Clearly thinking they had us stumped, this person said, "The Confrontation from Les Mis." This person did not know that we had watched @nph and @jasonsegel do this time and again on the Megan Mullally show and Inside the Actor's Studio. (Look it up. The best part might be @joshradnor's reactions.) #broadway #showtunes #lesmiserables #lesmis #confrontation #javert #valjean

A post shared by Kimberly Hirsh (@kimberlyhirsh) on Mar 24, 2020 at 1:49pm PDT