Every once in a while early Sesame Street drops in a random Carol Burnett segment and it brings me such joy. 📺

🔖 In Back-Talking The Tone Police: Book People Are Not Your Enemy, Tika Vateri says all the things I couldn’t articulate in response to Joanna Mang’s We Have to Save the Books from the Book People. 📚

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! 🖖

Hello! Today I’m (not) enjoying some musculoskeletal pain. How are things with you?

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.

Me: Why is my neck hurting?

Child: climbs on my neck

Me: Oh.