Kimberly Hirsh, PhD

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Hello, everyone! How are you doing?

Over here, I’m on Day 6 of being In My 40s and it’s going just fine. I had an amazing birthday party: I rented a big gazebo area at the neighborhood pool (which is a fancy pool with an expensive membership fee but that membership fee is cheaper than a summer’s worth of camp, so…). I invited a lot of people and some of them came. I got to see some friends for the first time since before the pandemic, as well as invite family out to a place they hadn’t been before (i.e. the pool). We weren’t worried too much about COVID because of being outdoors and it was just really delightful. And it also felt a little like a celebration of me finishing the PhD, too. Also, I swam for a while in my mermaid tail and got to talk to some kids who really liked it and wanted me to go underwater so they could go down and watch what my swimming looked like under there. 🧜‍‍♀️

I also sewed those napkins! Remember? And for my birthday my friend Casey introduced me to pre-filled bobbins, which I’m very excited about. Next up, I’m going to sew a pillow to put on my desk chair. The fabric is MANATEE fabric and I’m psyched.

I did some important businesslady things today. Most importantly, though, I made a to-do list for the businesslady things I need to do tomorrow. Here’s where I stand right now:

1. I’m doing consulting for Quirkos, a company that provides qualitative data analysis software. I have had a bit of a crush on qual since Day 1 of my Field Techniques in Educational Research class and it’s the primary kind of research I’ve done, so I’m excited to work with an organization that is dedicated to supporting it.
2. I’m developing The Quiet Space, a project to provide structure for scholars and other knowledge creators so that they are free to focus on creative work.

In September, once my kid is settled into preschool, I hope to get in touch with some other potential consulting clients.

I talked with my doctor on Friday. My thyroid numbers are moving in the right direction, but still not where I want them to be. I worried that a change in my prescription dosage would be too extreme, so we agreed that I would up my intake of l-tyrosine. My glucose and hemoglobin A1C are high, meaning I’m pre-diabetic. I also have a lot of intense PCOS symptoms like acne, hirsutism, and oligoovulation. My primary focus right now, aside from caring for my kid, is working on healing this so that my PCOS is well-managed. I’m using Amy Medling’s book Healing PCOS to help me with that.

Aside from that, I’m reading Harrow the Ninth, which is super fun.

What’s new with you?

Austin Kleon writes about his desire to be a pirate-gardener,

I’d like to stay happily at home, in the studio, planting my seeds and cultivating my garden, and when I get bored, like Ishmael, and “I find myself growing grim about the mouth,” then it’s time to take to the seas and do some pirating, steal a few seeds from foreign lands to bring back to my own garden, where I’ll stay happily until I get bored again.

I think the gardening affords you the opportunity to pirate.

Three makes a pattern, so this is the year that blogging about who I want to be in this year of my life becomes a tradition. Shout out to my friend Little Willow, who inspired the idea by making her New Year’s resolutions on her birthday.

Part of the tradition is looking at who I wanted to be last year and seeing how close I got. The big one, being a Doctor of Philosophy, happened in April/May. The rest were, fittingly, not so much in focus.

But the microbusiness. The microbusiness! I’ve been taking strong steps in that direction, lining up my first consulting client, creating a little trickle of passive income with my Notion templates, and dreaming big about what the future holds for The Quiet Space.

Hard as it was with the pandemic and my grandmother’s death, 39 was still on the balance a good year. (This is the moment where I acknowledge that the year I was age 39 was actually the 40th year of my life, since we live a full year before our birthday. Yes, Daddy, I know we use zero-based indexing for ages.)

So what’s next?

I think I want to be a little less ambitious about 40, to set fewer goals.

I want to be a loving and mostly gentle mother.

I want to take care of my own body, including making clothes built to fit it.

I want to keep trying new things and growing as a self-employed person.

I want to be aware of my impact on the earth and do what I can to make it gentler. I recognize, however, that this is a systemic problem that requires more than individual action, which is why I joined the Alliance for Climate Education mailing list and will start donating to them monthly as soon as I have something resembling a steady income.

I think four is a good number, so I’ll stop there.

Who will you be this year?

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Kristen Arnett is Florida’s and the Internet’s Lesbian dad. Her puns are a delight and her “The existence of ___ implies ___” joke structure cracks me up every time she uses it. I have no idea when or why I followed her on Twitter but I’m glad I did. I love her Twitter presence so much that I thought I would probably love her books, too.

I didn’t have a lot of expectations going into MOSTLY DEAD THINGS but I feel like I’d seen the phrase “darkly funny” tossed around in reviews.

I was surprised when every part that I bet other people found funny made me sad.

MOSTLY DEAD THINGS is a great book and humans who read should try reading it.

It operated on a very visceral level for me for a few reasons.

1. It’s set in Central Florida. I lived on the east coast of Center Florida (mostly on the Space Coast) for the first 7 years of my life, years that loom large in how I think of myself and what feels like home. I lived in Tallahassee for another couple of years. Even though I’ve spent almost 80% of my life living in North Carolina, I still consider myself a Floridian. The feel of Florida - swampy and magical at the same time, hot and sticky but in a way that works with nostalgia, full of things that can kill you but are also kind of cool - resonates with my heart and is all over this book.

2. The characters in it are mostly in a very specific lower middle class Florida-version-of-Southern (probably white) culture. This is the kind of culture I was familiar with for most of my life, despite my family being genteel poor (and only kind of poor but like sometimes living on federal assistance so definitely not wealthy). The main character Jessa-Lyn has deep nostalgia for her youth spent burning Christmas trees by the swamp, hanging out by the lake, drinking water out of a hose at her best friend/only love Brynn’s trailer home. I think this is what my summers might have looked like, had I stayed in Florida. For special occasions you have homemade pie on pretty paper plates.

3. It is so infused with nostalgia and I am a sucker for that kind of thing. Arnett and I are very close in age so our referents for the things people wore and the way they did their hair as tweens and teens are basically the same.

4. The dynamic of a mother who is capable of lots of cool stuff but doesn’t feel like she’s had the opportunity to do it resonates with my family history across multiple generations.

5. My last real connection to Central Florida is dissolving last week as my mother and uncle close the sale of my late grandmother’s Melbourne house.

This is just a sampling. Basically this book squeezed my heart and pushed on bruises. It eventually patched it up but, you know, mostly in the final act.

Highly recommend.

🦩🐊