Wisdom from the Co-Star app

  • 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.

Don't wait until you know who you are to get started, scholars.

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.

Steal Like an Artist for Scholars

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.

You can comment on kimberlyhirsh.com now!

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.

Weekly Update: 03/27/20

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.)

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:

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

I ordered my sister from a catalog.

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.

Do stuff your three-year-old self liked.

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.)

🎵 Introducing: #showtunesisters (i.e., me challenging my sister to sing showtune duets with me)

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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

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I like The Muppets (2015) TV show more than I thought I would. 📺

Cover of the novel Muppets Meet the Classics: The Phantom of the Opera _My brother gave me [this Muppet version of The Phantom of the Opera ](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/546080/muppets-meet-the-classics-the-phantom-of-the-opera-by-gaston-leroux-and-erik-forrest-jackson-illustrated-by-owen-richardson/) a couple Christmases back, and I have genuinely never felt more seen in my entire life._

Back in June 2019, M. and I visited the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, GA while accompanying W. on a work trip. They have a whole gallery devoted to Jim Henson’s work. My family has always been a Muppet family, I suppose because my parents had only been married a couple of years when The Muppet Show started airing and I wasn’t born until it had been on the air for four years. I saw it a great deal, so it must have been available in second-run syndication. And then of course there were the movies, which I watched many a time.

This visit to the Center for Puppetry Arts reminded me of my long-standing affection for The Muppets, something I hadn’t thought about overly much since purchasing the Blu-Ray of the 2011 movie The Muppets, which I adore. Truly, coming around a corner from the Sesame Street part of the gallery to the Muppet part of the gallery, I saw Kermit the Frog sitting on a director’s chair in a glass case and it was like seeing an old friend. I think I may actually have said hello to him.

Since that trip, I have slowly been bringing M. into my Muppet obsession. I think it may have begun with this adorable clip of Kermit and a little girl on Sesame Street:

and continued with “Mahna Mahna”:

I’m not sure what order the rest of it all proceeded in, but it involved the Kermit stuffy I bought at the Center for Puppetry Arts, an old Muppet Babies Kermit stuffy from my childhood, a squeaky Muppet Babies Miss Piggy toy that my sister found in her house, some Muppet picture books that are probably over 35 years old (and not in great condition), and The Muppet Movie. Through all of these activities, our household is in the throes of Muppet Fever, and I love it. M. has been especially obsessed with Muppets Most Wanted, he says because he likes that there are two frogs in it (not counting Robin’s brief cameo). We used an audiobook on a doublet set of the novelizations of the two most recent Muppet movies. He falls asleep to it every night.

Earlier this week, when we had just finished watching Muppets Most Wanted and he said he wanted to watch more Muppets stuff, we decided to try the 2018 Muppet Babies. I had tried it once before and not been able to handle the CG-ness of it, but I will try just about anything for him. It’s actually super cute and has some phenomenal jokes and references for parents.

Since I hadn’t liked this before but was finding it fun now, I decided to try the muppets.. I had been very excited when it was announced, and immediately turned off by the clear references to The Office which is just not for me. I didn’t like the mockumentary style and I was really displeased by the character design for Kermit’s not-Miss Piggy-but-still-a-pig girlfriend. But that was 2015, and this is now! So I started it.

I’ve really been enjoying it. The writing is sharp; the showrunner was one of the writers on Muppet*Vision 3-D, which does a brilliant job of capturing Muppetness. There was an uproar when the show came out about its depiction of relationships, sexuality, and alcohol use as being inappropriate for a “family” property, but one of the earliest Muppet specials was called The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence, so that really doesn’t bother me.

I think the show gets better further in to the run, as the really familiar bits of character come out.

One critic compared it to Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, but I think it really has a 30 Rock vibe.

One of my favorite things about it is how very much screentime Uncle Deadly gets. He leaped into my top 3 muppets (after Kermit and Piggy) after I saw him in the 2011 movie and, upon researching him, discovered that he is the Phantom of the Muppet Show.

Anyway: I have loved watching this show and am looking forward to the episodes I have remaining. I have been reminded that I have no other OTP that I cling to as fiercely as I cling to Kermit/Piggy.

Finally, if you, too, are obsessed with Muppets, especially if you have seen The Avengers and understand fandom tropes, please go read what is possibly my favorite fanfiction ever written, Avengers: Earth’s Muppetest Heroes.

Our family's social distancing schedule

I wanted to share our family’s current weekday schedule, mostly to help other people feel okay about theirs. This isn’t what every day looks like, but it’s a good sense of ours.

7 - 8 am Get up somewhere in there.
8 - 8:30 am Laze about, take meds, go to the bathroom, do puzzles, read, snuggle
8:30 am - 9 am Family breakfast
9 am - 10 am W gets to work; K & M do activity - most recently from either Fun at Home with Kids or Hands on as We Grow
10 am - 11 am Free play in the playroom, snack
11 am - 12 pm Screen time (lately, the new iteration of Muppet Babies)
12 pm - 1 pm Lunch as a whole family
1 pm - 3 pm W goes back to work, audiobook and quiet bedroom play (I rest in M’s room during this time)
3 pm - 4 pm Snack, playroom free play
4 pm - 6 pm Screen time (more Muppet Babies, maybe Muppets Most Wanted)
6 pm - 7 pm Family dinner (both making and eating)
7 pm - 8 pm Stories
8 pm Lights out

You’ll notice there is absolutely no space for me to get any work done in here. That’s not sustainable long-term, though I was willing to accept it for this week and treat it effectively like spring break. In the future, I’m hoping we’ll get a 4 or 5 hour block of grandma time in there many a day so I can really get to work. If that doesn’t work out, one of the screen time blocks will probably be W & M together while I go off to get a couple of hours of work in.

Me getting rest is prioritized pretty highly here, too. I’ve been in the middle of an autoimmune flare for I don’t know how long, and have had many a coronavirus anxiety spiral. My sleep is… Not great.

Also, there’s not specific time blocked in here for getting outside. We do make an effort to get outside every day, sometimes for a family walk, sometimes sidewalk chalk in the culdesac, sometimes just catching some fresh air on the porch. I want to move toward more deliberate outside time and/or indoor physical activity next week. I also want to provide M. with resources to follow his interests. He wants to learn about robots and turtles next week, he says. He’s indicated that he wants to prioritize turtles over robots, but is interested in both.

Anyway, there’s no real deliberate learning and there’s absolutely zero teaching; the activities are fun things mostly to keep me from completely losing it. I do them first thing because genuinely by 10 or 11 I feel like I’ve already used up my spoons for the day.

So yeah. It looks structured, but it’s not. This is more of a DESCRIPTIVE schedule than a PRESCRIPTIVE schedule. It’s just kind of what’s been happening. I hope it’s helpful.

What I'm doing about my pandemic anxiety

Something in me has broken, and now I am cracked, open and vulnerable. For the first time yesterday, I set my armor of humor aside and sat with the fact that, as a high-risk person, I am scared. I am scared not because I think coronavirus will kill me; I am scared that it will incapacitate me for any time at all, that it will place a huge burden on my family. I am scared that I will have to be kept away from my child. I don’t think I have it, but I’m scared that if I get it, this will be the outcome.

In November 2018, I had walking pneumonia. It was miserable. If that’s what a “mild” case of pneumonia is, I don’t want to know what a moderate one feels like. My husband, W., was out of town, I was on my own with my kid, M. I don’t know why I didn’t seek out more help from my family. W. came home and we almost immediately set out for Charleston as a family; I could have stayed home with M. by myself for a few more days, but that didn’t really sound like convalescing. So with what my doctor had said was inflammation but not yet infection (this was before the walking pneumonia diagnosis), I traipsed about Charleston with my kid. Our last day there, at breakfast, my lungs actually started feeling wet and gurgly inside them. I made an appointment to see my doctor as soon as we got home. (I was past the worst of the coughing at this point, so I thought I was on the mend. Ha.)

I came home, she diagnosed me with walking pneumonia, gave me some antibiotics, and an order for an x-ray if I didn’t start improving in the next couple of days. I took ONE DAY to stay in bed all day, and then felt like I better get back to helping with my kid, since he is basically my only family responsibility and it never feels great to me to ask the person who provides 85% of our income, cleans, does laundry, does dishes, and does yardwork to take on more childcare than he normally does. (He’s basically primary caregiver on weekends, too. He is remarkable.) I don’t think it was apparent to anyone else except maybe my mom how sick I was. Including M. and W. I think they thought I was a little unwell.

I got better, though pneumonia - even walking pneumonia - takes several weeks before you get as strong as you were before. And I don’t think I ever really got close to my pre-pneumonia level of strength and energy (which itself was not that great, because chronic illness). My lungs still feel a bit wobbly whenever I get anything respiratory.

I don’t want to feel like I did then.

I also am increasingly believing that the current disruption to life which has led me to be a stay-at-home mom more and a scholar less is going to continue for longer than I originally anticipated. And it’s kind of hard to feel like cosplay research is important right now (though honestly, it’s actually information literacy research and that feels VERY important right now). So I’m re-evaluating what I want to direct my attention to right now.

I’m not doing great with combatting social isolation. My introversion combined with flare up/world state low energy makes me less likely to initiate communication, so I’ve been trying to stay connected in more passive ways. But my efforts to stay connected, which have consisted mostly of scrolling Micro.blog and Twitter, have now driven me into middle-of-the-night anxiety spirals, so I’m taking action to disrupt those. Here are the things I’m doing.

Getting my news once per day via email. I get The Skimm for national and world news, the Indy Primer for local news (though it also covers national and world news), and the Wired coronavirus update for coronavirus-specific news.

Only looking at notifications/mentions. I am not going to scroll Twitter or Micro.blog anymore, as each time I do it throws me into an anxiety spiral. I’m only looking directly at my notifications or mentions. I have pinned these pages in Firefox as top sites, so I can go to them without having to navigate timelines or feeds to get to the notifications/mentions.

Consciously connecting with communities I know will alleviate my anxiety. Mostly, this is Kim Werker’s Community of Creative Adventurers right now.

Committing to doing more with my hands and living in my body. In the middle of the night, a balm for my anxiety came over me: GARDEN. This works on a couple levels, because gardening is a soothing activity, and also because I’m in this panicked near-survivalist mindset and if I can garden, I can learn to grow my own food, and then it won’t matter if the grocery store doesn’t have strawberries. (Obviously that’s a more long-term outcome, but I’m feeling pretty dire right now.) So I got out my copy of You Grow Girl and visited Gayla Trail’s blog, where I found a blog post from her that perfectly echoed my mindset. So this is where I’m at right now.

Watching Muppets Most Wanted with my kid as many times as he wants. It’s bizarre to me that he prefers this to the 2011 The Muppets, but whatever. This song, in particular, delights me every time. (Also, Tina Fey. Tina Fey delights me as well.)

🔖 Keeping kids busy at home

Storing links here so they’re easy for me to find when I need them during the next two weeks. Maybe they’ll help you, too?

More to come.

Changing my research plans in light of COVID-19

My kid has been sick the past few days. Today is our first day back at Montessori/co-working space since last Friday, and while I’ve been pondering how the spread of coronavirus will impact my research the whole time we’ve been out, today I actually plan to figure out what I’m going to do about it.

Yesterday, Governor Roy Cooper declared a State of Emergency in North Carolina. The press release includes several suggestions. The one that is pertinent to my research is this one:

NC DHHS recommends that people at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19 avoid large groups of people as much as possible. This includes gatherings such as concert venues, conventions, church services, sporting events, and crowded social events.

One of the key pieces of my research involves interviewing and observing at conventions. I’m not sure whether or not I am at high risk of severe illness from COVID-19, though I suspect I am, due to having pre-diabetic Polycystic Ovary Syndrome and autoimmune thyroiditis. Autoimmune disesases don’t make one automatically immunocompromised, but I don’t trust that there aren’t some hidden conditions going on in my body that would make me such. Additionally, I spend a lot of time with my son’s grandparents on both sides of the family, and all of them are in high risk categories. Even though so far none of the cons I was planning to use as field sites have been canceled, I am reluctant to attend conventions myself.

The interview protocol I’m using requires participants to create a graphic representation of their information horizon, drawing themselves in relationship to the resources they use when they have an information need related to cosplay. My plan was to do the interviews in person, giving participants blank paper.

One potential solution is to add more cons - further afield than the initial 50-mile radius I’d originally planned to maintain - that are occurring later in the year, in hopes that coronavirus risk will be reduced by then.

But with the situation changing so rapidly, I don’t feel comfortable relying on that.

So of course, I’m considering how to conduct these interviews online. I have access to Microsoft Zoom through my university, which provides excellent quality for video calls and easy recording. In one sense, this would actually be easier than a face-to-face interview. Except for the graphic representation piece. I could have participants draw on the Zoom whiteboard, but that would require me to give them a tutorial in the whiteboard features. What my colleague/committee member Casey Rawson suggested, and what I’ll most likely do, is have participants draw on some paper at their homes, then both hold the paper up to the webcam for me to see and take a photo of the paper and email/text/DM it to me.

I was concerned as to whether this shift would change my IRB exemption, but after examining the type of exemption I have, I don’t think it will. It is no less secure or protective of participants' privacy than face-to-face interviews, and in some ways, it is moreso.

That still leaves the question of observations. Part of the unique contribution of my study is that it is the first to examine a blended affinity space, a set of spaces where people gather around a common interest both online and in-person. (Earlier studies looked at World of WarCraft but not BlizzCon, and Minecraft but not Minefaire.) If things go very badly and there are no cons, well, that changes things quite a bit.

On the other hand: Everything is data, so seeing how participants in the cosplay affinity space itself handle avoiding cons or con cancellation will be instructive in and of itself.

Whew.

I’ll figure it out.

I really just want to graduate before I’m 40, y’all.

Reintroducing Genetrix, curating stories about creative mothers

Last January, I launched Genetrix, a newsletter to curate stories of creative mothers. After sending two issues, I started to get overwhelmed by the enormity of the task. But I felt called to it again recently, so I changed up how I’m doing it. Now it’s a newsletter/blog. It’s now hosted on Tumblr and syndicated via Micro.blog @genetrixletter, RSS, MailChimp, Twitter, and Facebook. The rest of this post will be the intro post from there. Please check it out if you like.

Welcome to Genetrix!

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. Hence, this blog.

What are we doing here? Like motherhood itself, creating and curating this blog 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.

03/02/20 Process Memo

I spent some time this morning installing encryption software so that I can encrypt the data files I will be backing up onto an external hard drive.

I created a spreadsheet to track the initial sources for my sustained, systematic observation and entered the resources Kroski (2015) mentions. I noted the title, author, URL, type (book, tutorial, blog post, etc), and whether the resource was part of a larger portal (e.g. YouTube, Instructables, Pinterest).

As you might expect of a 5 year old book, a few of the resources are now unavailable. Not a lot else to report today, and I expect this piece of the work will continue for a few more days before I start actually taking notes using my observation protocol.

02/28/2020 Process Memo: Beginning sustained, systematic observation

I began my sustained, systematic observation today by gathering my initial resources for this phase.

First, on my Dissertation Trello board in my Sustained, Systematic Observation list, I created a card called “Collect initial resources.”

On this card, I created a checklist and including the following types of sources to use to identify resources:

LIS sources

Cosplay sources

  • Convention websites to review for guest or cosplay group names
  • Groups mentioned in Kroski 2015, such as Star Wars groups the 501st & Rebel legions
  • Sources identified by Googling “Marvel cosplayers” and browsing the first 10 pages of results. Kroski refers to her own cosplay “origin story” as being when she participated in a call for Marvel cosplayers for an episode of Cake Boss. This mention is why I Googled Marvel cosplayers.

Next, I began a close reading of Kroski 2015 to look for resources she suggests/mentions. This includes specific lists of tutorials related to particular techniques, books she mentions, apps, and references in her endnotes that are cosplay resources such as blog posts. I am flagging these with Post-it flags and will enter them into a spreadsheet before beginning using my observation protocol.

I will also need to perform the observation protocol on Kroski 2015 itself.

What am I opening? (Dissertating in the Open)

I’ve been doing some reading this week on what it means to dissertate in the open, and as there are many different ways to do it, I thought I would talk quickly about my plans moving forward.

First, here are some of the sources informing my ideas:

Laura Gogia’s visual article and post on granularities sum it up best. I can open up my dissertation process and/or my dissertation content, using a variety of tools. So far, I’ve done a combination of both: I’ve offered insight into the process and shared documents such as my literature review, prospectus, and proposal.

For now, I’m going to focus on sharing process. I will come back around to content, especially as I want to share my research with cosplayers, but my primary audience right now is other researchers - especially doctoral students and early career researchers.

To that end, I will be blogging my process memos. In the course of working on my PhD, I’ve discovered it’s far too easy to forget how we got to a certain point, so I’m going to keep daily process memos about the work I did that day. I’ll probably be a day behind in posting them, since I’ll write them at the end of my workday. So you’ll see today’s process memo on Monday.

Have a lovely weekend!

Dissertating in the Open: Beginning to Set Up a Data Collection Structure

I’ve been trying to establish my data collection/analysis workflow and I’m running into the age-old problem with qualitative research: you don’t really know what you need until you’re in the middle of it.

One of the things I heard repeatedly from professors was that the difference between quantitative and qualitative research wasn’t how much work you would do, but at which end of the process you would do it. Quantitative research requires a lot of up-front work, designing surveys or experiments, etc. , but analysis can go pretty quickly as long as you already know which statistical tests you need. Qualitative research requires a lot of work in the analysis stage, and the beginning of the design process is a little more free-flowing and improvisational.

(She said, thinking about her detailed interview and observation protocols and meticulous research design…)

I’m the kind of person who likes to have structures in place ahead of time so that when I’m in a thing I can just do it. If I don’t get those structures in place, I can be a bit of a mess. For example - life example, not work example - if I don’t do all of my pill-sorting at the beginning of the week, there is an almost 0% chance that I will take anything besides my prescription medications. (I take 24 pills a day, when prescriptions and supplements are added together.)

So I wanted to have a data collection structure in place, so that my data would not become a mess.

I realized, though, that creating an elaborate data collection structure was a form of productive procrastination. After all of the complaining I’ve done about being ready to start on my own research, though, I really ought to get down to it.

I settled on only setting up the data collection structure for the first phase of my research, sustained, systematic observation. I gave myself permission to work exclusively on that for a couple of weeks before I design the next set of structures.

I’m going to start on that tomorrow, and my plan is to write a blog post about that process in hopes of helping future scholars who might use connective and affinity space ethnography.

Dissertating in the Open: Writing and Defending the Dissertation Proposal

I successfully defended my dissertation proposal on February 3, 2020.

I have one huge piece of advice for writing your dissertation proposal: buy or borrow Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches by John W. Creswell and J. David Creswell, and do what it says. It will guide you through the proposal-writing process down to the sentence level. It is expensive. It is worth it. It is the most useful graduate school textbook I’ve ever bought.

It’s possible you’ll discover at this point that you haven’t made as many decisions about your methods as you thought you had. That’s fine. Make them now.

For example, I realized that I had no idea where online I wanted to do my observation. This stalled me out for a few days, until I remembered that figuring that out was the whole point of the sustained, systematic observation part of affinity space ethnography (PDF). So I wrote about how I didn’t know that yet, about how my design is emergent, and about how I imagined that observation might play out.

In November and December 2019, I wrote the first draft of my dissertation proposal. I submitted it to my committee ahead of my comps, so they were able to quickly peruse it and offer me some feedback during the oral exam.

At first, some of the feedback overwhelmed me. Dr. Casey Rawson suggested that rather than a wide-scale ethnographic approach, I might take a case study approach, following just a few cosplayers through their process and attending to their information practices. This was an intriguing possibility, but the logistics overwhelmed me, as I’d have to know a few cosplayers well enough that they would allow me to actually physically be with them throughout their process, plus I would have to manage the time (i.e., childcare) to actually be with them. I decided that this was a cool idea, but it was a different study than my dissertation, so I ended up putting it in my suggestions for future research in the second draft of my dissertation proposal. Now I had a research program, not just one study.

I sent this second draft to my committee right before the winter holidays, starting the clock on the 30 days I was required to give them with the proposal before the proposal defense. We scheduled the defense for February 3, and I spent January creating my proposal defense slides. (As always, if you are a cosplayer whose photo I used and you would like it removed, please let me know and I’ll oblige ASAP.)

As I was working on the slides, I read through the proposal and asked myself what questions I would ask if I were a committee member, and then set out to answer them in the slides.

First, I realized that there were some terms I mentioned in the proposal and had defined in the literature review, but that probably needed to be defined again at the proposal defense:

  • Collective intelligence
  • Information literacy
  • Affinity space
  • Blended affinity space
  • Constellation of information

Then, I realized that my research methods were still not as detailed as I would like. I wanted to be able to show the committee what my research would actually look like, in practice. I remembered that for my theory development class, I had created a grounded theory proposal and included sample data that I had actually coded. I decided to do something similar for this presentation.

First, I demonstrated what the sustained, systematic observation would look like, using a librarian-recommended cosplay resource as my starting point. I created a specific observation protocol for this stage based on the affinity space ethnography literature, and applied that observation protocol to the resource. I evaluated that resource to determine if it was information-rich, and it was. I followed links out from it to other resources, evaluating them as well. I determined that the original resource was information-rich, and showed what it would look like to pull down data (in this case, YouTube comments) and code them using both my information literacy and collective intelligence coding schemes.

I put all of this stuff in my slides:

(I’ll say it again: if you are a cosplayer whose photo I used and you would like it removed, please let me know and I’ll oblige ASAP.)

The proposal defense went really well. I felt very prepared, having done all of this. My committee members said it was a thorough proposal and appreciated the demonstration of the methods. They also gave me several helpful suggestions for revising the proposal further before I submitted it to the Institutional Review Board. I submitted my final dissertation proposal to the review board on February 5, and a copy of it went to the SILS library, as well.

After one round of revisions and one correction of a typo, my IRB application was approved and determined exempt from further review. Time to get to work!

Starting to create a data collection/analysis workflow... Not there yet.

Most of my blogging has been micro this month, which is appropriate since I’m hosting my blog on micro.blog now. It has really made a difference in my comfort level and ease-of-blogging; much lighter weight than WordPress. I don’t feel like I have to have a 1000+ word essay to bother posting (obviously).

I do want to get back into longer form, though. The reason I haven’t this month is because at the beginning of the month I was getting ready for my dissertation proposal defense. As soon as I passed that, I had to write my Institutional Review Board application. Once that was done, I had to write an application for a dissertation completion fellowship. And then when that was done, the IRB application came back with 7 revisions I needed to make. I did that this morning.

I didn’t think all this stuff would take 3 weeks. I thought it would be done in the first week of the month, that I’d sail through IRB (more the fool me!), and then be doing data collection already. I also thought that during that brief wait from IRB application to IRB approval (again, haha, brief, apparently they’re moving very slowly lately), I’d come up with a beautiful data collection and analysis workflow.

Let me tell you what. Based on my quick Googling and visiting my favorite resources on academic writing (okay, my one favorite, Raul Pacheco-Vega’s blog) and my lit review, people really don’t want to share the nitty gritty details of their qual data collection workflow/process. Usually, when I bump up against something like this, my instinct is to then be radically open with my own process and create a resource other people can use so they don’t have this problem. (See: the Intellectual Freedom Toolkit I created with W. when there was a book challenge at the school library where I worked.)

But, well, for now, I’m at a loss as to where to start. I went back to my syllabi for what we call babydocs at SILS, and it had some good stuff for navigating the early part of a PhD, but not as much project management lit as I would have liked. I’ll dig into my qual methods course syllabi next, but I suspect they won’t offer much either.

Everybody wants to tell you: 1. why a given research design is appropriate 2. big picture how to do those methods And of course those are SUPER IMPORTANT!

But whoever is writing about like… Where they put their memos, and stuff - how they organize their workday when they’re doing fieldwork - esp. virtual fieldwork - well, I haven’t found those people yet. I’m sure someone must be writing about it. Not sure how much time I’ll spend before developing my own systems.

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

  • I’ll probably take field notes in my personal physical notebook, originally.
  • Then I’ll transcribe those into MaxQDA I guess?
  • I’ll use a digital recorder to record interviews and panels, then import and transcribe those in MaxQDA, too.
  • MaxQDA has space for coding memos, but I don’t know if there’s good spots in there for reflective memos, so I need to check into that. (Also I’m thoroughly pissed at myself that I can’t find my favorite qual research textbooks - Goodall’s Writing the New Ethnography and Coffey and Atkinson’s Making Sense of Qualitative Data. I might need to do some deep decluttering in the next week or so to try to track them down.) If MaxQDA doesn’t have a good spot for coding memos, I guess I’ll write reflective memos in… I don’t know. Word? I might do it in Scrivener though.
  • I’m definitely going to read some advice on dissertating with Scrivener.
  • I think I can pull webpages into MaxQDA, too, so that will be helpful.

Anyway. None of this process is helped by an extreme lack of sleep and hormones running wild, so. Might just call today a win with the whole IRB resubmission thing and cut myself a break.

Anyway, soon, I’m planning to write a proper Dissertating in the Open post about writing and defending your dissertation proposal, so stay tuned!

Okay but WHY a PhD? And what next?

Sometimes I ask myself why I’m doing a PhD and what I’m getting out of it. This is actually a long set of many smaller questions. Why did I apply to a PhD program in the first place? Why did I enroll once I was accepted? Why have I not quit after any of my many, many PhD freakouts? That’s most of the Why questions. Then there’s the What questions. What was I hoping to get out of it when I applied/enrolled? What have I actually gotten out of it? What do I hope will come of it?

I don’t necessarily have answers for all of those questions, but I can kind of get at some of them.

I had been thinking about doing a PhD eventually just because I like going to school, honestly. And because I loved listening to people talk about their research when they visited for job talks or whatever (I was working at the university where I’m currently a student). But I never quite understood the discussion of their methods, and I wanted to. And I also wanted to capture good work people were doing in the world and find ways to share it. So the reasons I thought I wanted to do a PhD were those: understanding research methods better, documenting good work in education and libraries, communicating that work. And the reasons I applied WHEN I did were because all the other people in my department at work had been fired, laid off, or transferred. It was me and several graduate assistants closing out the department’s contractual and grant obligations, and I was fairly certain that once those obligations were handled, I would be laid off, too. So I moved up what was a someday thing to a today thing, and enrolled because I don’t much apply for things I don’t actually want.

Why haven’t I quit? Stubbornness. Attachment to the flexible schedule. Because I don’t think I will feel like what I’ve gotten what I came for until I complete the large-scale research project that is my dissertation. And a little bit because my mom has coursework credit toward two Master’s degrees she never finished, and I have seen her regret.

I have gotten a lot of what I came for. In particular, I have a deep understanding of qualitative and participatory research methods that I definitely didn’t have when I came in. I understand ethnography and grounded theory in a way there was no time for me to understand during my MSLS research methods course. And I’ve gotten some other stuff: an immensely flexible schedule that allows me to be there for my kid almost any time he needs me, the opportunity to work on a federally-funded grant project, an understanding of antiracist work thanks to that project, time to work with people I am always excited to work with, and time to actually do research.

Since I’m ABABD (if all goes well, I’ll only have my dissertation left to do after I defend my proposal on February 3), alongside actually collecting data and writing my dissertation, I’ll be exploring my next steps for after graduation. There are a few theoretical tenure track jobs for which I might apply, but given the fact that I want to keep my family geographically co-located (in the same house, even), it’s unlikely one of those will come up and be an option for me. So what are some other things I’m hoping this PhD will have prepared me for? Working at a research-focused organization. Working in research communication. Working as an academic librarian in a discipline familiar to me: education, library and information science, Classics, theater. Working as an editor for academic presses, academic publications, or scholars. Working as an independent information consultant and researcher. Combining independent research with web development somehow.

So, I don’t know what I’m going to do next. I’m sticking with what Karen Kelsky calls the “flexible opportunity model.” I could do a LOT of different things. My current plan is to build up my options for consulting/freelancing while also keeping an eye out for institutional work that looks good.

Reclaiming my Spotify recommendations

My kid has taken over my Spotify recommendations. My Discover Weekly this week includes:

  • Rainbow Connection - from The Muppet Movie
  • the theme song from Lilo and Stitch
  • Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me)
  • the Spider-Man theme
  • the Sonic X theme
  • 10 in the bed
  • a song that is actually called “Pee Pee Poo Poo”
  • and other songs, including songs from the Lego Ninjago Movie, Phineas & Ferb, The Lego Movie 2, Teen Titans Go! to the Movies, Despicable Me, the Road to El Dorado, and an album called _Sharing Time).

There are 30 songs on every Discover Weekly playlist. Of mine, I think about 25 are kid-targeted. I’ve skimmed multiple articles about how to maximize the value of your Discover Weekly playlist. Almost all of them promise that listening to kids' music will not fill your Discover Weekly playlist with kids' music. Maybe I just don’t listen to enough other music. I don’t know. But I’m taking steps to get Spotify recognize that I want it to recommend new things for ME, not for my kid.

First: I realized I’d created an account just for my kid on our Spotify family plan a couple years ago, but wasn’t using it. Now, I log into his account when I’m going to play music for him. Is it a small hassle? Yes. Is it an obvious solution? For sure.

Second: I had 27 playlists dedicated to music for my kid. I rarely used any of these - he goes through seasons where he’ll want a couple songs on what he calls “repeat two,” so I had several of these - one for The Lion King that was only “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King” and “Hakuna Matata,” one for Frozen that was only “For the First Time in Forever” and “Love is an Open Door,” one that had just “The Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie and then the version from The Muppets. This sort of thing, and after a couple weeks, he doesn’t want to listen to that playlist anymore. I deleted all of the playlists that were for my kid. I didn’t lose much curation over this, but I sure cleaned up my account a lot.

Then I started following the advice from the articles. So far I’m mostly doing these two:

  • Saving music to my library.
  • Going down rabbit holes on artists and genres: listening to complete discographies, exploring similar artists, etc.

Next, I need to start:

  • Creating playlists.
  • Listening to Spotify radio. (For artists, songs, or playlists.)

I’ll let you know how this works out. It will take a few weeks to be sure.

A (somewhat dry) musical autobiography: Addendum

🎵📽 I realized as I was describing yesterday’s musical autobiography (which is different than an autobiographical musical) to W. that I had left out three of the most important musical pieces of my life. I think I left these out because they have been as ubiquitous for me in the past decade (or in one case most of my life) as water is to a fish. I imagine if a fish were writing an autobiography, it probably wouldn’t comment on the water around it, any more than a person who isn’t taking an explicitly ecological slant would comment on the air.

But here they are, three huge bits of my musical taste:

Enya: Especially her album Shepherd Moons. I don’t know when my family got into Enya, but we really committed once we did. We had the piano/vocal songbook for Shepherd Moons, and these were some of the only songs I ever learned to play on the piano. “How Can I Keep from Singing is a great favorite, which I think I’ve probably used as an audition piece at some point and just is the best when you need a boost. “Marble Halls” is so dear that when I came upon a beautiful bound score of its origin opera, The Bohemian Girl, I bought it without bothering to even look at the rest of the score. (I later gave that score to my sister, who might ever actually use that as an aria.) When I was in the darkest parts of my depression, Shepherd Moons and Watermark brought me great comfort (along with the soundtrack for The Princess Bride). (My love is like a storybook story, but it’s as real as the feelings I feel.) And perhaps most importantly, Shepherd Moons was playing both when my mother was in labor with my younger brother (I was 13 and in the delivery room) and when I was in labor with M. Soundtrack of my life much?

The Lonely Island: I know The Lonely Island got big because of “Lazy Sunday,” but it’s really “Dick in a Box” and “Motherlover” that made me fall in love with them. So many favorites: “I’m on a Boat,” “I Just Had Sex,” “Jack Sparrow,“and “Space Olympics” are tops with me (with “Space Olympics” as the one that best represents my comedic sensibility), and “Diaper Money” is especially relatable since M’s birth. (See also: Garfunkel and Oates’s “Pregnant Women Are Smug.") And don’t even get me started on Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience.

Finally, because I’m the same as everybody else, Hamilton (except I’m a Hamilton hipster, having listened to it via NPR’s First Listen before the album was released). Hamilton reminded me that I actually liked hip-hop and R&B. (I failed to mention Eminem in my list of music I enjoyed in college, so let’s just stick that here.) It blew me away and made me believe that rappers were magicians. Around the same time Hamilton was released, I started regularly attending a hip-hop improv show, and the March after it was released, I actually joined the cast of that show. I set challenges for myself: first, to rap along with Angelica’s rap in “Satisfied,” my favorite song in the show mostly for the couplet “I know my sister like I know my own mind/You will never find anyone as trusting or as kind” (check out that sweet internal rhyme, btw), and then once I mastered that, I challenged myself to learn Lafayette’s piece of “Guns and Ships,” which has the most words in three seconds in any Broadway musical. I knocked that out and I kind of learned to freestyle, which was the most terrifying part of improv before I got into Hamilton. I called my flow “passable,” until my friend, actual rapper and hip-hop educator Rowdy, scolded me for not giving myself enough credit, so now I call it “good enough for comedy.” Which, since my heroes The Lonely Island aspired to be “the greatest fake MCs on earth,” is good enough for me.

I bet I’ll remember more music stuff later. I’ll write a new post about it when I do!

A (somewhat dry) musical autobiography

🎵📽📚 I don’t know if it’s a problem or a good thing that when my mind can’t come up with a topic to blog about and I’ve committed myself to blogging (as I’m now trying to do first thing everyday when I sit down to work), I just jump in and treat my blog like morning pages. Which is fine unless I’m working on a blog post that I’m not ready to write yet and that is sort of occupying my stream-of-consciousness. Which is what’s happening right now: later, I’ll write a post about reclaiming my Spotify recommendations - Discover Weekly and Daily Mixes - from my kid’s music tastes, and the different tools and articles I’m using to do it. But I’m not there yet.

I can talk about music, though. That’s a thing. So, I don’t consider myself a person who has well-defined musical tastes. When I was growing up, my parents had a Columbia House membership, and I listened to their Gold & Platinum tapes a fair amount. I feel like I mined their tapes for other stuff, too: Styx’s Kilroy Was Here, Culture Club’s Colour by Numbers, a Peter and the Wolf that they transferred from vinyl to cassette (I don’t know which one, but my money’s on Cyril Richard), and The Irish Rover’s The Unicorn, which I guess was my grandfather’s album and not mine. I also had a Mousercise album that familiarized me with a bunch of Disney songs from movies I may or may not have seen, and the songs in the Totally Minnie TV special: “Don’t Go Breakin' My Heart,” “I Only Have Eyes for You,” “Let’s Hear It for the Boy,” “Nasty,” and “Eat It,” among others.

It was probably this early that I started getting into showtunes (my parents took me to see A Chorus Line when I was 3) and film scores, especially the John Williams oeuvre. These were always shared family experiences, and I loved them.

The first album that I remember as really being something I listened to because I chose it was Madonna’s Like a Virgin. I would put this on and dance, and of course had no idea what most of the songs were about. In fourth grade a friend introduced me to the movie Beaches, which brought me into the Bette Midler fold. I think it’s kind of hilarious that my mom was relieved when I traded Madonna for Bette Midler. I don’t think she’d done her research.

Also when I was in fourth grade, I first encountered The Phantom of the Opera and I fell in love right away. My parents had always enjoyed and shared Jesus Christ Superstar with me.

Around 1991, I started paying attention to pop hip-hop and R&B, and I think those are the genres that still speak to my heart in a very real way, especially R&B. In particular, I loved Kris Kross, En Vogue, Vanessa Williams’s “Save the Best for Last”, Des’ree’s “You Gotta Be,” and pretty much everything Boyz II Men. I briefly had a quick interest in Tim McGraw due to a friend liking him, but then returned to R&B. I also choreographed a secret dance to Paula Abdul’s “The Promise of a New Day” that no one ever saw.

Between Highlander and Wayne’s World, Queen got a lot of play. I think my mom liked them long before I knew I did.

In high school, I went back to Bette Midler and doubled down on the showtunes my parents had introduced to me in childhood, plus new shows. This is what I think of as my “musical taste” - a preference for showtunes to pretty much all genres, including R&B. My friends were into alternative from 1992 on, probably, and I can sing at least a few bars of every song on Spotify’s 90 Pop Rock Essentials playlist, less because I actually like them than because they were the big radio hits when I took Driver’s Ed.

My senior year of high school, I started dating W. and he loaned me CDs for many musicals, expanding/deepening my showtune horizons even further, and I really sort of locked in on showtunes until I was 20 or 21, when my participation in Domain Grrl culture led me to take an interest in more contemporary music as well as some older artists, and that’s when I got into artists like Michelle Branch, Lucy Woodward, Evanescence, and Jeff Buckley, with a little Dave Matthews Band thrown in because why not. I really loved Shakira’s “Underneath Your Clothes at this time, too.

Then I took a turn into punk/punk-influenced stuff, digging into The Sex Pistols, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, Jimmy Eat World(not sure that counts as punk, but I listened to it around this time), Superchunk, and older Goo Goo Dolls stuff. Plus I picked up a little bit of hairband stuff, mostly Poison’s Greatest Hits. Opposites, right?

I also listened to a lot of what might best be called “Buffy rock” at this time - bands featured on or somehow related to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and/or Angel: Velvet Chain, Darling Violetta, Four Star Mary, Common Rotation, and Kane. (And I guess a little Ghost of the Robot, and actually a lot of Tony Head and George Sarah’s album Music for Elevators, especially the track “Last Time,” over and over on repeat one until it made my friends very tired of it.)

W. gave me Cake’s Fashion Nugget and They Might Be Giants’s Flood around this time, both of which I love. Also, my friend A. gave me a copy of Eisley’s Room Noises, which I still love and find magical.

I retreated back to showtunes until around 2012, when I made friends with author Nathan Kotecki, who gave me a giant mix of all the goth/darkwave music that inspired him as he wrote his first novel, The Suburban Strange. In a real sense, this felt like going home, and when I then followed that up by listening to all the music Jillian Venters (also a friend) recommends in her book Gothic Charm School, I decided that Switchblade Symphony was my new favorite band. Which makes sense, because it’s a team up of a film composer and a musical theater performer.

And that’s where we are today. Writing this has helped me realize that actually, I totally have defined musical tastes. Look for tips on teaching Spotify to follow.

Why do I blog what I blog?

I’ll have a post later today with some links to things I’m reading, but for now, I’ll chat about the thoughts they’re stirring up in me. For a couple of years I’ve been sort of haphazardly using my blog as a commonplace book, but at the beginning of this year as I migrated my website from WordPress to Micro.blog, I really doubled down on that commitment. To that end, I’m not only posting notes, articles, and photos here, but also tracking what I read and watch, with plans to start tracking podcasts and music I’m listening to and games I’m playing in the near future. I’ve gone back and forth about posting replies. In the past, I’ve stated that I didn’t really care about owning my replies, and I think that still holds. Same with likes and favorites. A lot of these decisions are influenced by my (repeated) reading of @petermolnar’s post, Content, Bloat, Privacy, Archives.

Like Peter, I’ve noticed that when I’m tracking all of these things, they tend to drown out my more substantive posts. I read a lot, I watch some, and I don’t want these things to drown out my actual content. I considered only sharing what I’m reading or watching when I have additional commentary to add, but that doesn’t actually meet my purpose for sharing these things.

So why do I post this stuff?

Posting what I’m reading, watching, listening to, or playing is an invitation to conversation. Sometimes I add commentary, sometimes not, but either way, people who are following me now know that I am interested in this stuff and will talk about it. (I suppose it’s not explicit from the posts that I want to talk about these things, but now you know: all such posts are an invitation.) And they’re having that effect, like when @zap responded to my post about the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, when @odd responded to my reading @boffosocko.com’s post Thoughts on linkblogs, bookmarks, reads, likes, favorites, follows, and related links, or when in our weekly meeting my assistantship supervisor Maggie Melo, who’s a mutual on Twitter where I cross-post, said, “So I see you’ve been watching a lot of Star Wars” and then we got into a whole Star Wars conversation.

So that’s one reason I post this stuff.

Another reason is for myself. I’m constantly saying “I read this thing…” but then can’t find the source. If I track what I read, I hope that will be easier to find what I’m talking about.

One thing I’m trying out is doing sort of collapsed read/watch/listen/play posts. So if I read a bunch of picture books, instead of posting them singly, I’ll just create one post for all of them. Same for links to my online reading, or multiple episodes of a TV show. I’m hoping that doing that will keep my consumption from completely drowning out my creation.

Anyway, stay tuned for how I continue to refine my commonplace book/blog process!