It’s not that careers aren’t an important part of our identity, they just aren’t the only part.

When I took my first improv class a little over four years ago, I was careful on the first night of class to ask other people, “How do you spend your time besides coming to improv class?” I phrased it this way because I didn’t just want to know what people got paid to do; I wanted to know how they chose to spend their time.

The most common question I get about my doctoral program after “How long until you’re done?” is “What are you going to do with a PhD in information and library science?” I think a more interesting question is “What do you want to get out of a PhD in information and library science?” Because honestly, who knows what I’ll do? Independent of what I might like to do (and teasing that out is a whole process itself), obviously I’ll be at the mercy of market forces.

But if you ask me what I want to get out of it, I have a great answer:

I want to spend some time in a situation where my number one professional priority is acquainting myself with the evidence about what works in libraries. I want to understand qualitative research methods better. (This was really my #1 desire and I think I’ve done a really good job of working on this.) I want the opportunity to think deeply about what effective library services for youth look like and how they can facilitate exploring passions.

Isn’t that more interesting than “I mean, maybe teach future librarians? Or just be a better librarian myself?” I think so.

If you want to get to know people better than just these surface questions without getting too awkward and personal, here are some questions you might try:

• What's fun for you right now?
• What kind of expert are you?
• What do you want to learn/try next?
• What kind of people are you hoping to meet?

They’re good questions to ask yourself, too.

Here’s a complete list of everything I’ve got going on right now. And by “going on,” I mean a level of intensity ranging from “thinking about maybe doing it” to “seriously working on it.” (Categories come from the Integrative Nutrition Circle of Life exercise.)

Spirituality

• Slowly re-reading WTF Is Tarot?
• Listening to the Self Service podcast

Creativity

• Things of Bronze podcast
• Blogging

Finances

• Reducing grocery spending via using my Soda Stream, freezing leftovers, and eating out of the pantry/fridge/freezer

Career

• Revising culturally sustaining pedagogy online curriculum module and writing other modules for Project READY.
• Reading the archives of YALSA's The Hub ya lit blog and trying the books mentioned there

Education

• Working on the Makerspaces section of my comprehensive literature review

Health, Home Cooking, Physical Activity

• Focusing on water: drinking it, bathing in it, swimming in it

Home Environment

• Putting together a list of tasks for the handyman

Relationships, Social Life, Joy

• Reaching out when I feel isolated

Finished converting my concept map to an outline. Tomorrow: WRITING!

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

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

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

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

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

And yet the theatre is in me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

&&&&&&&

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

I unsubscribed from all of my RSS feeds.

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

I lay in bed reading novels and playing mobile games.

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

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

I have held that thought in my mind ever since.

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

&&&&&&&

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

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

&&&&&&&

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

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

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

I’m feeling pretty silly right about now.

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

&&&&&&&

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

&&&&&&&

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

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

&&&&&&&

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

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

&&&&&&&

How are you doing?

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

Perpetual Mood:

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

Tomorrow: finishing my outline.

And then, I write.

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

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

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

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

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

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

School/Work

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

Submitted IRB applications: 1. Approved!

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

Professional development modules drafted: 1.

Presentations given: 3.

Webinars attended: 1.

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

Parenting/Relationships

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

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

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

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

Creativity

Podcast episodes recorded: 3

Podcast episodes edited: 2

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

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

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

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

Consumption

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

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

Adulting

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

In conclusion...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This resonated with me immensely.

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

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

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

Don’t wait.