Notes
🔖▶️ Watching Meet Courtney: An American Girl Movie & trying not to lose it every time they mention the Challenger or Christa McAuliffe. 35 years & yet it doesn’t seem like history to me.
🔖📺 Listen, as a 90s babybat I welcome the new Anne Rice television universe. 🦇
I don’t have a plan beyond keeping my kid alive, resting a lot, trying to be more chill. I’ve never not had a plan before. I’m lucky I can afford to have no plan but also confused, overwhelmed, filled with existential dread. I’m basically living for iced chai & naps right now.
Want to read: Do Babies Matter? Gender and Family in the Ivory Tower by Marc Goulden, Mary Ann Mason, and Nicholas H. Wolfinger 📚
I don’t like to drink rosé but I love the roséwave vibe. I’m trying to figure out what faux-luxe looks like for parents of young children. So far, it’s sipping iced chai by the pool while my kid’s at his swim lesson.
💬📚 “Why have I surrendered so much of my present self to an abstract future self that may never exist? Why have I made my present happiness contingent on my future happiness?” Joseph P. Fisher in SUCCEEDING OUTSIDE THE ACADEMY
Every time I work on this article revision I end up getting mad at Reviewer 2 all over again, mostly for treating me like a baby, even though it’s merited because I was in fact a babydoc when I wrote the first draft of the paper.
My Kid (4.5 yo): Donatello is playing a video game.
Me: Fun! What’s it called?
Kid: “Science Nerd.”
🐢🕹️
🔖▶️ Watched Create Your Unicorn Career from Scratch. Engaging talk from a science communicator/comedian! Don’t throw any part of yourself away! (That’s from Austin Kleon.)
Low-key day today: chilling with my kid in the morning, an adventure with a locked but unoccupied bathroom that resulted in me taking the handle off and then putting it back on, confirming a future client relationship, and fixing my broken ring light stand.
JK, today is a rest-in-bed kind of day now that I’ve done my most important work, registering my kid for the next round of swim lessons. Also read a little bit in Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks but not engaging with literature search today because my brain won’t.
Today is a work-in-bed kind of day. (I have chronic illness and a 4 year old; kindly keep your sleep hygiene tips to yourself.)
As a younger person I thought people in their 40s had their acts together. ~3 wks away from turning 40 I realize people in their 40s have simply accepted that no one ever has their act together.
🔖📝 I love Austin Kleon’s advice to relocate your darlings. I have a file for every project with the word “Cut” in the filename and anything I don’t use goes there in case I want it later.
Is my hair still wet or is it like this because I tried the Curly Girl method and used gel? The Kimberly Hirsh story
[Caption: a woman with hair that might be wet or might just be slathered in gel looks confused.]
What is less helpful than it might be is when a reviewer suggests that people have already written a bunch about the thing you’re writing about and you clearly aren’t familiar with that literature, but offers not a single suggestion of a citation you’re missing.
9 am Kimberly: I’m totally going to work this afternoon!
1 pm Kimberly: I’m totally going to read GIDEON THE NINTH this afternoon!
📚
In the bathroom at the children’s museum yesterday, I looked in the mirror. I saw a sweaty mess who was clearly somebody’s mom. I thought, “I’m cute! This sweaty mess mom look suits me!” I believe as Dr. Mom I am coming into my full power.
Welp. Sitting on hold with the grocery store because they accidentally charged me $78.89 for 1 lb of turkey is not how I expected to spend my Saturday morning, but here we are.