This friend was sitting on my front porch welcome mat when I left for the chiropractor this morning. I was running a bit late but I had to take a picture. The Luna Moth is one of my personal symbolic animals.

This morning I had a dream that my house (which was, of course, the house I lived in as a teenager and not my current house) was falling apart - paint coming off the walls all over, the wall between a closet and a bathroom falling down (a wall that doesn’t exist - a closet that doesn’t exist) - the only room that was in tact was the family room, with its ridiculous/amazing striped scarlet pimpernel wallpaper (actual wallpaper still in the house) - and the bedroom, closet, and bathroom were full of moths. I was very anxious about all the moths until I saw a Luna moth placidly perched on a closet-bathroom wall and thought, “OH, that’s a SYMBOL, this is a DREAM, I don’t actually need to figure out how to describe what’s wrong with this house to a real contractor for repair” and felt an immense sense of relief.

So after all that, to find one right in my path this morning felt extra magical.

This might get a little stream-of-consciousness. Consider yourself warned.

I went to a play today. It was Wakey Wakey, the last performance of the last show at Manbites Dog Theater’s physical performance space. I’ve always been sort of Manbites-adjacent; I remember when they had a space in a different part of town than they do now. I have been friends with or worked with many other people involved with them. The art they have made over the years sits in this beautiful space - a sort of off-Broadway space - that is not beholden to the commercial, but is art explicitly intended to inspire conversation, as opposed to the let’s-put-on-a-show vibe of many theatre projects (including all the ones I’ve ever produced). Being in that space - reading the program - and most especially smelling that small theatre smell of painted scenery - made me feel keenly how this is a piece of my life that I have let go - certainly since having my son, but in some sense extending even farther back - to when I began college almost 19 years ago.

And yet the theatre is in me.

Wakey Wakey is a good show for making you think about the parts of you that are with you and in you that maybe you’ve been neglecting.

I started to think about Sarah Ruhl, and her book 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write. I haven’t read it. I want to. I want to read everything Austin Kleon recommends on art and motherhood.

Last week I had a frightening dizzy spell. It started as I was going to sleep Tuesday night. I thought, “Probably I’m just tired. It’ll get better overnight.” It did not. Wednesday morning I was genuinely afraid to go downstairs. W. was out of town, so it was just me and toddler M. We walked across the hall into my home office. I popped him in front of the TV with some Daniel Tiger and ate some candy I had on hand. At the end of the Daniel Tiger episode, I felt better enough to venture downstairs. I called in the grandmas, and my mom came over so that I could engage in enough self-care to try and get better. I thought maybe I was having hypoglycemia, because I’d only eaten a scone and cheese for dinner. Then I remembered that my hormones were acting all wonky in a way that maybe was leading to anemia. I thought maybe the intense nursing that M. has desired for the past couple weeks was leaving me dehydrated. Over the course of the day, through the careful application of food, water, and caffeine, I got mostly better. Thursday I wasn’t dizzy anymore but I was exhausted. Friday and yesterday (Saturday), I was basically a lump for most of the day.

I interpreted this episode as my body telling me that it was time to contract. Time to replenish. My mom said to me, “Please don’t let yourself get more depleted,” and I thought, “Yes, that’s the word.”

I was the opposite of replete. I felt like a jack o’lantern after the emptying and before the carving and lighting up. I felt scraped out. I genuinely felt as though my life force had left my body in very physical ways.

Today I started to feel better. I’m beginning to get a handle on it.

&&&&&&&

I unsubscribed from all my newsletters with Unroll.me. It’ll be easy to add back the ones I miss.

I unsubscribed from all of my RSS feeds.

I unsubscribed from all of my podcasts except The Hilarious World of Depression and Self-Service.

I lay in bed reading novels and playing mobile games.

I decided to let the Self-Service podcast be my guide. And it led me to water. Literally. An early episode is called “Stay Hydrated, BB,” and I decided to let go of the idea of calling things in for the next year of my life except water. I’m calling in water: for drinking, for swimming in. For making magic.

I was listening to Cinderly’s Mermaid Podcast months ago (I definitely want to pick this one back up!) and in one episode the host visits the Weeki Wachee Springs mermaid camp. One of the experienced mermaids tells her, “The water is a teacher.”

I have held that thought in my mind ever since.

Water changes its shape to fill the vessel it is in. Water can be solid, liquid, or gas. Water can carry things. Water can erode things. Water water water water.

&&&&&&&

I wasn’t kidding when I called this a blog post about everything and threatened stream-of-consciousness, y’all.

Being a mother feels like being a piece of kintsugi. It shatters you and puts you back together. You are shinier and more beautiful than before. You are disconnected from yourself, but all the pieces of you are still there. It’s easy in the early days to think they’re gone, but they’re not.

&&&&&&&

Some months ago I told W. that I felt like I needed a side-hustle because my research assistantship doesn’t bring in a lot of money, but that I simultaneously was struggling to do what I have to do now so I couldn’t really take on more.

“You’re a full-time mom and a full-time grad student,” he told me. “I would encourage you to consider one of those to be your side hustle.”

It was only this week that I realized mom is the primary gig and grad student is the side-hustle.

I’m feeling pretty silly right about now.

I kind of want to read Chris Guillebeau’s book Side Hustle and see if I can apply anything from it to how I organize my schoolwork. I told myself that I can buy it once I finish turning my concept map for the current chunk of my comps lit review into an outline.

&&&&&&&

It’s important to recognize that when you are caring for loved ones, even minimally, it’s going to impact what you can do elsewhere. It’s important to give ourselves grace and permission both to take a break from caring for others in order to care for ourselves, and to accept that the rest of life will move slowly when care is our number one priority.

&&&&&&&

Back in April, I did a lot of massaging of my online identity to make it fit a job I was applying for. I did want that job, and I do want to be the person who would get that job… but I didn’t want that job right now, not really, and I didn’t get the job, so that worked out well. (It’s the kind of job that isn’t available very often, in that it’s one particular position in one very specific organization, so I decided to go for it even though I wasn’t really in the place where I was ready for it, because I don’t know how long it’ll be before another chance comes along.)

Anyway, the massaging I did of my online identity has left me feeling a little dissatisfied, a little inauthentic, so I will probably be doing some reconfiguring of my bio everywhere, and my pictures and everything, to feel more like myself again.

&&&&&&&

I’ve recently started to allow myself to call myself a writer.

I wonder if I’ll ever be comfortable calling myself an artist?

&&&&&&&

How are you doing?

If you don’t feel like replying here, you can drop me an email. kimberly at this domain name right here. Love you, Internet!

Perpetual Mood:

Today I added 11 studies to my concept map for my makerspaces literature review.

Tomorrow: finishing my outline.

And then, I write.

I will write a bad first draft. And it will be good to have written.

I’ve gotten into the habit of saving links in Feedly or Pocket with every intention of writing a blog post about them later. Inevitably, when I return to them, I have no idea how I wanted to respond. I need to start taking notes.

I was listening to Lindsay Mack’s Tarot for the Wild Soul monthly medicine podcast for June, and she suggested that this is a great time for review because we’re coming up on being halfway through the year. Then I read the Astrostyle horoscope for my sun sign, Cancer, that said it was a good time to think about what I want to bring into the next year of my life, since my birthday is coming up soon. (About six weeks to go!) These are both great examples of the value I find in woo woo stuff - an invitation to consider what’s already within me and set my intentions for moving forward. I embraced the synchronicity of these two suggestions and decided to look back over the year so far, and then start making plans for what I want to bring into my 38th year on earth. (I’ll be turning 37. My dad will correct me if I call it my 37th year, since I had a whole year here before my first birthday, so.)

Before we make plans for the future, though, let’s look to the past!

I have a bad habit of telling myself nasty narratives about my own value: specifically, of thinking I don’t do anything. Life as a hybrid stay-at-home-mom/grad-student-working-on-comps is weird. You don’t go into an office. You don’t go to class. You theoretically set your own schedule. You spend a lot of time doing what your kid thinks sounds fun. You need to be ready to be interrupted at every moment of your day, yes even when someone else is taking care of the kid. It’s easy for me to let this unstructured amorphous blob of a life I have lead me to believe that I just sit around all day goofing off on the internet. I’m wrong; I know I’m wrong; but it helps to have documented evidence to remind me I’m wrong.

So here was my review process: I sat down with my bullet journals for 2018 and made a list of any metric I thought was interesting. I’ll be sharing those metrics here along with some additional notes. Categories are ad hoc.

School/Work

Submitted paper proposals: 2. One conference paper, one contest paper. The conference paper was rejected but I received some valuable feedback, Reviewer 2 Syndrome notwithstanding. (And honestly, Reviewer 1 was pretty harsh, too. Reviewer 3 was very encouraging, though.)

Submitted IRB applications: 1. Approved!

Comps prepared: See my earlier posts for notes on this.

Professional development modules drafted: 1.

Presentations given: 3.

Webinars attended: 1.

Job applications completed: 1. I’m not on the market, but there are a very few (okay maybe 2?) jobs that I would jump at regardless of my life circumstances, and one of them came open recently. I applied. I haven’t heard back beyond a confirmation that they received my application, but I’m not devastated because, as I mentioned, I’m not actually on the market.

Parenting/Relationships

Well Child Appointments: 1. And really, anyone who takes a toddler to the doctor should get a gold star, because they’re squirmy af and getting a weight/height measurement is always tricky. But my kid is done with vaccines until he goes to school!

Trips Taken: 3. At the end of February, M. and I accompanied W. on a work trip to Knoxville, TN. At the beginning of April, I took a whirlwind tour with my sibs, bro-in-law, and M., stopping in Savannah and Melbourne on our way to celebrate my grandmother’s life (she died in November at age 98) and then stopping in Melbourne and Atlanta on the way back (spending a couple of nights in Melbourne with my other grandmother, and a couple of hours in Atlanta with one of my bffs - remember that a best friend is a tier, not a person). WOOF. And then at the beginning of May, we took a much briefer trip just down the road to Greensboro, again accompanying W. for work travel. We went to the Children’s Museum and the Science Center. FUN!

Adjusted to new childcare situation. This has been huge. It’s taken a lot longer than I anticipated, but I think we’re hitting our stride. M. and I became members at Nido, a coworking space/Montessori school community. In the first few weeks, he was so demanding that they were devoting one teacher exclusively to him, which obviously was not sustainable. He threw a tantrum every time I left him. He would go on nap strike rather than sleep there. We were both stressed out by the whole thing. Now, he happily waves bye bye to me and takes two hour naps there. It’s been a long transformation, but what a big one! Next step: me leveraging my time there to get a lot more work done.

Health crises managed: 2. M. woke up with a slightly swollen eye one morning and by the next morning it was swollen shut. We had to figure out how to get him to take antibiotics. It turns out the least sneaky way is the most effective: squirt them inside his cheek and exhort him to swallow. Also, my dad had a pretty major surgery (it went well!) and I didn’t contribute much, but it still had a pretty big impact on how the day-to-day went for us during his recovery.

Creativity

Podcast episodes recorded: 3

Podcast episodes edited: 2

Journal pages filled: About 300. It’s worth noting that these are bullet journal pages, so this is a lot more lists and brain dumps and a lot less long-form writing than you might think. And a lot of this is notes that overlap with the comps preparation mentioned above. Still. 300 pages. It’s not nothing.

Blog posts made: 167 (including imports of old Instagram photos)

Doodles made: 2 so far. Keep up on Instagram for more.

RPGs played: I’ve got two running. One is face-to-face and one is via Slack.

Consumption

Books read: 9 (Including a couple of re-reads)

Haven’t tracked podcasts listened to or TV watched or articles read, but: a lot.

Adulting

Crises managed/in progress: 3. Got into a car accident (my fault). My wallet was stolen. There’s a big deal leak in our house, apparently from a flaw in our waterproofing somewhere (i.e. when it rains, we get water damage). I haven’t actually finished handling any of these, but I’m in the process on all of them and have taken steps.

In conclusion...

That’s a lot more than nothing, am I right? I should probably cut myself a break and stop thinking that I’m someone who takes up space but does not help. And I didn’t even mention all the invisible labor of parenting and adulting: meal planning, food prep, ordering diapers, clothes shopping, noticing which things we run out of and setting up Amazon subscriptions for them, figuring out developmentally appropriate activities, deciding how to spend the day… (I should note that I have a partner who recognizes a lot of this labor, rendering it visible which thank goodness, and who does a bunch of invisible parenting/adulting labor himself - laundry, dishes, yardwork, sweeping, mopping, reading to the kid while I make a smoothie - thank him. So when I call it invisible I’m referring as much to my own tendency to devalue this work as anything else.) Plus basic self-care, which I occasionally manage: showering, brushing my hair, brushing my teeth, washing my face, putting on clothes, remembering to eat, remembering to take my medicine and supplements…

Honestly, we all do a lot, don’t we? Just to live in this world?

Let’s give ourselves some credit. I will if you will! (I will even if you won’t. But I hope you will.)

I don’t know, do y’all feel like Anne McCaffrey liked dragons?

I love commencement speeches as a genre. I wasn’t remotely inspired by the one at my own college graduation and when I watch or read others, I like to pretend they’re for me  Because isn’t every day the commencement of something?

I read Ira Glass’s rather than listening to it, and found myself highlighting a lot  so I thought I’d share my favorite bits here.

You just have to get in there and make stuff and try things and push yourself hard and that’s the only way to find your way.

Glass is talking here about what to do when you’re lost and can’t figure out what you want to be doing. Multipotentialites can get paralyzed by possibilities. Perfectionists sometimes think they have to fully learn to do a thing before they can actually do it. But Glass has words that multipotentialite perfectionists (have you figured out yet that I am one?) need to hear: you learn the thing by doing it, and to find out if the thing is in fact one of your things, you have to pick it and try it.

It can take a long time to be as good as you want to be. And be kind to yourself, during that period. And work hard.

I ran into this a lot in improv, but I think it happens everywhere: you see the work of experts and are frustrated that your novice work isn’t good enough. I would watch people who had been improvising for 10, 11, 12, more years, and they would do what looked like magic, and I would think, “Why can’t I do that?” I started thinking this way when I had only been doing it for a year and a half. (Ira Glass has a great quote that expands on this idea.)

...the more idealistic your mission, the more cunning you have to employ to get people to engage with what you have to say.

This resonated with me immensely.

Everything will be better if you’re out for your own pleasure. Noticing what you’re actually truly interested in ... and curious about ... and making your work about that.

One of my core beliefs is that people do their best work when they care. Work you don’t care about won’t be good, no matter how important or meaningful it might be more generally. Find what lights you up right now (because it might change over time) and use that to change the world. And when it stops lighting you up, move on to the next thing.

Don’t wait. Make the stuff you want to make now. No excuses. Don’t wait for the perfect job or whatever. Don’t wait. Don’t wait. Don’t wait... Don’t wait. You have everything you need. Don’t wait.

Don’t wait.

Who’s going to #edcampcode in Raleigh on June 20? @nathan_stevens?

I’m working on the concept map for my makerspaces in libraries lit review. Nice progress so far and I’m a little less than half done.

 

Surprise work session today! Took advantage of bonus nanny time to get a couple’s work session in at the coffee shop near my house. Get you a partner who will sit across a table in silence from you while you both have your laptops out and secretly look at pictures of the kid you have together after you use a little work break to upload them to your shared album.

On to the reporting!

I reviewed and wrote synthetic notes for three studies today. Call that 600 words.

Then I transcribed synthetic notes for twelve studies from my notebook into Google Drive.

NEXT STEPS: revisiting my conceptual synthesis spreadsheet and adding new details to it. Making a new concept map. Revising my outline. Getting this chunk of my comps package drafted.

Finally taking on Kim Werker’s Craftsy class, Next Steps in Crochet. Here is my little swatch with a row of bobble stitches.

I love the amazing work that the students at Mount Vernon Middle School are doing to educate school librarians on how they can make their libraries more equitable. I can’t wait to learn more about the #libfive!

Finished 05/09/2018.

This is a (perhaps the) foundational work on young adult library services. I disagree with Edwards in a few places, mostly due to her being a product of her time. Writing before the advent of true YA literature as she did, she tends to consider books for teens as a step on the way to more mature reading, rather than an end in itself. And she also suggests that librarians shouldn’t sponsor clubs that aren’t book clubs. (She doesn’t look too highly on book clubs themselves, either.) Whereas I think there is a wide range of activities that a teen librarian can sponsor and still be within the library mission. Still, Edwards has a lot of good to offer even those of us who already have a degree in and experience with YA librarianship. Some choice gems:

• • You've got to read books if you're going to recommend them to teens. And you can do this by squeezing in reading in all those little moments. For myself, I'm trying to read at all the times when, for the past several years (since I got a smart phone, basically) that I would check my phone. Bye, Facebook. Hello, Stuff for the Teenage and the things you recommend.
  • There are some basic tools that it's easy to forget about in our tech-saturated world, but that doesn't mean they're not valuable: having teens recommend books to each other, giving book talks, making book lists.
  • Treat teens with respect.
  • Remember that in a few years, teens will be voters.
  • Meet readers where they are.
  • Be friendly and helpful.
  • Librarians are not police officers.
  • Librarians need to get out of the library and connect with the community.
  • Many librarians are in the business of customer service, not technical service.
  • Treat your patrons as guests at a party.
  • Focus on people rather than systems.

Art by Mari Andrew.

If you are a person for whom Mother’s Day is less fraught, perhaps you spent it like I did: claiming “me-time” by buying flowers and cards at Target while your partner played with the kid at home, hosting a gluten free brunch for your mother and mother in law, getting a little tipsy on mimosas, and napping.

And then getting up with every intention of taking a shower and realizing that no, you need even more napping.

As my kid would say, “Night night!”

A couple of months ago, I asked my friends, “What do I know or can I do that you wish I would teach you?” Learning is my favorite thing, and I wanted to find out what my friends thought I could do already that I could help them learn. I found out that there wasn’t just one thing, but instead a sort of class of things. They said how to podcast, how to knit, how to learn another language, how to do improv, and how to sing. Those are all things I can do and they all have one thing in common: each of them goes beyond being a simple skill, and instead encompasses a whole domain of knowledge.

There are a lot of blog posts and articles that will give you tips for learning anything, but they tend to take the approach of learning how to do a particular skill. What I am good at, and what I’m going to teach you how to do in this blog post, is engaging with a knowledge domain, which encompasses finding relevant resources and using them both to learn a suite of related skills and to build a network of other people in the same knowledge domain with whom you can learn and grow (and who might even become some of your best friends).

Here are all the different techniques I use when I decide to get obsessed with something new.

Ask a friend. Do you already know someone who is really into the thing you want to learn? I don’t like to explicitly ask folks to teach me these things, but I am comfortable saying to a friend, “Hey. You’re into [x]. What are the top five resources you use to keep up with it?” This is a good way to find out the best places to go, without putting an ongoing burden on your friend.

Read a book. I like books because they are great places to get a lot of information in an organized way. They can take you step-by-step through a process. They can connect you with other resources to try next. They are portable. You don’t need headphones to enjoy them. I have used this book as I’ve learned podcasting, and even though it’s ten years old, most of the information in it is still pretty valuable. To find a book relevant to your interests, you can Google the topic and add “book” to your search, like so. You can search or navigate the categories at Amazon or GoodReads. You can use WorldCat to find relevant books in libraries near you. Or you can read on for more tips…

Read a blog or online magazine. Blogs are great because they can keep you up to date on the newest happenings in a domain. They often have rich archives you can read through, organize related blog posts into series, and have comments sections where you can meet other people who are interested in the same thing. When I want to know the latest happenings in the world of web development, I visit A List Apart and Smashing Magazine. As with books, the easiest way to find new blogs is to search for your topic and add “blog” to your search. You can also try browsing through an aggregator like AllTop or use the Discover features at popular blogging services like WordPress, Medium, or Tumblr.

Subscribe to a newsletter. E-mail newsletters are experiencing a renaissance, and I’m excited about it. I subscribe to several podcasting newsletters, and I always have a sense of what is hot or new in the podcasting world because of it. One of the best things about these is that once you subscribe, you never have to come back. They just keep popping into your inbox and are there whenever you are ready for them. Again, an easy way to find these is by searching for the topic plus “newsletter.” The newsletter publishing service Revue also offers a gallery you can browse to find newsletters that might interest you.

Watch a video. YouTube is the most obvious choice for this, but it’s not the only one. There’s Vimeo. And, of course, your public, school, or academic library may have subscriptions to video services that you can access for free to find things that aren’t available on the open web. I honestly don’t know how anyone parented before YouTube. When my son was a newborn, I used a YouTube video to learn how to swaddle him. It was immensely valuable.

Join a forum. There are many specialized forums for various areas of interest. Just like with books and blogs, a search for the topic plus the word “forum” should get you where you need to go. I did that “ask a friend” thing when I wanted to get into mermaiding, and my friend Lareina Ladyfish pointed me to MerNetwork, which has a resource page that then points to several valuable threads.

Use social networking services. Already spending a ton of time on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram? Why not turn that into learning time? Use hashtags to find people talking about your topic. Look for relevant Facebook groups and Twitter chats.

Take a class in person. It feels obvious, but it’s worth mentioning. This is how I learned to do improv, and there are some things where this is the way to go. In person, you’ll get to practice the thing you want to do with immediate feedback from a dedicated teacher. The easiest way to find these is to search for the thing you want to do, plus “class” and the name of your city. (For example, “aerial silks class durham nc.")

Take a class online. For some things, it’s easier to learn on your own time. Platforms like Craftsy, CreativeLive, and Skillshare let you consume instructional content on-demand but also offer an environment where you can converse with other learners and receive feedback from the instructors who developed the course. This is how I learned to knit. The nice thing about many of these is that once you purchase a course, you can revisit it. Which I will definitely need to do with knitting, because like Liz Lemon, every two years I take up knitting for… a week.

Find an organization, meetup, or conference. In some cases, the best way to learn a thing is to just jump in and do it, even if you don’t feel ready. To do that, you might find an organization or event that is dedicated to it, like a community theater group, a ukelele jam, or a makerspace. You can find all kinds of groups at Meetup.com. You can also really immerse yourself by going to a multiday conference or convention. Just search for your topic with “conference” or “convention.” I went to Cosplay America this year, even though it would be generous to describe me as even a casual cosplayer, but I learned a lot that will serve me well when I really dig into cosplay. (Which I will.)

Find a mentor. This might be easier to do once you’ve tried one of the other options and met some people, but there are some people who reach out to strangers via Twitter or similar and ask them to be their mentor with some success. For tips on how to do that, read Never Eat Alone. I tend to obtain my mentors through more traditional means. A mentor doesn’t even have to know they’re your mentor, though; you can just watch and learn from them. But if you’re lucky, you might find out that they were intentionally mentoring you all along.

And finally...

Ask a librarian. For many librarians, helping people find the resources they need to learn what they want to learn is explicitly part of their job description. If you’ve exhausted all those possibilities above, or you’re overwhelmed by all those possibilities above, and you’re not sure where to start, find a librarian. Tell her what you want to learn. Ask him where you can find the best resources. Explain to them what specifically about doing this new thing excites you. Don’t know where to find a librarian? If you want to actually meet one, face to face, you should probably find a local library. If you’re shy about that, you might be able to find a chat reference librarian who will meet your needs or you can ask a librarian at the Library of Congress.

Did you find this helpful? Be sure to subscribe or follow me for more like it!

 

I’m participating in a 28 Day podcast challenge with Podcast Movement through the end of this month. I’ve already had several Things of Bronze guests give me feedback on my first episode, but I’m sharing with you, the internet, that I’m doing this challenge so you can hold me accountable. Feel free to check in with me throughout the month to see how it’s going. (Sidenote: Podcast Movement is a conference that offers childcare. Libraryland, we should follow their fine example.)

With respect to standardized markup around online courses, are you familiar with lrmi.dublincore.org ? I don’t think it’s exactly what you are looking to create, but it may be relevant to your interests.

Occasionally, Google gets it right when it suggests articles for me, and all of its creepy data mining was very successful when it recommended this to me. Librarians who are committed to doing good work but also make art? Hello, my people.

Today I finished reading The Fair Garden and the Swarm of Beasts, a foundational text on young adult librarianship written by Margaret A. Edwards, the fairy godmother of YA (more on that in another post), and she suggests that in addition to doing their regular work and making plenty of time to read, librarians must have another interest: gardening, amateur theatrics, something. And here these librarians are  doing that very thing

It’s interesting to me that none of them are performers, and that none of them serve children. I suspect many youth services librarians are musicians, dancers, actors, or comedians. (I’m all of these!) I would love to talk to youth services librarians about their art and its relationship to their work

Can you recommend anybody?

A little over a year ago, I wrote about how a post by Vicki Boykis and a comment by Chris Aldrich had inspired me to do my part to fix the internet. Since that time, I’ve worked hard to get my WordPress site set up so that I can write content here, send it out to other places where people who want to follow me can see it, and get their responses here. I have, for the past six weeks or so, really succeeded at Vicki’s first mandate:

...write your own blog on your own platform.

In that original post, I talked some about her other suggestions, but I haven't followed through as successfully on those. I think I'm going to take on her second one next:

Share good content.

There are several things I'm implementing to help me do that. With respect to sharing in WordPress on mobile with Android, Chris has generously shared one way to do that. I have tried it, and while it works, I'm now content to simply copy and paste a URL from the thing I'm sharing into the relevant field in my WordPress post editor. I keep my New Post page bookmarked, and I'm good to go. (My current setup is enabled by the Post Kinds plugin and made easier by the External URL Featured Image plugin, both of which I am aware of thanks to Chris.)

But of course, to share good content, I also need to consume good content. I do this by following blogs and subscribing to newsletters. I use Feedly for subscribing to blogs and Pocket for saving articles linked from newsletters for later reading. (Chris has written a great post about another WordPress plugin, PressForward, that can replace both of these services, but my current web hosting plan doesn’t give me the power I need to use it for the amount of content I’m taking in.)

I’m working on a following page to share what blogs and newsletters I’m subscribing to. (I have one but it isn’t displaying like I want it to, so it’s in draft mode until I figure it out.)

But I want to fix the internet in other ways, too, which is why I’m going to dust off my recollections of HTML5 and CSS3, learn PHP, and dig into WordPress so I can do things like build my own themes and create plugins that give WordPress the functionality I’m missing from it.

Would you like to join me in fixing the internet?