Kimberly Hirsh

In her week notes, cygnoir links to my post, Political action guidance for the overwhelmed, and credits me as Dr. Kimberly Hirsh.

I appreciate the recognition of my title. I want to say though that I wouldn’t be grouchy to have been credited as Kimberly Hirsh.

I work at a Quaker school. All of us go by our first names, in keeping with the Quaker practice of plain speech and the testimony of equality. This does not make me grouchy.

When I get grouchy is when people insist on using a title and then call me Miss, Mrs., or Ms. Because I have a title and those aren’t it. If I haven’t told you my title is Dr., then I don’t mind you not using it. But if I have and you ignore it, that makes me grouchy.

So. If you want to avoid making me grouchy, here are ways I would like you to refer to me:

• Kimberly
• Kimberly Hirsh
• Dr. Kimberly Hirsh
• Dr. Hirsh

Any of those are fine. Feel like calling a person Dr. is elitist? Okay! Use my first name or full name.

(There is a whole deal I’m not even getting into here about untitling, mistitling, gender, race, and ethnicity. Explore it if you’re interested.)

Information is my love language and how I like to learn about the world, but I also can start to drown in too much of it and need to scale back. So if you are like me, especially right now when there is A Lot Going On, you might like to do what I’m doing.

For calls to action, I have picked one main issue to focus on (library advocacy) and follow a few organizations dedicated to that work (Every Library, For the People, ALA). For broader concerns, I am reading my local Indivisible group’s newsletter.

I am focused on taking one action daily, ideally one that doesn’t activate my nervous system extra. So today I emailed my senators and told them to vote NO on Vought’s confirmation. (Please don’t at me about the effectiveness of email vs. phone. Or how I should really show up in person. Please trust me to know my own availability and capability.) I also emailed my representative and asked her to demand accountability re: an unelected private person’s access to the treasury.

I am also trying to remember to do other things that keep me grounded, like crocheting and reading romance. I’m trying to find joy where I can.

I hope this has been helpful for you.

Today’s Progress: Completed the freeCodeCamp certification project, “Learn CSS Colors by Building a Set of Colored Markers.”

Thoughts: This was fun to do and after doing some reading, I’ve realized that for my purposes, I don’t actually need to know how to draw with CSS unless I decide to try and make some wacky layouts with shapes or something. In which case, I’ll review. But in the meantime, CSS is for styling HTML that structures content, just as I feel it should be. This project is not hard but I definitely had to use references sometimes. Which is fine! But slows things down a bit. For this project, the use of a checkbox gave me the idea to make this a Mystery Shack feedback form so I could use Mabel’s rigged “Do you like me?” form.

Link(s) to work: Mystery Shack Feedback survey

In Austin Kleon’s newsletter today, he writes about 7 questions he asks himself when he doesn’t know what to do next. (The newsletter has free editions on Fridays and paid ones on Tuesdays.)

At the end of the newsletter he asked his subscribers, “Do you have a question that helps you?”

My response got so big and I liked it so much, I decided to turn it into a blog post, so here you go!

I feel like I have stolen this like an artist in the best way, in that I’ve taken from multiple sources that get at this idea and combined them into something new:

“What does my body need right now?”

I manage multiple chronic illnesses, and the answer to that question can change from moment to moment. I often feel like a brain floating around in a meat cage. So I drop in to my body and see what it needs: water? A nap? A shower? A hug? Stillness? Motion?

Because I can’t do everything I need or want to do, I have to prioritize, and asking this question helps me choose what to do first, what to expend my energy on in a way that gives me hope of sustaining or even increasing my energy for the rest of the day.