Posts in "Notes"

I love Discovery and I’ve enjoyed Picard and Prodigy, but Strange New Worlds feels like nostalgic Trek in a way that of the new shows, only Lower Decks does. I’m happy to have such an embarrassment of Star Trek riches. πŸ––πŸ»πŸ“Ί

πŸ”–πŸ“š

Can Motherhood Be a Mode of Rebellion? | The New Yorker newyorker.com

Read: www.newyorker.com

An amazing essay in conversation with Angela Garbes’s new book, Essential Labor.

a person can get paid more to sit in front of her computer and send a bunch of e-mails than she can to do a job so crucial and difficult that it seems objectively holy: to clean excrement off a body, to hold a person while they are crying, to cherish them because of and not despite their vulnerability.

Her husband’s job provided health insurance and regular paychecks; Garbes writes that it β€œmay take me a lifetime to undo the false notion that my work is somehow less valuable than his.”

It feels shameful to admit that I don’t have the desire to hustle up that same ladder.

Parenthood likewise forces an encounter with the illogic of the market: good fortune means getting to pay someone less than you make to do a job that’s harder and probably more important than your own.

parenting toward a more just world requires more than diverse baby dolls and platitudes about equality.

She quotes the writer Carvell Wallace, who, after the 2016 election, told his children, β€œOne of the most important questions you have to answer for yourself is this: Do I believe in loving everyone? Or do I only believe in loving myself and my people?”

How can mothering be a way that we resist and combat the loneliness, the feeling of being burdened by our caring?

motherhood has also granted me a chance to see what my life is like when I reorganize it around care and interdependence in a way that stretches far beyond my daughter.

πŸ”–πŸ“š

“This is the Book I’m Meant to Write Right Now” sarafredman.substack.com

Read: sarafredman.substack.com

This interview is huge. Life-alteringly huge.

Angela Garbes, who usually line edits as she writes:

I can’t revise an idea, no matter how good it is, in my brain. I can’t revise it if I don’t write it down.

Interviewer Sara Fredman says:

I personally feel torn between feeling like motherhood is the most significant thing I do and that I’ll ever do in my life and also feeling like that’s a trap of some sort.

It’s a rough time right now so I’m trying to notice small joys and one of today’s is that I learned how to use regular expressions in advanced text editors to remove timestamps and extra lines from Zoom transcripts.

I just wrote the beginning of a fiction story after being inspired by Amanda Cook’s “Weaving Serenity” in issue 1 of @wyngraf. I also found a writing tagline for myself: “Kimberly Hirsh writes about badass moms doing awesome shit.” πŸ“πŸ“š

πŸ“š I joined Austin Kleon’s Read Like an Artist book club today and am also going to read his past choices. I’m starting with a re-read of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing.

πŸŽ™οΈ I listened to the first episode of A Beautiful Anarchy on my way to pick up the kid. It was about imposter syndrome. There were some really beautiful bits that I’ll add to this post later.