Notes
Y’all RiffTrax is doing a Star Trek: Generations watch along tonight and if my kid is asleep in time, I may try to hop on! 🖖
Me: reviews dissertation feedback and writes down 5 questions for meeting tomorrow w/advisor & methodologist
Still Me: Welp, time for a nap.
WELCOME TO COVID-19 YEAR 2!
Great question from Jen Polk (@FromPhDtoLife) that it’d help me if you answer: What do I do that others don’t?
I have so many thoughts about information literacy and they’re so timely. It would be brilliant to write them up as public scholarship but y’all I just don’t have the energy. I hate not having the energy.
I’m reading IF WE WERE VILLAINS by M. L. Rio & it does this interesting thing where you know it’s not THE SECRET HISTORY but it a little bit is & just when you’re pretty sure it is, it shows you it is and it’s not. Also Shakespeare nerds are adorable. 📚
I’m doing a daily tarot pull starting today. Four cards popped out of the deck at me today.
The tarot always knows what we need to hear. Daughter & Son of Cups are my signifiers; pulling them is always special. Daughter reminds me to play with my creativity. Son reminds me that I can leverage it for professional/financial gain & still have an artist’s soul.
5 of Cups is about grief deferred; I choose to read reversal as a special highlight for a card rather than its opposite. I am still moving through grief at the loss of my grandmother. I keep thinking how I loved late night easy conversation with her & my mom. She & my grandfather slept in separate beds. After he died, my mom & I would sit on his bed while she lay in hers & talk about lots of random things. I’m still so perplexed that this is a world without her in it. In this card, it’s worth noting that not all five cups have spilled. There is grief in me, but there’s also love and memory.
10 of Wands is about burnout, as this deck depicts so clearly. I know so many of us are feeling this right now. I myself am tired of my dissertation (though not its topic or research more broadly). I’m tired of the neverending nature of this pandemic & especially the way it limits what I feel safe doing with my kid: I love taking him to museums & zoos but I don’t feel safe doing it right now.
In this layout, the Son of Cups is facing the Daughter of Cups. Perhaps her propensity for play and chasing her interests is a healing for the problems the other cards represent: where to take my career next, how to move through my grief, and how to refill my empty well.
💛
Deck is the Wayhome Tarot by Bakara Wintner & Autumn Whitehurst.
Every night I lie in my kid’s bed until he falls asleep and every night I wish someone would pick me up and carry me to my own bed.
I’ve got that sweet, sweet book hangover where you finish reading and then look around and think, “Where am I? What is this strange ‘real world’? Wasn’t I just in a cafe in France in 1972?”
I’m having to remind myself that the reason a 2 yr ethnographic dissertation I’m reading is more expansive than mine is bc I wrote mine on a compressed timeline in a pandemic with reduced childcare, and not because I’m a garbage scholar.
GENTLE WRITING ADVICE: You could write some words sometime if you feel like it, but if you’re in more of a taking-a-nap or binge-watching-Star-Trek place, that’s cool, too.
The model for a dissertation defense in my head is still f2f. When I try to envision my inevitable remote defense my brain just shuts down. Will I really be a Dr if I don’t have milkshakes or Mediterranean food with Drs Hughes-Hassell, Rawson, Sturm, & Gibson right after the defense?
🔖 I am a Book Person. I don’t love the shots this piece takes at Book People, but I appreciate its conclusion: it would be good to calm down about books. (The verbs attacks Book People are defending themselves against are published, rather than imagined.)
Just got “Wait, you’re KIBA?” for the first time in several years and it still feels kinda good… I’m not a classy fan.
If I have any friends/followers diagnosed with hEDS or HSD who would be willing to talk with me about the diagnostic process & benefits of having a diagnosis, will you let me know? Email or DM is good if you want to talk privately.
Hi. I’m Kimberly, and everything you need to know about me can be summed up by the fact that I’m currently bullet journaling while rocking out to The Phantom of the Opera’s cover of The Power of Love.
Just over here having an anxiety attack about taking my car to the mechanic for some routine work and state inspection, NBD.
If somebody could get on replacing Larry in “Pinky & the Brain & Larry” with Bernie, that’d be great.
🔖 The Power of German Playwright Bertholt Brecht’s V-Effekt: Oliver Mayer discusses the connection between the January 6 insurrection and Brecht’s work with alienation.
🔖 What’s Behind the Label ‘Domestic Fiction‘?: Soledad Fox Maura writes about why we need to reconsider genre.
🔖 An old piece that the Rec Center brought to my attention: How Writing Fanfic Introduced Me To Myself.
I’ve been feeling the need to do some fun, low-pressure writing. Fic may be just the thing.