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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I put all of this stuff in my slides:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what I’ve got so far:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next, I need to start:

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

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

🎵📽 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.