Links
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Raising Us Wrecked Her Career But My Mom’s Thriving In Her Second Act romper.com
Read: www.romper.com
My mom was just hitting her second act stride when leukemia knocked her down. I hope that as the treatment side effects are better managed, she’ll be able to get back into it.
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Can Motherhood Be a Mode of Rebellion? | The New Yorker newyorker.com
Read: www.newyorker.com
An amazing essay in conversation with Angela Garbes’s new book, Essential Labor.
a person can get paid more to sit in front of her computer and send a bunch of e-mails than she can to do a job so crucial and difficult that it seems objectively holy: to clean excrement off a body, to hold a person while they are crying, to cherish them because of and not despite their vulnerability.
Her husband’s job provided health insurance and regular paychecks; Garbes writes that it “may take me a lifetime to undo the false notion that my work is somehow less valuable than his.”
It feels shameful to admit that I don’t have the desire to hustle up that same ladder.
Parenthood likewise forces an encounter with the illogic of the market: good fortune means getting to pay someone less than you make to do a job that’s harder and probably more important than your own.
parenting toward a more just world requires more than diverse baby dolls and platitudes about equality.
She quotes the writer Carvell Wallace, who, after the 2016 election, told his children, “One of the most important questions you have to answer for yourself is this: Do I believe in loving everyone? Or do I only believe in loving myself and my people?”
How can mothering be a way that we resist and combat the loneliness, the feeling of being burdened by our caring?
motherhood has also granted me a chance to see what my life is like when I reorganize it around care and interdependence in a way that stretches far beyond my daughter.
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“This is the Book I’m Meant to Write Right Now” sarafredman.substack.com
Read: sarafredman.substack.com
This interview is huge. Life-alteringly huge.
Angela Garbes, who usually line edits as she writes:
I can’t revise an idea, no matter how good it is, in my brain. I can’t revise it if I don’t write it down.
Interviewer Sara Fredman says:
I personally feel torn between feeling like motherhood is the most significant thing I do and that I’ll ever do in my life and also feeling like that’s a trap of some sort.
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Angela Garbes Is Reclaiming Realistic Motherhood thecut.com
Read: www.thecut.com
🔖 You should read Josh Radnor's Museletter.
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.
🔖📚 Kate McKean writes in today’s Agents and Books about professional jealousy. Her advice applies to academics, too, and probably any field. “No one is being successful AT me.”
🔖📚 Read Cozy Flash: The Cat and the Conerian.
Adorable. Cozy fantasy is my current genre of choice.
🔖 Micro.blog is one my favorite places on the Internet, and Jean MacDonald’s article A Guide to Micro.blog For People Who Have A Love/Hate Relationship With Twitter is a good introduction.
🔖 Read Cranking.
🔖 Read The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.
I’ve been thinking a lot about personal productivity, what it’s good for and what it isn’t. This article is about a year and a half old now but it points in a direction of collective solutions.
🔖 Read Who Is Steven Hotdog? Or, Untangling the “Braided Essay” |.
What’s Steven Hotdog to me, or I to Steven Hotdog, that I should weep for him?
Ever since I learned about the Steven Hotdog essay I have loved this descriptor. Jess Zimmerman is one of my favorite writers.
🔖 Read 11 Bookish Accessories to Make Reading More Accessible.
I love pieces like this. Getting a book holder changed my reading life.
🔖 Read Should you ever NOT listen to user feedback?.
I’m exploring the possibility of a career in UX research & reading this article showed me that it’s definitely an area I could get into.
🔖Read Being a Public Librarian Can Be Dangerous Work, Why Don’t We Acknowledge That? - Electric Literature
Libraries are resolutely radical institutions. They are free to use and open to the public, spaces that demand nothing from you to enter and nothing for you to stay. No exchange of money occurs between library user and library, save for overdue book fees, which are becoming more and more obsolete. Libraries are sanctuaries for the mind, body, and spirit. They are repositories of language, literature, community care, and human growth. And they are also places of objectification, racism, sexual assault, and other human atrocities. They are embodiments of our history and culture, for better, and also for worse.
🔖🎵🎭🍿 Read Judas Christ Superstar: Easter thoughts on being just (Reader) by Katie Prout.
This piece is excellent. JCS is an extremely important show to my family as well. I have a lot more thoughts about it and if I feel up to it, I’ll write them up later.
🔖 Read Projects: The Alastair Method.
Alastair Johnston has created a Kanban-like tracking system for the Bullet Journal that I may modify for use as an analog writing audit/pipeline.
🔖 Read ecosystem theory: how to reframe the “i do this or i do that” binary (Thrive PhD) by Katy Peplin
Such a helpful perspective.
🔖 Read Plan to rewrite NC teacher licensing could also raise pay, but it’s too early to say
Educators, what do you think? I’m not sure about the options for evaluation, but I like the idea of teacher leaders getting paid for their leadership work.
🔖 Read Dirty hands do all the thinking in LXD (LXD.org) by Patrick van der Bogt.
🔖 Read The incredible power of paper prototyping (LXD.org) by Niels Floor.
🔖 Read Learning Experience Design vs Instructional Design (LXD.org) by Niels Floor.
🔖 Read Four Ingredients for a Memorable Learning Experience (LXD.org) by Rodrigo J. Gallego
Studying up on Learning Experience Design & Research. Feeling it out for a potential career pivot in 2024.