100 Days of #bluemind Day 3: Sat on the front porch and watched and listened to the rain. Tried to capture the rain sound on video but it didn’t turn out well.

👦 My child has decreed that henceforth this character shall be known as R2 Bleep Bloop. You’re welcome.

100 Days of #bluemind, Day 2: Took a drive along the North Durham Country Byway, crossing over Lake Michie and the Flat River.

🧶Got bored making a sweater that just uses the same stitches over and over, so added Sophie’s Universe to the mix. Very happy with this decision.

Had a great call with my school’s career services coordinator where she urged me not to let worrying about jobs become a distraction from finishing my dissertation. I’m so grateful every time someone says this, including my advisor and my husband.

Today is the first day of the 100 Days of Blue Mind challenge. I got my #bluemind on today by gazing up at the clouds from my hammock.

Deep cleaning 3 essential oil diffusers at once, as you do.

I just realized that to figure out what professional options I want to consider in the future, I essentially need to do an informational interview with my past self, the version of me who has her dream job.

I don’t think of librarianship as a CALLING, but I do consider it a disposition. For example, I just texted 2 friends to tell them about an amazing vegan ice cream I found recently. That’s a very librarian thing to do.

Finished reading: The Addams Family: An Evilution by Charles Addams and Kevin Miserocchi 📚

Happy World Goth Day! I’m GothEnough and if you want to be, so are you! If you are Not-a-Goth or not goth, you can still celebrate. 📚

🔖 Read ‘A joyful thing’: the man who wrote his wife a poem every day for 25 years. I have a bad habit of idealizing other people’s marriages. This article isn’t helping.

North Carolina is moving from Stay-at-Home to Safer-at-Home & I’m anxious about it. My swim club is opening on 6/1 & I want to go swimming but I’m nervous bc autoimmune disease.

I just can’t brain this week, so I’m going to liveblog some career assessment results! First up, the Holland Code. I took the assessment at Truity. This is a measure of your interests, and they’ve broken it down by the more active words used alongside Holland’s original codes, rather than the codes themselves. So according to them, here’s the order of my interests: Creating-Persuading-Thinking-Building-Helping-Organizing. Sounds about right. Again, I’m vaguely drawing on some other sources for this, such as Wikipedia (linked above) and Career Key, but as I understand it, it’s common for career counselors to assign an individual a code according to their top 3 interests rather than the order of all six, for the purposes of career exploration. So let’s do that.

Let’s say I’m a Creating-Persuading-Thinking person. (I would say that’s pretty accurate.) Truity has a Career Search that tells you about different careers and their Holland Codes. Here are some (NOT ALL!) of the options they suggest for me:

  • Actor - Yes. I have done this in an amateur capacity A LOT, and in a professional capacity once. I don’t see it being my career, as I desire either stability or control (I feel like acting gives you neither) and want to be home most nights. But definitely looking to take this up as a hobby again, once live performances are a thing.
  • Computer or Information Research Scientist - Yes please. If someone wants to hire me to do LIS research without a tenure clock, let me know. I’m deeply uninterested in the tenure-track and VERY interested in research.
  • Craft Artist - Endlessly giving myself permission not to monetize this; I do craft and I do love it but I think I wouldn’t like doing it for money.
  • Editor - I’m available for this one and going to launch it as an actual service I provide before too long.
  • High School Teacher - Been there, done that. Teens are awesome people but K-12 public schools are not institutions where I can thrive.
  • Musician or Singer - Another hobby I hope to pick up again when I can. Doing it a little at home, mostly the Animaniacs theme for my kid at bedtime, but thisclose to starting impromptu concerts on my deck where I sing Disney songs and musical theater standards and hope that my neighbors don’t attack me. (I paid a lot of money to sing well, so they shouldn’t want to.)
  • Producer - I actually think at this time, being some kind of producer would be pretty ideal for me. Probably a web producer or a research coordinator.
  • Writer - Another thing I plan to start doing for money soon.

Overall, what I would call my professional interests - research, writing, editing - line up well with my Holland Code. As do my personal interests - performing and crafting. Okay, Holland Code. You strike me as an accurate test, though I think I know myself pretty well enough that none of this stuff is a surprise.

🔖 Stuff I read yesterday:

Want to read: Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde by Thomas Wright 📚

🔖 Read today:

🎮 I finished playing Final Fantasy VII Remake yesterday. I had fun with the game and I adore Tifa, Aerith, and Jessie, more than I did when I originally played Final Fantasy VII about 20 years ago. Marlene is the best part because she looks kind of like my kid. FFVII is in a weird spot for me because it was the first console game I really played, and I played it at a time when I really needed it, emotionally. I’ve tried replays in the past but never made it through. My understanding of the plot has always been… fragmented? And wasn’t made better by watching Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. I deliberately halted a replay before going into the remake so I wouldn’t be constantly comparing them, and I’m happy with that decision. Anyway, I was confused by the ending but didn’t dislike it, and once I talked with W. about it, I found that I actually wished they’d gone bigger in the same direction. I’m now doing a playthrough of the original, and after that I may dig into some of the Final Fantasy VII Compilation titles before going back and doing a plus game replay of FFVIIR.

Lest I think I’m doing nothing during this social isolation time, in addition to raising my kid & dissertating, I’m also planning a consulting business, reading about writing, brushing up my coding skills, and agreeing to do some volunteer research comm. And playing video games.

I’m struggling to dissertate today. My main task for the next little bit is just to correct AI transcriptions of my interviews. It’s not immensely draining, but today even that task is too much for my brain. I blame the weather. It’s cloudy and rainy here today.

Thinking of changing my website’s title (but not my domain) from “Kimberly Hirsh” to “Kimberly Hirsh is a lot.”

🔖🎵🎭📚 Read 8 Musicals that You Might Not Know Were Based on Books by Emily Neuberger.

I’ve been grieving the fact that public performances likely won’t be a thing for the next couple of years. I grieve it both as an audience member and as a performer. Neuberger’s book is going on my to-read list, as her main character’s early experiences with musicals are nearly identical to mine. The musicals and books she writes about are now on my radar if they weren’t, or things I’m going to make a point to revisit if I was already familiar with them.

I bet Neuberger’s book would pair well with The Secret Life of the American Musical, which acts as a Poetics for musicals, describing their shared structural features.

🔖📝 Read How to Write 1000 Poems in a 1000 Days by Nick Asbury. More why to than how to, this is a moving read and a great argument for making art in response to crisis.

👦 My kid just told me that Iron Lychee is a whole bunch of Iron Mans [sic] inside one giant Iron Man.

The best part of conducting my dissertation interviews via Zoom is I get to see my participants’ cats.