Kimberly Hirsh

Finished reading: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers 📚

Happy to have read it. Turns out vibes are enough when you’ve got charming characters.

Austin Kleon blogs about pilers and filers, a dichotomy/spectrum he learned about reading Temple Grandin’s book, _Visual Thinking _, in which Grandin discusses Linda Silverman’s work:

In a presentation about the differences in learning styles, Silverman flashes a slide showing a person with a tidy file cabinet and a person surrounded by messy piles of paper. The “filer” and the “pilers,” to use her terms. You probably know which one you are. What does it say about the way you think?

Kleon says:

All of these “versus” type situations can be rethought as spectrums and/or creative tensions. There are times when I want to access that sequential part of my brain and bring order to things, and filing does that, but there are other times I want to access my visual brain, and piles help.

I am my father’s daughter, which means I’m a piler-filer.

Both my dad and I often have stacks that look like a mess to other people. But when I was a teacher, my colleagues marveled at my ability to run exactly what I needed from one of these piles within seconds.

I also had immaculate file cabinets full of things like student paperwork. I love a label maker.

For me and for my dad, piles are for current projects and files are for reference materials and archives. If something goes into a file before we’re done with it, it ceases to exist until an external event prompts us to track it down, by which point it may be too late for us to have done what we needed to do with it.

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This is a panorama of my desk when I was managing editor at LEARN NC. The stacks on the desk and in the standing file were projects in-progress. I filed finished projects in the drawers in the file cabinet/snack station on the left side of the desk.

So. We’re piler-filers. Are you one, the other, or a combination?

🔖 Read The Battle for the Soul of Buy Nothing by Vauhina Vara (Wired).

This is an excellent long read. There are a lot of good questions here. How can we scale non-capitalist initiatives in a capitalist world? How can we acknowledge volunteer labor in that scaling? How can we support local action without resorting to geographic discrimination?

Currently reading: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers 📚

Now that I’m reading for vibes & character instead of a narrative arc, I’m enjoying this properly. The book didn’t work for me the first time I tried it.

My kid’s school is hiring a classroom teacher in his age range. So if you got the gig you might get to teach him, and I hear he’s pretty delightful.

🔖📝 Read IF YOU LOVE WRITING, YOU SHOULD RELISH REJECTION.

This is a really helpful piece that reframes rejection as the water writers swim in.

🔖🎓 Read All my classes suddenly became AI classes.

I love the assignment here that asks students to work with ChatGPT as if it were a student and they were a teacher coaching it to get better writing out of it.

Hi friends.

I wanted to take a moment to share my blogging “process,” which I put in scare quotes because it’s not very refined.

First, I have a thought or encounter something to which I have a response and decide I want to share that thought/response.

Then, I open up Google Docs and type what I want to share into a file called “Current Blog Post Draft.” I mainly do this to avoid losing a post because of a browser or app crash.

I sometimes read over it before posting. Sometimes I post right away.

My posts aren’t reviewed by an editor or even a beta reader. They go out fresh, raw, and often flawed in either form or content. The ideas are sometimes half-baked. I’m sometimes writing in the heat of emotion. I’m going to be wrong sometimes. Perhaps often.

Blogs are tools for thinking. As such, the thoughts expressed in them will not always be our most polished.

This is a personal blog, not a professional publication. I don’t mean for it to be anything but a personal blog and portfolio.

Thanks for reading it.

Yesterday I saw 3 people (I’d guess women) at Amsterdam Centraal 🚄 walking together wearing matching pairs of gorgeous plain black Docs and then felt super sad that I’d only had room for one pair of Docs in my suitcase and went with the floral ones.

Status: in a parasocial relationship with the crew of the Enterprise D.