I spent my winter vacation migrating my website from WordPress to micro.blog. I thought I’d write a little bit about the process. There’s a help page about doing a WordPress import and it worked for me exactly as described. I actually managed to accomplish the whole migration using only my phone: I downloaded the WXR file to my phone, uploaded it to micro.blog, and that all worked fine. I pointed my domain to micro.blog, requested SSH (so my domain has https:// in front of it), and @manton got that set up within an hour of my request.

I made the move because my webhost hasn’t been able to support IndieWeb technologies as much as I would like, but I’ve also found that the webhost I was considering as a replacement might not support all of the IndieWeb features I want, either. So I moved my personal site here to micro.blog. Then, I opened an account with Reclaim Hosting and - again, using only my phone - successfully migrated my webhosting over to them. They were able to migrate my entire hosting account. The whole thing was done, including manipulating of various domain names, inside of 4 hours.

It’s worth noting that in the case of both of these services, most of my tech support emails came directly from the founders of the services. I know that this level of service doesn’t scale, and for many people it would probably be less than ideal to have a founder or CEO handling things like site migrations and secure domain set up. But it felt really good to me - clear that I was communicating with a person who not only had the technical chops to support me, but who believed in their product.

I’m just beginning my interactions with these services in particular, but they both embrace an ethos that reminds me of my mid-90s technoutopian web developer origins, and it feels good.

There’s still a bit of work on my end to make everything work just so:

• migrate featured images over from my WordPress installation
• apply the "research" category to all of my research-related posts
• decide if I want to apply any other categories

This will give me a chance to review all of my old posts.

I’m excited to be on micro.blog because theme development relies on languages I already know (HTML & CSS).

📄 I didn’t feel ready to write a year-in-review post before now, but here we are! So what did I get up to this year?

This year I:

• keynoted IndieWebCamp New Haven
• had my first freelance librarian gig
• visited Knoxville, Atlanta, DC, and North Myrtle Beach
• dealt with at least 5 house contractors
• finished Project READY
• worked as an exhibitor at a professional conference for the first time
• weaned M.
• went to 3 fan conventions
• learned how to use MaxQDA
• hosted M.'s third birthday party
• moved M. into his own bedroom
• got anxiety meds
• tried and loved flotation therapy (still waiting for my ESP to kick in, though)
• cosplayed 3 different characters
• special ordered pies from Phoebe Lawless
• wrote my lit review
• drafted my proposal
• passed my comps

Cosplays of 2019: Luna - Cat Version (Sailor Moon), Ariel (Ralph Breaks the Internet), Wednesday Addams (The Addams Family, 1991 film)

My word of the year for 2019 was PHASE. My goal was to accept cycles and understand that all things pass. I’m pretty satisfied with how I did with that. I think I’m a much more chill parent at the end of this year than I was at the beginning. In addition to embracing that energy, I wanted to own my personal goth aesthetic, read for pleasure, and have a good time. I think I did all of those really successfully.

With respect to my aesthetic, I expanded it so that it shifts seasonally (tying the phase energy in even here!):

I always transition to Gothic Girl Fall in September, leaving behind my Summer Mer-Goth Sea Witch vibes... In winter, I sport full Holiday Goth (lots of dark green velvet) and my spring aesthetic is Goth Fae... https://t.co/HmHMcgcu3W

— Kimberly Hirsh (@kimberlyhirsh) September 6, 2019

I read a lot for pleasure in the first half of the year, but once comps really ramped up, my brain just wouldn’t take in any more words. I met my goal for the year, thanks to counting single comic issues as books. And of course, if I’d counted every article I read, well… I’ve read a lot. I’ve also read many words of visual novels, but I don’t think GoodReads tracks those.

2019 Reading Challenge

Kimberly has completed her goal of reading 24 books in 2019!

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25 of 24 (100%)

view books

I definitely feel like I’ve had a good time this year. I went to Retro films several times, went to Silent Book Club a few times, had a blast wandering around DC with SILS folks for dinner, an escape room, and some Harry Potter Wizards Unite fun, and watched my kid continue to grow. I saw Frozen II and laughed and cried, and Will and I saw Knives Out twice and Benoit Blanc is my new favorite character.

The year’s not over yet, and I’m looking forward to a lot of family fun, submitting the final draft of my dissertation proposal, another trip to North Myrtle Beach, and maybe seeing The Rise of Skywalker before the year is out.

…but onwards, to 2020!

My word of the year for 2020 is FULL.

While there’s been a ton of good these past couple of years, I have more than once felt empty or hollow, like a pumpkin after you scrape its guts out. I’m done with that nonsense. I’m going to fill my well.

I’m also choosing full in the sense of going full something, in my case Going Full Kimberly. This means refusing to suppress all of the weird bits of myself that make me who I am. Obviously, we behave differently in different contexts, and that’s fine. But too often I find myself thinking things like, “Oh, I won’t double down on my affection for Star Wars because W. is out on Star Wars,” or “I won’t wear those sparkles because I’m too old,” or whatever. And I’m done with that. I’m 38, and it’s time to just be myself unapologetically.

Embrace imposter syndrome.

Revel in the fact you have fooled everyone.

You are a Trickster Goddess.

You are the Imposter Child for Deception and Clever Ruses.

— i’m a skELIton (@EliLizzieLizbet) March 17, 2019

I told W. that for my mid-life crisis, I’m just going to brush up my sewing skills and start creating adult-sized versions of all the sparkly little girl fashion at Target.

When I was a teenager, with only a few rare exceptions, I really liked being myself. Leonie Dawson talks about how you should love yourself, because you’re rad. I’m rad. You’re rad. Let’s stop acting like we’re not rad, y’all.

In the spirit of going FULL KIMBERLY, of being Kimberly af, here are the things I’m feeling, my non-resolutions, for 2020:

• Continue to read for pleasure.
• Play video games.
• Pursue my core desired feelings of ease, creativity, and connection.

And then my beautiful, auto-text-generated resolution:

Reviving this from @thephdstory but for 2020... My 2020 resolution is to be a part of the team. https://t.co/dkeCjW6coX

— Kimberly Hirsh (@kimberlyhirsh) December 18, 2019

Featured image is a photo I took during Bull Moon Rising, when the Museum of the Moon (by Luke Jerram) was in town.

I’m writing this in an attempt to help people without chronic illness understand the constant calculation people with chronic illness (whether physical, mental, or both) have to undertake to budget our energy, as well as the limits on our resilience.

First, go read about the Spoon Theory (which is technically a metaphor, yes I know). Then come back. I’ll wait.

….

You’re back! Great. Let’s continue.

To review:

The basic idea of the Spoon Theory (Metaphor) is that, while most people have a consistent level of energy that’s pretty high and don’t have to calculate how they expend their energy, people with chronic illness - whether physical, mental, or both - are engaged in a constant calculation of what they can afford to do before they run out of energy and have to rest or risk illness and collapse. For example, some days I have to decide - if I take the full recycling bin out first thing in the morning, will I have enough energy to get M. to our co-working space/Montessori school and then do any good work once I’m there? If not, I better wait on the recycling, or I risk having to spend my workday in a fog being unproductive.

An important part of this metaphor that the original explanation doesn’t address is that the number of “spoons” - the amount of energy a chronically ill person has - varies depending on a number of factors. So a person might be able to accomplish a lot one day and very little the next, or might have a run of bad days with very few spoons and need many restful days to recover. This happened to me when we rearranged the house rather quickly right before M’s birthday. I’m only now beginning to find energy for things other than school or caring for M.

There’s another element to this that the spoon theory doesn’t address, and that’s the case of having variable emotional resilience. Anyone can have their resilience depleted, but some people have more resilience to begin with. In my case, depression and anxiety mean when those conditions aren’t well-managed, I have much lower resilience than a normal person. A tantrum from M. that I could normally handle gracefully and with gentleness might prompt me to snap at him or have to separate myself from him when I’m feeling this way. The metaphor I find helpful for this is to think of myself as a rubber band. When I’m stretched close to my limit, a very small additional stretching could cause me to snap. My rubber band might be more brittle or smaller than someone else’s, someone who could tolerate more demands on their resilience before snapping.

I hope this has been helpful for people, especially if you care about someone with chronic illness but don’t have it yourself,

Grad school and parenthood are both immensely isolating experiences. So when you combine them, you tend to be… immensely isolated. I feel very lonely most of the time, but also too exhausted usually to do the things I think you have to do to keep a friendship going. So I start to feel like I have no friends, when really I have a lot of friends, but I’m just not communicating with them much.

This is, I think, actually pretty normal. This article I read for class a few years ago had the image below in it.

[caption id=“attachment_9253” align=“aligncenter” width=“514”] Figure from “Question-Negotiation and Information Seeking in Libraries,” Robert S. Taylor, College and Research Libraries 29(3), 178-194[/caption]

The way I interpret this schematic, when people first become friends, there’s a lot of communicative acts that are of the getting-to-know-you type, not focused on any particular topic. But as the friendship endures and you know each other better, you communicate less frequently but more topically.

My friendships fall in line with this pretty well, but there’s not much communication that’s just on the topic of, you know, how we’re all doing, and how we value our friendship. So here’s me, lonely, missing my friends, too tired to do much about it, and also a little overwhelmed at the prospect, because what do you say to someone you care greatly about but haven’t talked to in months?

…

On Thanksgiving, W., M., and I drove over to W.’s brother’s place for dinner with that side of the family. M. hadn’t napped and fell asleep on the way over. I told W. to go ahead inside, and I would stay in the care and bring M. up if/when he woke up.

I’d brought books with me, but I found that my brain couldn’t process the words in them. So I played some games on my phone and watched “Pangs,” as is my tradition. After that I started to watch The Empire Strikes Back, but I got a text from Verizon saying I was about to use up all my data, so I decided to stop.

So there I was, in the dark, in a rare silent moment, all by myself, and I had a revelation:

All I had to do to connect with my friends was to say hi. It was as simple as a text. It didn’t need to be a dramatic letter full of reasons why I haven’t been in touch, apologies for ghosting them, lengthy updates on how things are going with me.

So I opened up the Contacts app on my phone and just started going through it, texting people I miss a lot and haven’t checked in with in a long time. (I did miss some people and only realized later that I should have included them, so the next time I find myself in a truly quiet moment like this, I’ll get to them.)

To each of them, I sent a customized version of a message that went basically like this:

"Hi [friend's name]! I'm in the car with a sleeping M. outside W's brother's house and taking the rare quiet time as an opportunity to text friends and wish them well. I hope you're having a great day!"

Some people just got “Hi! I love you!” and others just got a variation of “I hope you’re having a great day!” without the explanation about M. sleeping.

And in a few minutes, answers started coming in.

I am thankful for your friendship.

❤️️❤️️❤️️

We just pulled off our first Thanksgiving in our house!

I love you right back and I hope you had a wonderful day too! 💜

Thank you! We did have a good day! I hope you and your family did as well.

Thanks for the Thanks-greetings! I hope you’re doing well and junk!

I love you too! And I miss you!

Hey lovely! I hope you’re well! I adore you!

Friends. They’re great, right?

Now I’ve opened up all of these conversations, I hope I’ll feel more comfortable just sending a note to say “Hey! Thinking of you! How are you?” I can’t believe it took this long for it to occur to me that it’s as simple as that.

And let’s conclude with this:

If you’re someone who thinks sometimes of reaching out to me and then doesn’t, because it’s too daunting or whatever, know that I always welcome a “Hi! How are you?”

I’ve been thinking today about something Maria Bamford said - I think it was in her episode of The Hilarious World of Depression. She said that one of the times she was hospitalized for her mental illness, and before she met her husband, she saw the people in the psychiatric facility and how they had people who loved them visiting them, especially spouses and romantic partners. She said it made her realize that she didn’t have to wait until she loved herself for someone else to love her.

I think this is so important to remember. There’s a lot of rhetoric out there about how if you want to be loved, you have to love yourself first. But I’m here to tell you, and so is Maria Bamford: it’s just not so. You are worthy of love, whether you love yourself or not, and the people who love you will love you when you think you’re great and when you’re very down on yourself.

I was out at dinner with my family a couple days ago and four adults were sitting at the next table over, conversing about movies and books and society. For the first time since my son was born, I realized that I miss that flavor of conviviality.

Of course I love my kid more than anything in the world, but I also enjoy conversation that consists of more than “The potty IS a good place for poop!” and “I don’t know why Winnie the Pooh has a grumbly voice.”

To be fair, my kid and I actually have some solid commute conversations, but they’re still not the same as chatting with friends about pop culture and the world.

(Does this post - or my others about parenthood - mean I’m a mommy blogger now? When I was pregnant, my friend Whitney asked, jokingly, if I was going to become a mommy blogger once I had my kid and I was all, “Haha no!” But did I? Jenny Lawson and Heather B. Armstrong are considered mommy bloggers and I really like them, so I’m going to rock it, if that’s who I am now.)

We went to lunch with a friend of my son’s and her parents after the preschool Halloween party today. I thought, This will be great! The kids will entertain each other and we can have grown up talk!

Reader, that is not what happened.

Honestly, though, being a parent seems to mean being really behind on pop culture, so what would I even talk about besides either my kid or my work? And it turns out most people aren’t interested in talking about the spread of ethnography as a methodological approach beyond the field of anthropology, so work’s not great for much conversation, either.

My kid is so cute, though.

I’ve been feeling moderately not okay lately. Nothing truly devastating, but a sense of doom. A sense of never being able to finish anything, of everything moving slower than I’d like while somehow also moving faster than I’d like. Of not being able to get out from under life.

I still feel that way, but I’m doing a little better today, for a couple of reasons.

1. To appease my child, after returning some books to the university library today I went and visited with my advisor and one of my committee members, who is also a dear friend. I talked to them about my slow progress, my frustration, the stage of the work I'm in, the sense that this part is a slog. They affirmed that it's normal to feel this way and that I'm still within my timeline for a May 2021 graduation, and I'm going to be okay. So, next time I feel this way, I should probably remember: talk to Sandra and Casey, because it always makes me feel better.
2. A few weeks ago, I read Danielle Laporte's The Desire Map, which focuses on living according to your core desired feelings. My core desired feelings are ease, flow, creativity, and connection. I have not been doing things in alignment with bringing about these feelings, but I know that I have the power to switch things up so that I do live in that alignment, and remembering that I can do that has me feeling a lot better.

So, I’m still not okay, but now I believe I will be okay, later.

My blog post, A Start-to-Finish Literature Review Workflow, is probably the most viewed thing on my website. It’s a great overview, especially for people new to writing lit reviews. I’m pretty proud of it.

But it’s incomplete.

I’ve had plans for a long time now to write a more advanced lit review tips post, as well as one with some variations and modifications on that workflow.

But today I need to talk about what’s on my mind right now, which is that theoretical and methodological lit reviews are really different from lit reviews that describe a body of research on a particular topic.

The general workflow still works for these kinds of lit reviews, but once you get to that concept mapping stage, things get a little different. So here are a few things you might consider for these types of lit reviews.

Theoretical Lit Reviews

• Trace the development of the theory. Who first articulated it? How has it changed over time? Who refined it? Who expanded it? What did they add?
• Synthesize the development of the theory. As people refined and expanded it, how did those refinements and expansions interact with the theory as originally proposed? Can you pull it all together into a new statement that incorporates all those different things?
• Discuss application of the theory. (This might be beyond the scope of your literature review, but it might not.) Who has applied the theory? How did they apply it? Did their application of the theory lead them to reconsider anything about the theory?

Methodological Lit Reviews

• Identify the origins of the methodology. What type of thing was it created to study? What problem was it trying to solve?
• Declare key characteristics of the methodology as it has been implemented over time. Not only what it was created to study, but how writing about it has contributed to our understanding of what the methodology is. For example, Hine (2000) discusses ethnography as involving travel (whether physical or experiential), participation, observation, the ethnographer as someone with the authority to describe the "field" where the ethnography has been undertaken, the participant/informant as a member of the culture being studied, and the reader of the ethnography as someone who has neither the participant nor ethnographer's experience and thus is gaining understanding of the culture through the ethnographer's account.
• Describe methodological challenges that have arisen as people have implemented the methodology, and, where possible, how people have navigated those challenges.

I’m working on a literature review about affinity space ethnography/connective ethnography right now, and as I try to organize my thoughts, thinking about these things is helping me make sense of the tons of writing there is on ethnography more broadly.

References

Hine, C. (2000). Virtual Ethnography. SAGE.

I’m having a little brainstorm over here about my frustration with jargon in academia and the way disciplines borrow from each other and then deposit that jargon on students as though they already know what these things mean, and it’s not all coming together yet so I thought I’d just throw some words out here and some of them will have notes on my understanding but others won’t yet.

space and place - this is what launched this brainstorm, because I was reading about bringing a spatial perspective to the internet and because I’m doing work on affinity spaces. A quick Google tells me that this comes from geography, from the work of Yi-Fu Tuan, and I have heard people throw this around so much in educational research and to a lesser extent in information science research, and I think it’s probably a really useful concept but at no point did anyone offer me an introduction to it as though it were a new thing.

Paulo Freire - I really ought to have read this guy’s stuff. I haven’t yet. Maybe I’ll get there one day.

Habitus (Pierre Bourdieu) - SAME. In my second semester of my doc program, John Martin was all “Bourdieu’s habitus” and, like, I know, he was right, this is a thing I should know, because I’m researching practices, and practice theory is a thing, and this is another one where it’s like, okay, I’ll get there someday I hope.

Bakhtinian carnivalesque - I ran across this because of cosplay but I first came across Mikhail Bakhtin’s work when I was doing a paper on expansive learning, and guess what, I could probably stand to read some more Bakhtin.

semiotics - this comes up a lot for me right now because Gee’s work is all over semiotics and Discourse/discourse and blah blah discursive practices blah.

hermeneutics - Ran across this one in an English class that I thought was about Digital Editing, which it technically was, I just didn’t know that editing has a different meaning in academic English circles than it does in the circles where I ran prior to starting a PhD.

I’m a fourth-gen postgrad and I struggle with this jargon. I don’t know how anyone makes time to deeply understand theory, especially theory translated into English from other languages, and I’ve taken two theory classes and three qual methods classes.

All of this language, in my experience, serves the purpose of gatekeeping and alienating people who could be doing phenomenal work. (Epiphenomenal?) How do we fix it? Can we fix it?

I kind of want to make it my job to fix it.

I’ve been listening to the latest episode of Fansplaining, with guest Emily Nussbaum, and it’s led me to sort of a revelation.

[First, an aside: Emily Nussbaum mentions in the episode that in her Buffy days she was on the Bronze. It’s no secret that that was my first fannish home. It’s so nice to hear about Bronzers in the world. I don’t know if Emily would call herself a Bronzer, but my definition is just somebody who spent time at the Bronze, so she counts.]

Since I decided to do my dissertation on the information literacy practices of cosplayers, I’ve been reconnecting with fandom. For years now, I’ve had trouble staying connected to any particular fandom specifically, and fandom itself in general, for a number of reasons:

• my fannish home being in diaspora
• burnout after a failed Save Our Show campaign
• the proliferation of social networks
• grad school
• parenting

W. has repeatedly suggested that being fannish is easier in your teens and 20s when you have fewer responsibilities than it is in your 30s when you have a kid, and that’s fair. But I always feel like none of these explanations are quite enough.

Listening to Emily Nussbaum say:

"...the situation in which somebody produces an entire show and then releases it to the audience changes the way that people talk about TV when it doesn’t come out week-by-week."

…gave me a little lightbulb moment.

My primary fandoms have all been week-by-week TV fandoms: Sailor Moon when it aired as an afternoon show in the 90s, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Wonderfalls (yes, Wonderfalls!), The Inside (I’m here for Tim Minear’s most obscure work), Veronica Mars, 30 Rock, New Girl. The intensity of my participation in fandom for each of these varies, but other than a brief flirtation with Star Wars fic in high school because Sonja was doing it, and some heavy time spent reading Harry Potter fic and playing in related RPs, weekly television is my medium of choice.

And the way we talked about weekly television in the late 90s and early 2000s is how I know to talk about things as a fan: what is the significance of what just happened? What will happen next? What do we wish would happen next?

You can do all of these things after bingeing a season of Stranger Things, and I do (though mostly only with W.), but it feels different somehow.

I’m going to try and crack it. I’m going to figure it out with Glow.

Anyway, this has not gone very far, but it’s just something that I thought about and wanted to write about a little bit.

See comment at kimberlyhirsh.com/2019/07/2… backfed from twitter.com/thoughtso…

I’m not a very efficient writer.

I have 20 hours of childcare a week, and usually lose two or three of those hours to late arrival (mine), getting settled in, and winding down.

It feels like I ought to be spending every minute of that time either reading or writing.

But I actually spend a lot of it giving my mind space to process what I’ve read or reorganize what I’ve written.

Brigid Schulte writes about realizing that many of the world’s great male artists had women (wives, housekeepers, mothers) who protected their time for them. They used this time not just for the physical act of producing, but also for taking long, silent walks where they thought through their work. Schulte points out that throughout history, women’s time has been fragmented, and they have carved their work time out of these little slivers.

My time is extremely fragmented, though less so than when my son was an infant. He sometimes blesses me by taking a long nap, which I inevitably use as leisure time rather than work time because honestly, my brain is just usually no good for work at the time that he’s napping. (I also can’t rely on these naps, so I’m afraid to plan to work during them, because sometimes he doesn’t take them.) My mother-in-law also helps out by spending several hours with him every week, and my partner takes care of most of the things that those great artists' wives, mothers, and housekeepers did, in spite of having a full-time job himself.

So, I’m blessed.

But I still feel wrong when, instead of churning out my own words or filling my head with the words of others, I take time to stare.

Even though that’s where my words come from, that space between reading and writing.

I need to reconceptualize this space as part of the writing process.

What about you? Have you successfully given yourself permission to view thinking time as productive time?

Get ready for some rambling, stream-of-consciousness, blogging-as-thinking.

As a member of the Oregon Trail generation, I came of age alongside the Web. I had access to much of it a little earlier than my peers, because my dad’s work provided home access for him. As an adolescent, I had this sort of constant feeling of the immense potential of my life ahead of me and of the Web, and as a young adult I really leaned into that, blogging starting in 2001. It’s not a big leap from me to this rando kid on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “I Robot, You Jane” who says, “The only reality is virtual. If you’re not jacked in, you’re not alive.” I feel this visceral connection to the Web that I have a hard time putting in words.

As I shared last weekend, I’ve been looking at Pierre Levy’s writings on collective intelligence and cyberculture. I shared in the IndieWeb chat that I was reading Collective Intelligence and it was making me deeply sad. I actually had to put the book down several times and hit a bit of a wall in my plans for my comps because I just didn’t know how to recover from this sadness. The French edition of Collective Intelligence was published in 1994, and full of the kind of technoutopian rhetoric that I believed for years, that kind of still hums in my veins a bit. And reading it made me so sad about what I imagine we’ve lost, the weird internet Vicki Boykis talks about. Specifically, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that the kind of collaboration that excited me about the web, and that Web 2.0 promised to make more accessible, is so much harder to find now, perhaps nearly impossible, because of silos and the proliferation of advertising.

And maybe it’s because I’m 38 instead of 18 that I’m feeling this way, maybe it’s something else, maybe I’m wrong. I just felt immensely defeated, even in the face of examples to the contrary. I just felt sad and overwhelmed and to be honest, this feeling hasn’t gone away entirely.

But then I was poking around the Vaporwave subreddit, which of course is a brilliant place to be if you’re feeling disillusioned by the false promises of and simultaneously nostalgic for 90s-era technoutopianism, and found the thread for VA:10, a project resulting from collaboration between 88 creators, with plans to create not just an album, but also a film and an art book, documenting this digitally-born musical genre and aesthetic. With plans to donate all proceeds to the Internet Archive.

And my faith came back a little.

Other stuff from this week:

• I finished playing Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and started playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (not for the first time). I've been lurking in the Metroidvania subreddit.
• I finished reading Circe. It was good, but I liked Song of Achilles better.
• I started reading How to Do Nothing.

M. and I have an agreement, proposed and enforced by me, after we spent months with him as a tiny audio tyrant during our commutes. Now, so that I don’t have to listen to Pharrell’s “Happy” on Repeat-1 for 40 minutes a day (or, as it would be now, “Belle” or “For the First Time in Forever” or “My Superhero Movie”), he chooses what we listen to on our morning commute (usually one of those songs above on Repeat-1, and he actually knows to ask for Repeat-1), and I choose what we listen to in the afternoon. He won’t begin a nap anywhere except in a moving car right now - ironic since we never had to do that with him when he was a tiny baby, but I guess it’s because we could always bounce him in the Boba and he’s too big for comfortable front-wearing at 33 months - and podcasts are more likely to lull him to sleep than music, and also I really enjoy podcasts, so most afternoons I put on a podcast.

For a while, we were listening to Fansplaining and The Mermaid Podcast, both of which are super fun, and which I intend to get back to. They’ve got huge backlogs, and also are a little distant from my current experiences in life, so I decided to check out some podcasts that are more relevant to my day-to-day and would be easier to catch up on. It’s made a huge difference in my quality of life. Here they are:

The Double Shift: “a reported, narrative podcast about a new generation of working mothers.” Every mother works, host and journalist Katherine Goldstein points out. This podcast is huge for me because it’s not about parenting as an activity and it’s not about kids. It’s about personal experiences of being a mother and how that impacts your whole life. I loved hearing her talk to a punk rock future rabbi and women who work in Las Vegas brothels. I want more media like this: acknowledging that being a mom impacts everything you do, but doesn’t have to limit you to activities and ideas that center exclusively on motherhood. It’s sort of the impetus behind my (dormant but I’ve got the next issue in draft form) newsletter, Genetrix.

Acadames: “a biweekly podcast that explores whether being a woman in academia is a dream, game, or scam through interviews with a diverse range of women.” This is hosted by two scholars in the health sciences at my university. They address lots of issues that feel deeply relevant for me, though I do sometimes bump up against the differences between health sciences and social sciences, for example when Dr. Whitney Robinson was talking about how she thinks the study of knowledge is called epistemology and I thought, “What a luxury, to be uncertain of the definition of epistemology.” (Her definition is one: epistemology as a branch of philosophy that deals with how we know what we know. In the humanities and social sciences especially, but also I think in the natural sciences, epistemology is also a scholar’s or scholarly community’s set of beliefs about how knowledge is constructed. Your “epistemological stance” is your personal take on this. Mine is that knowledge is constructed, that there are multiple ways of knowing that include but are not limited to both empirical and experiential ways, and that anyone can create knowledge.)

Motherhood Sessions: Dr. Alexandra Sacks is making matrescence, a concept with which I am obsessed, a more widely known idea. In her podcast, she talks to moms about all kinds of things, and basically does recorded therapy sessions. (The guests are people who volunteered to be on the show. She’s not secretly and unethically and maybe illegally? recording patients or anything.) Some of these are closer to my experience than others, but I found it especially valuable to hear from a mom of one who has mixed feelings about the fact that she’s okay with only having one kid, and a PhD student who has had her dissertation on hold for years and needs to talk through whether she wants to bother finishing.

My friend Little Willow doesn’t make New Year’s Resolutions in January. She makes them on her birthday, which is not in January.

I like to set intentions lots of different times: in January. In March, when the astrological year begins. At the start of the school year. With each new moon. And, yes, on my birthday.

My birthday was yesterday, and I spent it packing up the last stuff from my brother and Mom’s apartment to move them back into the closest thing I have to a childhood home (where I lived from ages 13 - 18), having lunch, playing video games, and having a much better day than I feared I would, but I didn’t have the oomph to set intentions.

Today I’m asking myself who I want to be this year.

I want to be someone who takes care of herself, unapologetically, and who understands that there is no one in her immediate environment who would deny her the ability to take care of herself. (It’s easy for me to think that self-care needs to fall by the wayside because I’m a mom, but I’m at a point where that’s just not true anymore, so I need to not let it be an excuse for neglecting my own needs.)

I want to be someone who simultaneously understands that she is a person of value just by virtue of existing, but also contributes to keeping her family and household going.

I want to be someone who is invested in her community. (My family gave me a membership to the Durham Co-op Market for my birthday and shopping there and participating in the Co-op is one way in which I can really support my community.)

I want to be someone who makes things for pleasure.

I want to be someone who continues to live a life that is more for living than for documenting, but also be someone who documents her thoughts and understandings both to share with others and so that she can reflect on them later.

Who do you want to be?

I love that Ton Zijlstra asked his readers a few years ago

What would you like me to write more about?

I want to blog more and to use the time when I need a break in the middle of an academic writing sprint to write other stuff. So I’m asking you to answer the same question for me. You can answer publicly or privately, and you should feel free to include fanfic prompts in your suggestions.

(And a note for Sandra, you don’t have to answer, because I know and I promise I’m working on it.)

I should mention that it’s my birthday today and answering this would be a great gift from you to me.

I’ll update this post with answers as they come in. Let me know if you want yours to remain anonymous.

Hello, friends! Today I’m going to write up an idealistic eating plan for myself based on what I’ve learned over the past four years about what’s manageable for me. This is as much to remind me as it is to share with you, because it turns out my primary audience for my blog is future me. So future me, here’s what you need to eat.

Requirements I’ve placed on this eating plan:

• Must be gluten-free, dairy-free, corn-free, soy-free
• Needs to distinguish between warm-weather and cool-weather foods
• Needs to have options for both low-energy and high-energy days

Tricky things:

• I'm really particular about vegetable textures and can never remember which ones I like or how I like them prepared.

Warm-Weather Eating Plan

Breakfast

• Smoothie: non-dairy milk + fruit + greens + protein powder + fiber powder + greens powder + ice (homemade or storebought: e. g., Smoothie King's Vegan Dark Chocolate Banana or one of Jamba Juice's Plant-Based Smoothies)
• Dairy-free yogurt and granola (on a high-energy day or a day when I have plenty of time, yogurt from a big tub; on a low-energy or rushed day, yogurt in a small package)

Lunch

• Salad (e.g. PCOS Diva's Mango-Black Bean Salad in a Jar)
• Sandwich on gluten-free bread

Dinner

• Grilled meat + rice/quinoa/sweet potato + veggies
• Something in the Instant Pot

Cold-Weather Eating Plan

Breakfast

• Oatmeal with fruit and nuts
• Toast with nut butter and fruit

Lunch

• Soup (homemade or Amy's brand)
• Leftovers from dinner

Dinner

• Baked meat + rice/quinoa/sweet potato + veggies
• Something in the Instant Pot

All-Weather Snack Options

• Nuts and fruit
• Larabars

All-Weather Beverage Options

• Still water with ice
• Sparkling water
• Chai tea + stevia + non-dairy milk
• Coffee + stevia + non-dairy milk
• In true desperate times when caffeine is required and tea and coffee don't appeal, Zevia
• As a rare treat, Izze

Next Steps

I’ve struggled in the past with actually eating the salads I prepare and figuring out how to incorporate more vegetables into my diet. My next steps are to begin trying different vegetables prepared in different ways and tracking how I like them.

This is an ever-evolving meal plan, so expect to hear more as I update it!

This is just me, thinking out loud, so expect it to be rough, incomplete, unpolished. But I thought it was a train of thought worth stopping, so here we go.

When you’re driving down a city street at a cool 35 mph while “Belle” plays on repeat one for the 1000th+ time in recent months and your toddler is in the back seat sulking because Daddy has to go to work today and separation from Daddy is painful, your mind wanders. It does if you’re me, anyway. Mine wandered to the way in which the only thing I seem interested in besides sleep lately is tweaking my personal website. Then I thought:

As I'm building my website, it kind of feels like I'm building myself.

Identity construction is kind of an obsession of mine, specifically the idea that we create our own identities through narratives we tell about ourselves. Sure, there are identities the world forces upon us, but our narratives interact with those. Most of my work in my doctoral program has touched on identity in one way or another:

• I wrote about the maker movement in libraries and found Breanne Litts's Activity-Identity-Community framework, which posits that the development of maker identities is one of the pillars of the maker movement.
• I wrote about how libraries can leverage tabletop roleplaying games to support teen identity development (in revision for Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults).
• I touched on the process of developing an identity as an improviser as a key part of participating in the improv comedy community.
• I wrote about how horizontal learning enables young people to leverage their out-of-school identities for academic success.
• I wrote about how young people imagine their possible future selves.

And my favorite fictional works often have to deal with reconciling different pieces of one’s identity: Spider-Man, Sailor Moon, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer all come to mind. (And the X-Men; I was just reading an old Chris Claremont book - Uncanny X-Men #129, 130 - somewhere in there - where Nightcrawler thinks about how he’s decided not to disguise himself as a normal human; I think there’s something to unpack there.) So, I guess superheroes are what I’m talking about, and I’m sure lots of work has already been done on how superhero identity plays out, including Brownie & Graydon’s book.

So I was thinking about how building my website feels like building myself, and I thought… hasn’t this been true since I first started building websites in 1995? I got my first personal domain in 2001, and building an online space to represent myself has always meant choosing what I want the world to know about me, who I want to seem to be, and by defining who I want to seem to be, am I not defining who I want to actually be?

Then I thought about social media and all the ways we’ve used them to represent ourselves, and all the ways that has gotten away from us. Before we knew how bad Facebook was, when my husband would add a new friend on Facebook, he would immediately peruse their profile to find out what books and movies they liked; what we like contributes to the picture of who we are, but what we want people to know we like does even more so, I think.

My train of thought loses steam here, but I’m definitely interested in digging into the intersection between technology and identity more. Our tools shape not only how we think, but who we are.