📚 I am a very specific kind of nerd. In this book, set in 1909, a scholar studying faeries says she’s going to use naturalistic observation and ethnographic interviews as her research methods. I immediately thought this was anachronistic, because I knew Naturalistic Inquiry wasn’t published until 1985.

I was wrong. It’s not anachronistic, but it does show that Dr. Wilde is using cutting edge methods. While ethnography was first developed as a science in the 18th century, naturalistic observation wasn’t formalized until the turn of the 20th century.

So. Who cares? Well, me, because I’m a qual nerd. But I’m also a book nerd, so I feel like Wilde’s choice of methods reveals something about her as a character.

The way she writes about her research shows that she thinks of herself as a natural scientist, observing faerie behavior much as one would observe animal behavior. At the same time, the questions she’s asking and the way she treats her research “subjects” (a term that isn’t cool to use now but is absolutely what you’d use in 1909) shows that she can’t help but treat her research as social research, because surprise! in her world, faeries are people, not animals.

(What distinguishes people from animals? I’d say for Wilde’s purposes, speech and self-awareness.)

And now that I’ve written 200+ words about an imaginary scientist’s research methods, I should probably get back to bed.

I recently listened to Katie Rose Guest Pryal on Camille Pagán’s podcast, You Should Write a Book, talking about how she found the throughline in her work and life. (Just listen to her articulate it on the podcast. I am afraid if I try to sum it up, I’ll get it wrong.)

At the time I listened to it, I was like, “I don’t know what mine is. Maybe I’ll never find it. Waaaah!”

But as I sat and let the idea marinate for a while, and I think I’ve figured it out.

I recently bought the above sticker and several other library-themed stickers, as well as a Read Free or Die t-shirt, from its creator.

One of the possibilities I was considering for after my postdoc was going back to being a school librarian. I don’t think that one’s going to pan out, but it did sort of launch me in the direction of identifying my throughline.

In May, several folks working on different grants funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services, including myself, met and talked about what we’d learned from our work and what our capacity was for working on connected learning in libraries moving forward. All of the other academics indicated that they had to move on to other work, which might incorporate connected learning, but would not focus on it.

I found myself heartbroken.

This is what I want to work on. And nobody else, nobody with an institutional affiliation, was going to be able to work on it anymore?

Well.

Over the course of many weeks, I decided that I would still work on it. That I would find institutional partners who were willing to do a little bit of the work, so that I don’t have to have an institutional affiliation myself to get the work funded, but that I would be happy to do the bulk of the work so long as I could get a consultant’s fee for doing it. Enough to pay my student loans, mostly.

I’m in the process of refining this vision.

But the throughline, I’ve got that now.

Fine, it needs refinement, too, but here’s the basic idea:

My work builds libraries’ capacity to facilitate learning and connect with their communities. The two modes I use to do this are research and professional development.

This describes so much of what I’ve done for the past 8 years. And more than that, it describes what I want to do going forward. It’s expansive enough for me to take on a variety of projects, and narrow enough that I can continue to establish my areas of expertise and grow my network.

What’s your throughline?

It’s my birthday!

As I’m 42, I understand that according to Douglas Adams, I myself am the answer to life, the universe, and everything. (I am the one I’ve been waiting for all of my life.)

The person I wanted to be at 40 is the person I wanted to be at 41 is the person I want to be at 42:

1. I want to be a loving and mostly gentle mother.
2. I want to take care of my own body, including making clothes built to fit it.
3. I want to keep trying new things and growing as a self-employed person.
4. I want to be aware of my impact on the earth and do what I can to make it gentle.

Our first foray into Amsterdam besides going to the airport was heading to the International Newcomers office at the World Trade Center (right by the Amsterdam Zuid train station) for our immigration documents. We didn’t really see much of the city that day BUT!

We did decide to first go to Van Stapele Koekmakerij and pick up some of their cookies, which are so good and so famous that they have a line waiting every day and when they run out of cookies, they close. (Think Magnolia Bakery circa 2009.) We ordered ours in advance. You go to their shop which is in between Singel and Spui, ring a doorbell, and a very kind person squeezes out past the crowd waiting in the shop and through the doorway and asks for your order number. Then they bring out your order, packaged in either a cute box or beautiful tin and slipped in a lovely bag. It’s best to eat the cookies right away, as they’re filled with a cream that is best eaten warm and gooey. (Big thanks to Jonathan Stephens, who gave us this recommendation when my friend Whitney asked him for suggestions of things to do with a kid in Amsterdam.)

Going to Van Stapele allows you to get a lovely glimpse of the Amsterdam you think of Amsterdam as being, if you have any expectations of Amsterdam at all. You climb up the stairs from the Rokin metro station and spread before you are rows of 5 story, narrow houses all smushed together along a canal’s edge, curving toward the horizon. It’s not the most touristy part of Amsterdam, but it’s touristy-adjacent. There are plenty of “coffee shops” (like if you had to consume the marijuana you get at a dispensary before you actually leave) and the smell of Amsterdam, i.e., a scent that will give you a contact high, greets you wafting out from at least a couple of doors on every block. (It was almost weird to not smell this anymore once we left Amsterdam.)

Then we did head to IN Amsterdam and that was… not the most interesting process.

Did we do all that on the same day? Now I’m not even sure. We were planning to. I think that’s what happened.

Our next time in the city was when my sister M.E. and I took M. to Nemo Science Museum, also recommended by Jonathan Stephens and every list of kids’ activities in Amsterdam ever. This was fun, with giant gorgeous rainbow twirlers hanging down from the ceiling and an incredible chain reaction demonstration that was like a giant Rube Goldberg machine. The person running this demonstration took a quick poll of the audience to determine how many English speakers were there. As there weren’t many of us, he conducted most of his demonstration in Dutch, which gave us a chance to practice the little bit of Dutch we managed to learn in the months before we traveled. M. loved this. The museum had other interesting exhibits, including a makerspace and an area dedicated to human sexuality.

There were a lot of transit strikes while we were in the area, and we could never be sure if the bus running from Aalsmeer to Amsterdam would be running at a particular time during the strikes, so on those days we tended to just stick to places that were walkable from the house.

Next time: a Valentine’s Day date in Amsterdam!

I loved Amsterdam almost immediately, at first because of how the major roads are laid out. Buses have their own two lanes, totally separate from the car lanes, and then bikes have their own lanes, too. This isn’t true on the smaller roads, but it is on the big major arteries. We got off the plane and managed to figure out the trains eventually (at first I didn’t understand how tapping in and out worked, so I had to work that out but I got it eventually) and while having the luggage on the bus was stressful, it was otherwise a perfectly pleasant bus ride. The house was not as close to the bus stop as I expected, I think because when the bus route changed, they probably changed which stop they used. But that was still fine, and a cat greeted us as we turned down Seringenstraat. (Van Cleeffkade was the big road nearby where the bus stop was.)

The cat walked us all the way home to Weteringstraat 6, and we also saw a lot of adorably painted bricks on the sidewalk. It seems that these were painted by students at the primary school nearby. (Education attendance law is super different in Amsterdam than the US. I think it’s compulsory from age 4+, and we got a scary letter just a couple of weeks before we were planning to leave Amsterdam asking us to share the information about where we had enrolled Michael at school. But we hadn’t. But based on my poking around it seemed that if he was enrolled in a school in the US, which he was, then it wouldn’t be a problem. So we told them that he was, and we didn’t hear from them anymore.)

We were one block from a canal. The canals are the other thing that made me fall in love with Amsterdam. So much water! It’s funny to think that I was positively indifferent toward Amsterdam when Will decided that’s the school he was going to ask to sponsor him for the Fulbright, versus how much I came to love it once we were there. (And funnier still that as much as I loved it, I loved almost each place we came to after it more.)

The house at Weteringstraat 6 is a townhouse with a narrow staircase, 3 bedrooms (one teeny tiny and not unlike a walk-in closet), a lovely patio, a big kitchen with eating area, and a nice living room. The living room fireplace was plugged up and the TV sat in front of it.

One of the big things about visiting lots of different houses in the course of a few months (I believe we stayed in 7 total, including our short trip to Cologne) is that you have to re-learn how to use the appliances everywhere, and of course if you’re in a country where English isn’t the official language, you better hope the Google Translate on your phone can help you figure out what the text on the appliance says. (What a blessing Google Translate is, though!)

Weteringstraat 6 is two blocks away from an Albert Heijn grocery store, likewise to a drug store (Kruidvat) and a department store (HEMA), also near a discount store called Action that felt sort of like a Dollar Tree or Big Lots without the furniture, a little farther from LIDL, around the corner from an Indonesian/Indian restaurant, and about half a block away from a chocolate shop. There were a lot of other businesses and shops nearby, but those are the ones we tended to frequent.

We were also a short walk away from a working windmill, which we toured. We went all the way to the top and got to see the mill working and the windmill’s wings or sails outside.

The nearest playground was clearly for toddlers and Michael found it disappointing. There were a couple of better playgrounds for him, but they were a 20+ minute walk away. One was in a little neighborhood and the other was on the shore of the Westeindeplassen, a lake, at a little spot called Surfeiland. There was also a cute little greenway nearby and we could stand on a bridge there and watch ducks swim along the canal. There’s a watertoren (Water tower) on the Westeindeplassen that was really cool, but we never went inside. There’s an escape room inside it but you have to climb the 200ish stairs to play. The top wasn’t even open because of some birds that lay their eggs there. Peregrine falcons, that’s what it was.

Every time we went for a walk in Aalsmeer, we seemed to run into at least three cats. I made a zine about the cats of Aalsmeer.

More about Amsterdam itself soon!

I like Manton’s Where have I been post and have had a pretty significant change in where I’ve visited since the start of the year, so I thought I’d make my own list.

As for what counts:

If I simply passed through in a car, train, or bus, it doesn’t count. If I was only there at an airport for a layover, it doesn’t count.

Everything else counts.

7 Countries:

• United States
• The Netherlands
• Germany
• Scotland
• Ireland
• England
• France

14 States:

• Arizona
• California
• Florida
• Georgia
• Kentucky
• Louisiana
• Maryland
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Pennsylvania
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Virginia

A while back I said I was going to get obsessed with Sarah Bernhardt (I seem to have said it somewhere other than my own website ☹️) but never followed through. But today I went to the Sarah Bernhardt exhibition at the Petit Palais and now I’m recommitting myself to this plan.

If you want to read about the exhibition, here are a couple articles:

• The Original Influencer Was French—A Show Dedicated to Sarah Bernhardt Celebrates the World’s First Superstar
• Why Actress Sarah Bernhardt Was the First Modern Celebrity
• Before Taylor Swift or David Bowie, There Was Sarah Bernhardt

Did you know Sarah Bernhardt was a goth multipotentialite? She acted, directed, sculpted, painted, wrote, ran a theatre, and led charity work. She had herself photographed in a coffin and was super into bats. And she was friends with Oscar Wilde. And she kept acting even after having her leg amputated and began her film career at age 56. I love her.

There’s an AP news piece confirming what I suspected when I first saw Manton’s post about Heather Armstrong’s death.

Heather Armstrong, also known as dooce, was a prolific personal blogger, called “queen of the mommy bloggers,” a writer of books, a person who lived with depression and alcoholism. She was an early and high-profile example of someone who lost her job because of her blog. Her episode of The Hilarious World of Depression is one of my favorites. I didn’t read her blog consistently at all but I definitely read it both in some of its earliest days and in the past couple of years. She has been an influence on me without me even realizing it.

Armstrong leaves behind two children.

A little over sixteen years ago, my friend Sherrie died by suicide. It sent me into a big anxious spiral. Sherrie left behind a four-year-old son.

When my brother was a baby or toddler and I was fourteen or fifteen (and my sister was eight or nine), my mom had untreated hypothyroidism, pernicious anemia, and depression. She had suicidal ideations. She later told me that she didn’t act on them because my brother needed her. She believed my sister and I would have been fine.

We would not have been fine.

Even though I know that she was listening to the lies depression tells, I felt angry hearing that we were not enough to stay alive for.

Depression makes me so angry. Suicide makes me so angry.

I, too, live with depression. It’s usually in remission.

Every day, I choose to live. Most of all for my son, but also for myself, for the rest of the family. I think about how angry I am when I hear someone has died by suicide. I think about how I don’t want the people I love to feel that anger. I think about how I don’t want them to be angry at me.

I don’t have a strong conclusion for this post. Depression is bullshit and I wish nobody ever had to deal with it.

🔖📝📚📺🍿 Read What the Universal Translator Tells Us About Exploring Other Cultures by Charlie Jane Anders (Happy Dancing newsletter).

Anders talks about the way a universal translator gives us shortcuts to understanding other cultures that don’t really show how hard it is to actually understand another culture.

She offers a lot of examples of this and asks,

How is it that Han Solo understands Chewbacca, but doesn’t speak Wookiee himself? And vice versa?

It’s been a long time since I was getting my Master of Arts in teaching and had to take a course on how Language Acquisition happens (almost 20 years), but I recall that we tend to understand much more of a language than we can speak, and I’ve certainly found that to be true recently.

For W’s Fulbright, we spent two months in the Netherlands, and had learned some very basic Dutch using Duolingo before heading over there. I often didn’t understand what people were saying, but I always understood more of what they were saying than I could ever speak myself.

Our first week there, some young people overheard my son saying his favorite Dutch word, “kat,” on the bus. They asked us about our being Americans and then one of them wanted to know if we were full of “kattenkwaad.” We didn’t know this word, and the person who asked didn’t know English well enough to explain it, but his friend tried.

I asked if it meant behaving like a cat, and he indicated not exactly. He tried to explain by example: pushing the stop button on the bus, then not getting off when the bus stopped.

“Oh, like, pranks!” I said.

“Yes, like pranks.”

“Mischievous,” my sister suggested. He wasn’t sure about that one.

Weeks later, I found this book in the shop a short walk from our house:

Google translates this title as “First Aid for Mischief: The Survival Guide for Cat Parents.”

I don’t think it captures the sense entirely, based on our bus conversation, but it’s hard to be sure.

I first encountered music from The Phantom of the Opera when I was 9 years old. I had taken a lip syncing class, because the Leon County, FL gifted program in 1990-91 was awesome, and at the performance where the most effective lip syncers gave a performance, a boy lip synced “Music of the Night,” complete with tux, cape, mask, and hat. (I was not selected for this performance, because the teacher said my performance of “Material Girl” showed that I cared more about the look than about lip syncing well, and she wasn’t wrong.)

I was immediately in love - with the song, with the costume, in my imagination with the lip syncing boy (who had been in a different class from me and who I hadn’t met nor would ever meet).

My mom promptly added the original cast recording to her next Columbia House order.

And the whole show was much bigger than that one song, endearing itself to me more than “Music of the Night” ever could have to me alone.

I stayed obsessed with the Phantom of the Opera. I read Gaston Leroux’s original novel. I read Susan Kay’s Phantom (highly recommend). I read The Phantom of Manhattan (fun but I recommend it not as highly). I went to see it when it came to Raleigh on tour. (1993, I think.) I played the computer game, Return of the Phantom.

When I met W in 1998, our mutual love of Phantom of the Opera was one of the things we first bonded over. That October, I hosted a costumed sing-along of it at my house. He was the Phantom and I was Christine. We did the same thing the following year.

We saw the show together when it came on tour. We saw it when they did a movie theater cast of the show in 2011.

Our son, M, has listened to the first act with me. We looked at The Complete Phantom of the Opera book together as we listened. He was very interested.

Next month, I hope to visit the Palais Garnier and see the places and things that I have only seen in pictures and my imagination so far: the grand staircase, the chandelier, box five.

The Phantom of the Opera has its last Broadway performance today. It’s been hugely important to me, even though I’ve never seen it there. I’m so glad it ran for so long. I know we haven’t seen the last of it in the US.