Kimberly Hirsh

Trapper Keeper is back but I’m holding out for the re-release of the unicorn in front of a waterfall.

Whoops, I didn’t mean unicorn and waterfall, I meant swan and rainbow. We also had the tiger one.

My taste in fantasy art is less Lisa Frank and more Frank Frazetta.

📚 Data Feminism has the best (and perhaps only) definition of positionality I’ve ever seen: “Positionality is a term that describes how individuals come to knowledge-making processes from multiple positions, including race, gender, geography, class, ability, and more. Each of these positions is shaped by culture and context, and they intersect and interact.”

📚 Just finished the introduction of Data Feminism & am jotting down some thoughts. I hope to expand on these later.

1. To what extent and how do the 7 principles of data feminism intersect/interact with Jennifer Armbrust’s 12 principles for prototyping a feminist business?

2. Women were the first computers. Is there a relationship between this history and the default woman-coded voices of digital virtual assistants that goes beyond generic sexism?

About to go pick kid up from first day of preschool. (1/2 day today, full day Thurs). Achieved:

• made coffee
• made breakfast
• drank coffee
• ate breakfast
• took meds
• finished reading Data Feminism intro
• replied to email
• measured feet
• ordered motion control shoes

One of the many straws on the proverbial camel’s back that led me to stop watching THE CHAIR after only 8 minutes was when the dean said “We can’t add another line” for the junior scholar. 📺

🎙️ Listening to Keegan-Michael Key’s The History of Sketch Comedy on Audible & in ep 5 he mentions the Carol Burnett Show. Comedian guests on The Hilarious World of Depression consistently cited that show as their earliest comedic influence. It’s mine, too. ♥️

Younger S7E5 is delighting me with Janeane Garofalo as an art college dean and Sutton Foster as Liza Miller dancing to a recording of Sutton Foster in Thoroughly Modern Millie.

Casey Fiesler asked for tips for creating equal participation in breakout rooms. One strategy to try is providing distinct roles for each individual. Cal State-San Marcos Instructional & Information Technology Services explains why & how to do this.

How come every time Rachel Cohn & David Levithan collaborate the result is adorable? What’s up with that? 📚

Me, prepping for my kid’s very masked return to preschool:

IMAGE: Liz Lemon (from the TV show 30 Rock), a white woman with brown hair wearing glasses, says, “I’m going to become wonderful.”

Want to read: Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life by Heather Cass White 📚

Colleagues are all “I forgot how exhausting teaching in person is!” & I’m all “I forgot how exhausting getting your kid ready to go to preschool in person is!”

Setting aside my TIME 100 list plan to play in the land of YA rom-coms. Just started NICK AND NORAH’S INFINITE PLAYLIST. 📚

📺 It’s been interesting seeing other (current or former) academians’ responses to THE CHAIR. I made it 8 minutes but once the notion of just getting through the tenure process and THEN shaking things up was mentioned, I had to stop. My heart was hurting.

I have a friend who is due to have a baby in January. I offered to write up a bunch of notes for her and realized it would make a pretty good blog post, so here we are.

Make a list ahead of time of ways to help. You won’t want to think about it once the baby’s born. Share the list with people who you think will want to help. (I just put out a call on Facebook asking for who wanted this information.) If someone offers to make a meal train or whatever for you, take them up on it, but you don’t have to wait for an offer. You can do it for yourself.

If you’ve got the money and a place nearby that makes prepared meals, do this for the first couple weeks. It’s amazing.

Stock up on easy snacks. If you’re nursing, you will need to eat all the time. Get a giant straw cup to drink water from. My doulas recommend a giant Bubba Bottle.

Populate your streaming services with queues of everything you’ve been meaning to watch. Again, if you’re nursing, there will be cluster feeding nights when streaming this stuff will save your sanity, and you don’t want to pick which thing to watch in the moment.

Read these books:

• Before baby is born - The Happiest Baby on the Block
• When baby is born - The Wonder Weeks (also has an excellent companion app)

Get the latest edition of Baby Bargains and use it as reference material.

If swaddling seems like a real challenge, try a Miracle Blanket. They don’t work for everybody but if they work for you, they are the best thing ever.

If you’re nursing, get a My Brest Friend pillow. So much better than a Boppy or whatever.

If you have the energy, try to assert your needs to family that wants to hang out with the baby. You might find it a huge relief to have the baby taken away for a while but you might find it really upsetting. Communicate with people about what you’re feeling. I was not good about this. I wish I had been. The first few weeks would have been happier if I had.

Remember that Boppy that isn’t super helpful for breastfeeding? It’s actually a great pillow for keeping your genitals and butt from having to touch real furniture. If you have a vaginal delivery, those parts of you will hurt. Not putting them on real furniture and instead having them propped up with a pillow with a hole in the middle will spare you a lot of crying in pain. Sit on the Boppy.

Learn to use a baby carrier ASAP. YouTube is your friend for this. In fact, YouTube is now your co-parent. Go to it whenever you can’t figure out what instructions are telling you to do. Including for the Miracle Blanket.

Don’t go to YouTube for hand expressing milk advice, though, because it will show you things that are more designed to turn people on than to educate them, and that’s not helpful. (Unless that’s what you’re into, in which case it might be helpful. But I found medical information about this much more helpful.)

Seriously, though, learn to use that carrier because then you will be able to use your hands for things like feeding yourself.

Your baby will hate tummy time. (Learn what tummy time is if you don’t know yet.) If your baby cannot handle it without misery, try rolling up a little receiving blanket and propping it under baby’s armpits. This turned tummy time from hated time to happy time in our house.

Try to remember that this is a temporary time. You are becoming a new version of yourself. You don’t know what this version of yourself will like or care about. You will probably have an identity crisis. Becoming a parent is a lifestage not unlike adolescence, especially if you’re the birthing parent with all the hormones that come with that. (People use the term “matrescence” to refer to becoming a mother. I don’t think there is a similar gender-neutral or non-binary term, and I suppose maybe somebody uses “patrescence” to refer to becoming a father, but I haven’t heard it.) It’s okay if you don’t know who you are right now but I promise you are other things as well as a caregiver. Caregiver is just taking priority right now.

When you feel like you’re doing it all wrong and you’re the worst parent ever, get quiet and check in with your intuition. If you’re like me, it will tell you what to do.

Many thanks to my friend Monica, everybody at Emerald Doulas, and Victoria Facelli for all the things they taught me that contributed to my ability to write this post.

Want to read: Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly 📚

– Read

Meet the Southern librarians fighting for racial justice and truth-telling – Scalawag scalawagmagazine.org

Read: scalawagmagazine.org

Read this because it’s on Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Human-Information Interaction syllabus for this semester. (I like to look at updated syllabi for classes I’ve already taken to see what I might have missed recently.) Going to pull out a couple of quotes that stuck with me. I hope in time I’ll write a more robust response to this article.

The public rarely sees the many processes that happen behind the scenes at libraries—which cultural priorities inform decisions of what to include in a collection, or to digitize; which books to display; which films or speakers wind up on the calendar—all of these choices are determined by the priorities designated by the library leadership. And, of course, their biases play a part.

The ALA isn’t a worker’s union. It’s an association that includes everyone from paraprofessionals to directors of large systems. Several people told me that as library workers, they didn’t feel represented by the organization—far from it.

I read Ravynn K. Stringfield’s How I Became a Scholar of Black Girl Fantasy and felt energized. I felt energized specifically by how she found role models who were doing the work she wanted to do, how she came to terms with being able to be a scholar AND a writer of other genres.

I attended her class The Scholar’s Guide to Writing & Publishing Creative Nonfiction and she talked about pursuing questions. She talked about that in her essay, too.

And I thought, what questions motivate me?

I went back to my PhD personal statement. The question motivating me there was broad. It was basically “How do Connected Learning in school libraries?” Meme style.

I drafted it in 2014. I have changed a lot in the last 7 years. Connected Learning has changed a lot in the last 7 years.

And I’m still delighted by people loving things and all the amazing learning that comes from that, but… I don’t know. I don’t feel like I’m interested in that set of questions right now.

I love reading about affinity spaces.

I really loved my dissertation topic.

But now? What now? I wrote my proposal before COVID-19 was well-known.

I defended my dissertation when there seemed to be hope on the horizon: I was freshly fully vaccinated and things were looking up.

I’m despairing about a lot now.

I’m also jazzed about the possibility of taking some time to be a writer.

But a writer of what?

I don’t know.

I’ve been banging my head against WHAT NOW?! as if it’s a puzzle I can solve if I just look at or play with it long enough but I think I’m not there. Doing all the parachute-color-style exercises isn’t what I need right now; it just leads to frustration and exhaustion.

I did a couple Self-Employed PhD sessions with Jennifer Polk back when I was still working on the dissertation. I knew that I could go a lot of possible directions with either traditional or self-employment. I said so. People said “So what’s the problem?” I said “Well I have limited time and energy so I need to pick one to try first.” People said “Well what do you want to do?”

I said:

I WANT TO REST.

I want. To. Rest.

My dissertation has been fully submitted since mid-May. I officially graduated on May 16, I think.

I have been “resting” for 3 months.

But “resting” has meant caring for my son and drumming up client work. It’s meant applying for jobs. It’s meant presenting for both professional and personal endeavors. It’s meant figuring out how to safely get my kid into preschool so I can work. It’s meant agonizing over the fact that while I am incredibly lucky and privileged to be in a position to take time to figure out what’s next, I hate the idea of my husband paying my student loans. Partly because I fear his resentment.

Partly because like… what do I have all these degrees for if all I do is sleep?

Some of what I’ve been doing has been home ownership management. Lots of logistics.

I do not feel rested.

A lot of things happened over the course of my PhD in my family and personal life, in addition to the world being what it has been since 2015. Listing it really bums me out so just trust me that it’s been A LOT and it has taken a toll. And when I look at it all written out, as I did privately for myself last night, I think:

NO WONDER I AM SO TIRED.

So the questions that are driving me, for the foreseeable future, honestly, are:

• What do I HAVE to do to care for myself, my family, and my home?
• What feels good?
• What heals me?
• What energizes me?

Those are all the questions I can handle right now.

“Being a mom is my calling, and being a writer is also my calling, so they have to both exist simultaneously.” Well said, A’Ziah King.

I clocked a solid chunk of time on my current consulting contract today and I really enjoyed the work. That’s such a good feeling.

Who’s your favorite fictional character with an extreme love of school supplies? Mine is Amy Santiago. (I’m super behind on B99 y’all.)

Today, in Sesame Street Is the Best Comedy School, Grover and Campers Learn About Trees. Excellent use of the rule of three and a beautiful button.

We might need to have a talk about how I don’t want to eat any actual meals, just leftovers of the Fran’s Torte L’Orange that my bonus mother-in-law made me for my belated birthday celebration at her house.