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

Tomorrow: finishing my outline.

And then, I write.

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

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

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

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

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

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

School/Work

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

Submitted IRB applications: 1. Approved!

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

Professional development modules drafted: 1.

Presentations given: 3.

Webinars attended: 1.

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

Parenting/Relationships

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

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

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

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

Creativity

Podcast episodes recorded: 3

Podcast episodes edited: 2

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

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

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

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

Consumption

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

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

Adulting

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

In conclusion...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This resonated with me immensely.

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

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

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

Don’t wait.

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

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

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

On to the reporting!

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

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

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

When I learned Noelle Stevenson was showrunning a She-Ra reboot, I was psyched. I haven’t read Lumberjanes or Nimona yet, but her Avengers fan art and D&D tweets are top-notch. I was super into She-Ra as a kid, and I love that this new one is called She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.

I’m on board with modern girl culture, at least as it’s manifesting in animation and comic books. I was talking to another parent recently who said she’d been afraid to let her daughter watch My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, but was pleasantly surprised by how feminist it was.

I recommended she look into DC SuperHero Girls and see if she would feel okay sharing that with her daughter, because I think it has a similar vibe.

And I need to read the “new” Jem and the Holograms comic, I know.

I love that the stories I’m seeing about girls and young women in these media place the girls at the center and let them have their own adventures. Romance tends to be sidelined. The girls are dealing with identity development and relationship building. Each of these properties has characters who are so different from each other in their interests and personalities. We’re seeing that there’s no one right way to be a girl or a woman, and I love that. The other thing I love is how they take colors and art styles that are coded feminine and use them to communicate that you don’t have to choose between strength and femininity, and that there are many different ways to be strong.

I’m sure none of them is perfect and I know that they are vehicles for selling toys, but I’m still excited about them.

I would buy that She-Ra poster and hang it on my office wall.

(By the way, DC SuperHero Girls creator Shea Fontana is going to be at ALA Annual and you can bet I’ll be at her session. DC SuperHero Girls is an incredibly accessible way to get to know the DC universe and figure out which characters appeal to you. I say this as an inveterate Marvel loyalist.)

As promised yesterday, I’m going to start tracking my daily work productivity, mostly to help me realize that yes, I’ve actually done stuff. First we’ll get a macro picture of everything I’ve written as part of my doctoral program, and then I’ll get into the work I’ve been doing for my comprehensive exams, where I will detail more than just words written.

I have written the following items as part of my doctoral coursework:

• The Maker Movement and Learning in School Libraries. Literature review. 8,000 words.
• The Role of Archives and Special Collections in K-12 Instruction. Literature review. 7,000 words.
• Organizing and Describing Information for Children. Literature review. 5,000 words.
• School Librarians as Leaders. Literature review. 5,000 words.
• Special Education Training for Preservice School Librarians. Original research. 4,000 words.
• "A Real Fun Scene": Learning Improvisational Comedy in Community. Original research. 7,000 words.
• Everyday Life Information Needs of Adolescents. Literature review. 4,000 words.
• Designing Information Retrieval Interfaces for Children's Use. Literature review. 5,000 words.
• Libraries, Tabletop Roleplaying Games, and Teen Identity Development. Literature review. 6,000 words.
• Cultivating a Community of School Librarian Scholars. Literature review. 6,000 words.
• Unlocking the Door to Adventure: Cultivating a Community of Practice in Improvisational Comedy (and related assignments). Original research. 10,000 words.
• Expansive Learning, Third Spaces, and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (and related assignments). Literature review. 5,000 words.
• Learning from Library Escape Games. Research proposal. 1,000 words.
• Decolonizing and Participatory Research with Youth in Library Makerspaces (and related assignments). Literature review. 7,000 words.
• Possible Selves. Literature review. 6,000 words.
• Teen Participation in Library Makerspaces: A Grounded Theory Study. Research proposal. 5,000 words.
• Youth-driven School Library Services. Research proposal. 1,000 words.
• Racial Equity Initiatives in North Carolina's Public Schools. White paper. (Co-authored.) 6,000 words.

Not bad. (Please don’t ask how many I published.)

Now, let’s talk about the work I’ve done on the comprehensive examination literature review package.

I identified 179 studies that were potentially of interest. Of those, I have identified as useful, read, and reviewed 35 studies. I have written synthetic notes for 33 of those; at an average of about 250 words each, that’s a total of 8,000 words. This is a marked drop-off in word count output. There are several non-writing reasons for that. I’m going to ramp it back up in the near future.

So that’s where I was as of yesterday. Look for another update after today’s work session!