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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why do I post this stuff?

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

So that’s one reason I post this stuff.

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

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

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

Just updated my Now page with the following information:

I’m living happily in Durham, North Carolina with my husband, W, and our three-year-old son, M. We eagerly look forward to M being old enough to get kittens. All of our parents and siblings live in our metro area, and we get to see them often. It’s really lovely.

We’re hosting monthly brunches so we get to see friends more. I’m planning to try to find more ways to get social interaction in, because both grad school and parenthood are immensely isolating.

I’m in the process of scheduling my dissertation proposal defense for my doctorate in Library and Information Science. My dissertation investigates how cosplayers find, evaluate, use, and share information, both online and in-person. I’m working as research assistant to Dr. Marijel (Maggie) Melo, on a lot of exciting projects related to academic makerspaces. I’m also accepting word-of-mouth referrals for information services consulting clients for summer 2020 (including literature search, bibliography, literature review, metadata analysis, content strategy, writing, editing, and web development) and exploring what it might look like to commit myself to an independent information services business more extensively.

I’m making it a point to take my fun where and when I can: reading books using recommendations from NovelistPlus, watching TV shows and movies based on Tumblr’s fandom statistics, and playing video games based on whatever mood I’m in.

I’m back to being gluten-free and corn-free, after the extreme indulgence of the holidays. My hormones are still finding their way out of the woods in the wake of weaning my son.

I recently found the term “agnostopagan” in Erin Morganstern’s book The Starless Sea, which the character who describes himself using it defines as “spiritual, but not religious.” For me, it’s more than that, but it definitely felt like something clicked when I read the word. Mostly, I believe we make our own magic through setting intentions and creating visual and metaphorical reminders to assist us in setting them and carrying them out, and also I believe that I don’t have enough knowledge to be certain about anything bigger than me. Lately, the tools I’ve been using for setting my intentions are moon cycles, the Tarot, candles, and crystals.

Currently:
🎵: Spotify’s “This is Big Daddy Kane” and “This is KRS-One” playlists
📖: The Starless Sea by Erin Morganstern and How to Be Everything by Emilie Wapnick
🎬: The Empire Strikes Back
🎧: Micro Monday
🦸‍♀️: Ultimate Spider-Man
🎮: Puzzle Quest: The Legend Returns

Last updated January 8. 2020.

📚 Some quick notes on Why Johnny Doesn’t Flap: NT is OK!:

This is a kid’s picture book all about how sometimes neurotypical people are unfathomable, but that doesn’t mean neurotypical people and neurodivergent people can’t be friends. It was gifted to me by an autism mom, and as an autism sibling who exhibits many signs of neurodivergence, it delighted me.

When he talks to you, Johnny looks directly into your eyes, which can make you pretty uncomfortable. He doesn’t mean any harm, though. That’s just the way he is, and that’s OK.

I mean look how Johnny’s head takes up the whole page. I need some personal space, Johnny. To quote my second favorite new character in The Rise of Skywalker, D-O, “No thank you.” (First favorite is Babu Frik.)

The whole book is full of gems like this. Highly recommend.

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

I decided to focus exclusively on the positive here. There have been a lot of hard days this year, a lot of illness, a lot of scares, but even the worst days each had something redeeming in them, and I think that's important to remember.

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.

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 passed my comps last Tuesday, and I thought I’d take some time to write about it today.

Previously, on Dissertating in the Open:

1. Inspiration strikes and I write a prospectus.
2. I work with my advisor to select five areas for my comprehensive examination literature review package.
3. I contact five faculty members - 3 internal, 2 external - and ask them to be on my committee. They accept.
4. I had my first meeting with my committee and we narrowed the scope for my lit review a bit.

And then I didn't really blog about the process for 9 months because I was too busy actually writing the literature review.

Over the course of that process, some things shifted.

As I mentioned in my post about my first committee meeting, my lens on information literacy changed from a broad one to one that narrowly focused on information literacy practices as a set of sociocultural practices, tied to a particular context and set of social interactions.

When it came time to write about theory, I decided to write exclusively about the theoretical concept of affinity spaces. I discussed collective intelligence and participatory culture in the information literacy chapter instead, and decided to included Sonnenwald’s work on information behavior as part of my proposal.

As I wrote about affinity spaces, I learned about some new-to-me methodologies: connective ethnography and affinity space ethnography. I took on ethnography as my broad research design, taking a constructivist research approach, and then used connective/affinity space ethnography as my stance for how to conduct ethnography in the cosplay affinity space.

Over the next several months, I drafted chapters of my comps and sent them to my committee for review. You can see the first drafts here:

1. Information Literacy as a Social Practice
2. Cosplay
3. Connected Learning and Libraries
4. Affinity Spaces
5. Connective and Affinity Space Ethnography

I prepared for and wrote each of those drafts using some variation of my start-to-finish literature review workflow, drawing heavily on recommendations from Dr. Barbara Wildemuth and Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega. I didn't always follow the workflow in a truly linear fashion; sometimes I would find myself needing to memo a subset of literature before I could move on to another concept at all. Other times I would write a memo that was basically a draft, then mark it up with pens and rearrange the whole thing. Sometimes I would cut entire sections after writing them. I'm a little sorry I didn't document this process better.

As I finished each chapter, I sent it out to my committee. Different committee members provided different amounts of feedback, but none of them were under any obligation to provide any feedback at all. I’m grateful to them for their help.

When I started writing the final chapter, the methods chapter, I first began by memoing articles about my specific data collection methods. As I tried to turn these into a cohesive literature review, I realized I needed some guidance. So I emailed my advisor, Dr. Sandra Hughes-Hassell, and my research methods expert, Dr. Casey Rawson, asking them about this chapter. Casey suggested that this chapter should be about my research design and approach - constructivist? pragmatist? participatory? and ethnography? case study? narrative? - more than my specific data collection and analysis methods, which would be a key part of the proposal rather than the lit review. This help determining the scope of the chapter was invaluable, and let me really focus on connective and affinity space ethnography conceptually.

I revised the chapters based on my committee member’s feedback and my own notes, compiling them into a single document along with my prospectus, also slightly revised. I also sent the committee a brief statement of my research interests.

I submitted all of that to the committee at the end of October. We scheduled my comprehensive examination date for December 10. In my department, the literature review stands in lieu of a written exam.

Over the next month, I drafted my dissertation proposal, which will be another post, though I did finish it in time for my committee to have it for a few days before my comps.

For the comps exam itself, my internal examiners were physically present, while my external examiners called in via Zoom. We began the exam with me delivering the following brief presentation as an overview/refresher:

(Note: If you are a cosplayer or photographer featured in this slideshow and would like your image removed, please let me know and I’ll take care of it ASAP.)

After this, Sandra asked each committee member to ask me a question, working around the Zoom/room clockwise. Each committee member had one or more really insightful questions to ask that helped me think about my methods, my plans for data analysis, the role of theory in my study, and how I conceptualize cosplay and the relationship between cosplayer, character, narrative, and costume.

In the end, I passed and came out of the exam with several ideas for how to refine my dissertation proposal, which I’ll write more about in my next Dissertating in the Open post.

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?”