I’m playing with CSS to get spoiler-text hidden unless selected on my website. Let’s see if it works! I’m putting double pipes around it so people browsing in dark mode know where to highlight.

|| This is a spoiler. ||

Could I create a more elaborate solution to this problem? YES! But I’m not really interested in doing so.

Adam Grant’s article There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing has been floating around different places I spend time online and Austin Kleon wrote a great response, I’m not languishing, I’m dormant.

On Kleon’s Instagram post about this, a commenter quoted Aaron Burr’s line in the Hamilton song “Wait for It”: “I am not standing still, I am lying in wait.” This was my first thought on seeing Kleon’s post about this, as well.

The definition Kleon shares of “languish” and the more clinical/sociological definition Grant cites focus on ill-feeling. Kleon says that because languishing is antithetical to flourishing and he’s not attempting to flourish, he’s not languishing.

I’m definitely in a downtime stage of life, having just pushed through what I call a “Chariot moment,” based on the Tarot card The Chariot, which is my fave and also all about the hustle. I’m in more of a Hermit place right now. I even just had a conversation with W. about possibly spending most of the month of May in PhD recovery, only applying for jobs that are AWESOME, waiting to pursue freelance gigs until I start to feel a bit better.

To me, languishing implies unused potential. I have a bunch of art supplies languishing in a closet in my house. Grant sort of hints at this meaning, but the dictionary definition and Kleon’s response certainly don’t consider it.

So I’m not languishing.

Another commenter on Kleon’s Instagram post suggested that the book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times is a good read for thinking through this. I just borrowed the eBook from my local library and if I enjoy it, I’ll probably buy a hardcover copy. (One of the biggest changes in my life since the start of the pandemic is that I buy way more new hardcover books and I almost always buy them from one of my local bookstores.)

I’m lying in wait. If a great opportunity comes along, I’ll pounce on it. But like a cat, I’m conserving my energy.

And like a plant, I’m not ready to come up yet.

Feel free to apply other metaphors to the same ideas.

I’ve read Katie Rose Guest Pryal’s The Freelance Academic twice now. It’s a great book. I’ve taken notes on it and highlighted all over the place but I feel like I haven’t internalized the notes. So I thought I’d blog some notes, highlights, and marginalia. This blog post is no substitute for reading the book, so if this information seems useful, be sure to check it out!

The Freelance Academic Manifesto

Originally posted on Dr. Pryal’s blog.

1. Get paid for your work.
2. Live in a place you love with people you love.
3. When you find yourself being lured back to your department for a temporary gig, remember: They’re never going to let you in the club.
4. Stop applying to academic jobs.
5. Remember that you are not alone.

Things to Do

• Read books “about how higher education has changed and how how people have dealt with these changing conditions.” p. 13
• “…read everything you can about how to start making money for the hard work you do.” p. 14
• “Take a course on how to pitch ideas to writer’s markets that pay, either through online courses or by hiring a successful freelancer friend to teach you.” p.18
• “…hire an academic career coach, who specializes in helping people transition out of the academy.” p. 18
• Finish outstanding academic commitments such as papers.
• Write your goodbye letter.
• Figure out what you’re good at by making a list of your superpowers.
• Make a list of things you’re an expert in.
  • Add topics you might want to write about.
  • “…figure out who would be interested in reading what you have to say in these areas.” p. 138
  • Some ideas: trade magazines, in-house blogging or copywriting.
  • Make a list of at least 10 story ideas so you can choose 1 to pitch.
  • After you’ve pitched and written one article, pitch a series.
• Learn about running a business.
  • “Find out what the going rates are in the private sector for what you do. Think about the rates that you should be charging, and start charging those rates. And remember, when you set your rates, you have to add 30%.” p. 123
  • Pay yourself a steady paycheck.
  • Standardize the services you offer.
  • Technology
    • email
    • data storage (hard drive/cloud)
    • laptop
    • email signature
  • Library access
    • Find out if you can use your university library with something like a community membership.
  • Online presence
    • Update social media profiles
    • Get a Facebook business page.
    • Get testimonials from clients and put them on your website and social media profiles.
  • Business cards
  • Business structure
    • Consider incorporating.
• “Hire an academic career coach.” p. 18
• Professionalize yourself as a non-academic.
• “Get your research out there, just as it is.” (p. 42)
  • Make your research publicly accessible on your own website and on “open-access repositories that are indexed on Google.” p. 39
• “Create an internet presence.” (p. 43)
  • Learn “about website design, coding, and hosting.” p. 24
  • Change your website from a CV to an online portfolio.
    • “Buy the URL (web address) that is your name.” (p. 43)
    • Create one page for your education and experience.
    • Create another page for your publications.
      • Link your publications to your repository page.
    • Add a blog.
      • Share your blog posts on social media.
      • Blog about important things.
      • Establish your areas of expertise on your blog.
      • When blogging, “Be honest and always link it to the larger trends and structural issues.” p. 32 (quoting Lee Skallerup Bessette)
    • “Put a bullet point on your website about your experience with grant writing or professional writing.” p. 117
  • Make connections on Twitter and Instagram. Network and share your scholarship.
• “Share your ideas – widely.” p. 44
  • “…put yourself in a position to engage publicly with your research.” p. 39
  • Figure out which publishing venues “are interested in which genres.” p. 44
  • “Take a course on how to pitch ideas to writer’s markets that pay, either through online courses or by hiring a successful freelancer friend to teach you.” p. 18
  • “Read the magazines you want to write for. Learn who the editors are by reading their work.” p. 45
  • “Start pitching articles in your area of expertise that are ‘pegged’ (tied) to current events.” p. 45
  • “Reach out to your freelance academic colleagues and ask for help” coming up with creative solutions to problems. Also ask your coach. p. 51
• “Build a community, whether online or off, of others who are trying to do work similar to yours.” p. 80
• “…always have a clean, up-to-date résumé ready as a safety net.” p. 174

Things to Read

• To Write or Not to Write, Kelly J. Baker
• Should Academics Write for Free?, Sarah Kendzior
• Hanging Up on a Calling, Rebecca Schuman
• Love and Other Secondhand Emotions, Jacqui Shine
• On Graduate School and “Love,” William Pannapacker
• The No Baby Penalty, Elizabeth Keenan
• The Responsibility of Adjunct Intellectuals, Corey Robin
• What’s the Point of Academic Publishing?, Sarah Kendzior
• Thesis Hatement, Rebecca Schuman
• Sexism Ed, Kelly J. Baker
• Why Everybody Loses When Someone Leaves Academe, Erin Bartram
• Instead of Gaslighting Adjuncts, We Could Help Them, Annemarie Pérez
• Don’t Fear the Résumé, Rachel Leventhal-Weiner
• The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy Norman Mailer, James Baldwin
• Student Arrested after Crawling into a Duct to Steal an Exam, Christopher Mele
• Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, Roger Fisher and William Ury
• What is BATNA? How to Find Your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement, Guhan Subramanian
• Academic Waste, Kelly J. Baker
• How the University Works, Marc Bousquet
• Build a Career Worth Having, Nathaniel Koloc
• Why Freelancers Need a Nonpayment Law, Sara Horowitz
• How to Craft a Pitch, Kelly J. Baker
• Recommended Reading and Resources starting on p. 175

People, organizations, and resources to look up

• Kelly J. Baker
• Jennifer Polk
• Beyond the Professoriate
• Rebecca Schuman
• Sarah Kendzior
• Elizabeth Keenan
• Erin Bartram
• Rachel Leventhal-Weiner
• Editorial Freelance Association (publishes The Freelancer newsletter)
• The Freelancer’s Union
• Who Pays Writers?

Highlights

It’s probably going to be a little while before I get my full dissertation up online, so I thought I’d go ahead and post my acknowledgments here.

Immediately after the graduation ceremony at which I received my MSLS in 2011, I told my advisor that I would probably be back for the PhD sometime. Six years ago, I made good on that promise. Since I started the Master’s program in 2009, Sandra has been a constant mentor, colleague, and friend. Thank you so much, for more than I have the words to say.

I would like to thank my committee for their guidance and reflections from our first meeting to discuss the topics for my comprehensive examination package until today. Your support, especially as I navigated completing a dissertation during a global pandemic, has been invaluable. Casey, your advice and friendship has made this road so much easier than it would have been otherwise. Crystle, your work quite literally inspired this work and I’m grateful to have had you on my committee offering the unique insights from your own research. Heather and Brian, your ideas and questions have strengthened this work significantly. Thank you all. Thank you to my participants for sharing your experiences and insight with me. I can’t wait to see what you’re wearing when we can all go to cons again! Thank you also to the cosplayers who attended the November 2018 Final Fantasy: Distant Worlds concert at the DPAC. You sparked the idea that led to this dissertation.

I am grateful to the UNC Graduate School, SILS, IMLS, and the NSF for supporting me financially for six years and enabling me to work on incredible research with amazing colleagues like Dr. Maggie Melo and Laura March.

I’m thankful for my improv friends, who made sure I had fun during the first year and a half of this thing and served as guinea pigs for some of my earliest research.

I am so grateful for the families and teachers I met at Nido Coworking + Childcare. You are still my village. I want to thank my parents for instilling a love of learning in me and my siblings for enduring my pedanticism. I am grateful to all of them, as well as to my in-laws, for staying with Michael so I could attend class and write. Thank you extra to Laurie, who cared for Michael during the writing stage. Without your help, I would not be graduating in 2021.

Thank you to Michael, my big kid miraculous earth angel, for making me smile, filling my heart with so much joy I often think it will explode, and for being a living reason and reminder to do things besides school. And thank you to Will, who not only made sure I had shelter and food during this whole process, but also introduced me to the world of Final Fantasy and the beautiful music of Nobuo Uematsu, without which we never would have attended the concert that inspired me to choose this dissertation topic. I was able to do this whole PhD thing because I had you to catch all the balls I dropped, to remind me that we would get through it together when I was sure I couldn’t do it, and to make me laugh.

I’ve been wanting to clean up my blog at least since I migrated from WordPress to Micro.blog, maybe longer. But at over 1000 entries and more all the time, it felt too daunting. Then I read John Johnston’s post, Gardening in the Stream, in which he described using an “On This Day” feature to surface old posts and then go back to the posts from a given day in previous years and clean those up. I love this idea. It’s manageable and if I miss a day, it’ll be only a year before I have another chance to look at it. I’m using Jonathan LaCour’s On This Day snippet for Micro.blog to get this going.

It reminds of me of Austin Kleon’s writing about stock and flow, referencing Robin Sloan’s writing about stock and flow. My hope is that by circulating old flow back into new flow, I’ll discover some things I can turn into stock, clean up, and link in places that make them easier to discover.

This post contains slight spoilers for The Nevers.

I just watched the first episode of The Nevers. Yes, it was created, written, and directed by Joss Whedon. Yes, I am appalled and heartbroken by the way he treated his colleagues on Buffy, Angel, and Justice League. That’s about all I have the heart to say about it. I’d like to talk about The Nevers now which, of course, can’t be completely separated from him, but also kind of is its own thing. As Austin Kleon says, “Art Monsters are not necessary or glamorous and they are not to be condoned, pardoned, or emulated” (Keep Going, p. 124) but also “bad people can make good art.” I haven’t decided if The Nevers seems like good art to me, but I can’t deny that a lot of JW’s other art has been central to my life for the past almost 22 years. So. I want to talk about this art, acknowledging the bad behavior of its creator.

I’m going to talk about The Nevers now, like I said.

Over at The Ringer, Alison Herman describes the protagonists of The Nevers as “Victorian Lady X-Men,” and this is not wrong.

Specifically, you’ve got a bunch of persecuted superpowered people living in a facility sponsored by a rich person who used a wheelchair.

Let’s talk for a minute about Lavinia Bidlow (played by “I am very British. I don’t say Hard Rs” Olivia Williams). Lavinia Bidlow uses a wheelchair. As far as I can tell, she herself is not one of The Touched (aka superpowered people) and has no turn (aka superpower). But she is extremely devoted to making sure that The Touched have a home and are safe and thus she sponsors the “orphanage” where many of them live and work. (There are rogue Touched and unaffiliated Touched, too. Like… Like mutants. In X-Men.)

So. Lavinia Bidlow, using a wheelchair presumably due to a disability, feels a great deal of sympathy and/or empathy for The Touched.

People often refer to The Touched as “afflicted.”

Mrs. Amalia True, head rounder-upper of Touched-who-need-protection, precog lady (not to be confused with Doyle/Cordelia’s power on Angel, which IIRC was more clairvoyance than precognition but usually conveniently early clairvoyance that often allowed time to save the person they saw) and skilled fighter, responds to Ominous Fancyman Lord Massen in this conversation:

Massen: I take it then that you are yourselves among the afflicted.

True: Touched, yes. We don’t consider ourselves afflicted.

Massen: Perhaps some women are more fortunate in the nature of their ailment than others.

True: That’s true, but more suffer from society’s perception than their own debilitation.

This set off little bells in my head, as it sounds very much to me like a TV superhero’s quick explanation of the social model of disability. From that moment I started watching this as if it were a supremely unsubtle metaphor for disability. I’m not sure if it works, but I do find it an interesting lens.

There’s also Maladie, who is the most prominent rogue Touched, is a serial killer, and certainly appears to live with a mental illness. (It is a perfectly valid criticism when Natalie Zutter at Tor.com says her dialogue “feels like it was collected from Drusilla’s cutting-room-floor musings.”) We see Maladie about to be carted off to an asylum in the flashbacks to the day when the Touched got their powers. And of course, “touched” has been used as a rather unkind euphemism for having mental illness.

I have invisible disabilities including autoimmune disease that is sometimes debilitating, migraines, depression, and anxiety. Lord Massen would call me more fortunate and there are certainly many forms of ableism I don’t face. But when I struggle to work through a migraine or have trouble going downstairs to the kitchen from my bedroom because all of my joints hurt, I wonder if there is a place in this world for me. So near the end of the episode, when strawberry-blonde Irish science nerd Penance Adair (your Willow/Kaylee stand-in and thus my fave) describes a feeling “that I’m here. I belong here… all of us that’s Touched, we’re woven into the fabric of the world and we’re meant to be as we are,” my heart swells and I think, “YES, I want to feel that way!” (I do, sometimes, but I want to feel it more.)

Does this all add up to a solid disability metaphor? Not yet, and it’s very possible what we’ll see here is a kind of “fantastic ableism” akin to the fantastic racism X-Men and other stories are critiqued for. But I’m watching with this lens now and I’m interested to see what I find.

I haven’t found anybody else approaching The Nevers this way, but if you have, I’d love to hear about it! I’d especially love a perspective from someone with more visible disabilities.

It feels like submitting my dissertation has freed up an immense amount of space in my head and heart to start thinking about other things. I’m so excited about so many possibilities right now. I bought a bunch of sewing supplies, but my sewing machine thwarted me. It needs a thorough cleaning and oiling, and then I can try sewing again.

I’m back on the Artist’s Way train, doing “morning” pages that are really afternoon pages because the only quiet I can get is during childcare time, and that’s in the afternoon. (I could switch this to morning but it would disrupt some standing meetings I have, so I’m leaving it as-is for now.)

I’m reading John Scalzi’s You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop and it has me feeling energized about writing.

I’m reading Jess Zimmerman’s Women and Other Monsters: Building a New Mythology and it’s phenomenal. I only annotate textbooks, so all my notes from this are commonplace-book style in my Bullet Journal and there are so many of them. Pages and pages.

I’ve got a stack of books about mending on hold at the library. I’m really thrilled at the thought of mending things. My kid’s favorite clothes get holes in them. I’ve got some leggings and pajama pants that could use a good mend. But mostly I love how this feels like a personal step toward sustainable living. Of course we should hold institutions and businesses accountable for their role in promoting sustainability, but that’s not a good reason to not even think about it myself. One day I’ll be able to go in thrift stores again without worrying and I really hope that by then I can start to see the things I find for their possibilities rather than just what they already are. I can dye things! Cut them up! Refashion them! Woohoo! Psyched to get this stack on Saturday and I expect I’ll write more about these things as I read them. (I’ve got a few web links about this, too; maybe I’ll put together a little guide.)

I’m thinking about writing a post or page that is essentially a digital care package for new parents: my favorite books, online resources, and tips related to parenting. You learn so much in the first few years (and more later I trust, but I’m only half way through year 5 so I can only talk about the first 4 and a half years or so). It seems a shame to just sit on that knowledge, or to only pass it on to people in little bits and pieces. Wouldn’t it be cool to just point people to a webpage? I think it would.

Come to think of it, I know little bits about all kinds of stuff. Maybe I should write a BUNCH of guides. One about cupcakery. One about producing community theater or local comedy. What else?

Helping people is kind of my favorite thing.

I’ve now taken an hour and a half of childcare time as runway time, so I suppose I should get down to work.

Anyway, welcome spring! LET’S DO ALL THE THINGS!

Fourteen years ago, I started a book blog - or, as I called it at the time, a reading journal. I jumped in and started writing without any worries about doing it “right.” (For one thing, 2007 was early days with respect to book blogging.) Over time I became part of the kidlit book blogging community.

I slowed down on book blogging long ago, but now I want to ramp up the bookishness of my personal blog. So I did what you do, I googled “book blog.” For months I’ve been reading book blogging introductory articles and posts.

Most of the advice hasn’t sat with me quite right.

I don’t want to book blog like anybody else.

I want to book blog like me.

It turns out 2007 Kimberly has a lot of wisdom when it comes to book blogging. I’ve started looking at my old posts to see how they might be models for how I write about books in the future.

I’m already feeling better about book blogging. I’m excited to get back into it.

Dissertating during a pandemic is not easy. Maintaining concentration is a real challenge. Before the pandemic, my chronic illness allowed me about 2 good hours a day to do creative work, and any other work time I allotted to more rote/administrative tasks.

Now I have the capacity for 1 task, regardless of whether it’s creative or administrative, and 1 meeting. That’s it. If I do those things, my brain insists it is time for sleep, Star Trek, or fiction reading. And often it can’t even handle fiction reading, so I then do this Star Trek/sleep combo.

I don’t sleep well at night. Even on nights when I don’t do a 3 am doomscroll and instead get a good chunk of sleep, I still wake up feeling like I could sleep for the rest of time if only my body would actually, you know, sleep. (I took Benadryl and slept until 10 am one weekend in recent memory and that was amazing but the rested feeling was 100% gone by the next day.)

I rarely have the energy to be “on” for my kid. We read, I remind him of all the possibilities he has (Clay! Legos! Blocks! Sandpaper letters! Pretend cooking! Real cooking! Coloring! Painting! Magnatiles! Action figures! A bunch of tiny animals!), he chooses one of those and plays independently while I crochet or try to read about either unschooling or Reader’s Advisory. We watch Sesame Street and Wild Kratts. Sometimes we play Animal Moves, in which I call out the names of random animals and he moves like them. (I use a random animal generator because I can’t even think of the names of more than probably 7 animals.)

I’m a person who likes to appear cheerful. I’m a person whose nature it is to care about things.

Right now, I want my dissertation to be done, I want to sleep, and I want to read fiction and then talk to people about what I’m reading and what they’re reading. I want to crochet but not to knit because knitting requires brain power since I keep having to re-learn it and my fingers are always slipping.

Sometimes I put on Bob Ross, if I have a migraine.

And I often have a migraine, waxing and waning in intensity.

I am living this pandemic on the absolute easiest setting, with a flexible schedule, two incomes even though mine is right at the cost of living for 1 person, the ability to pick food up curbside and do none of my own shopping, deeply discounted childcare from my mother-in-law, and the ability to communicate with friends and sometimes even visit outdoors with local family.

And I am exhausted.

I can’t imagine how hard this must be for people in worse circumstances than mine.

How are you holding up? Are you holding up? I have a headache today. I really want to write about ideas: craft as healing, being a parent and being other things too, what we mean when we talk about information literacy. My brain though can’t gather all the floaty fragmentary bits of thoughts about these ideas that are whirring through my mind, so I guess I’ll write about them later.

I got my car inspected and its 60K maintenance done. It feels nice to have a car that should be in good shape for another 30K miles. The guy who helped me was the same guy who helped me the last time I took my car in, a year ago, and he recognized me, even with my mask on. He said he remembered my eyes.

So now I think I have memorable eyes.

Last night I had a desire to listen to Michael Crawford sing some distinctly un-Phantom of the Opera songs. I don’t know why. He always sounds ghostly to me, so it’s really funny to hear him do brassy songs in a ghost voice. It makes me happy. The most hilarious is probably The Power of Love, but that’s not on Spotify so last night I went with Any Dream Will Do. Hilarious! They should rename the show Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor DreamGHOST when Michael Crawford sings it.

Have you ever noticed that Michael Crawford doesn’t do a lot of Sondheim? He plays Hero in the movie of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum but on his solo albums there’s not much Sondheim. Maybe a little. (Only vaguely related, another role Crawford had in his early career was Cornelius in Hello, Dolly! and the story of how he got that job is hilarious.)

I’ve been thinking lately about how to be a theater person again, because I miss it and it was a huge part of my identity until the college theater scene kind of beat it out of me. (I made the mistake of aligning myself with the far too serious drama department kids instead of the more fun non-majors putting up their own shows.)

There’s a Theater & Drama Crash Course and it was nice looking through the titles of the videos to realize how much I remember from my BA in dramatic art. I might watch some of those videos and revisit that stuff.

Now is, of course, a terrible time to get back into theater; there’s not much live stuff going on and I’m not really in a position to do virtual shows because my kid could walk in at any minute.

But there are other angles I can approach it from; play reading, playwriting, watching recorded productions, theater history… We’ll see where I go with it.

Anyway, back to my first question.

How are you holding up?