Kimberly Hirsh

I’m RSVPing to IndieWeb Create Day on March 5, 2022. This might show up as a yes but it’s actually a maybe.

Me to W: I need to go be in the dark and quiet for a little while now because I’m overstimulated. There were so many people outside when M was playing.

Narrator: There were 4 people outside.

I am thisclose to posting a vibe shift reading list.

I have too many chronic conditions and I don’t like it.

🔖 Read The Millions of People Stuck in Pandemic Limbo

…people are still dying, and immunocompromised people disproportionately so. Ignoring that sends an implicit message: Your lives don’t matter.

I’ve been reading the Future Ready with the Library posts at the YALSA blog and it’s got me thinking about the skills I was building in middle school and how they have persisted and how I’ve leveraged them throughout my career.

In middle school, I spent my out-of-school time practicing theater, reading books, and coding in BASIC. I volunteered one summer at the library. (My memory of this is that somebody at school decided I needed more to occupy me and sent me to the counselor and when she asked my interests, “reading” was the only one she could figure out how to match with a volunteer opportunity.)

In my career, I’ve been an educator and public speaker (both use my theater training), a librarian, and a web editor (HTML is pretty easy if you’ve got a handle on BASIC). I use knowledge and skills from all of these domains as a researcher, too.

It’s fun and cool to think about the connections between that me and this me.

I just heard my neck crack. I am really over everything. Everything except crafting and my job. And loving my kid. I guess I’m over stuff that I’m not doing impacting me, really.

Today’s vibe: driving home from my fasting bloodwork appointment listening to “Surface Pressure” on repeat-1 while basically inhaling a Panera cinnamon roll.

I get annoyed at the voice in my head that, when I’m stressed, offers an oh-so-helpful list of all the stress-relieving things I’m not doing, implying that I could make the stress go away but I just must not want to badly enough.

I realized as I was helping my family in the face of my mom’s return to the hospital that there will never be a time when I’m not a caregiver and that given my family’s medical woes, I am much more likely to need to drop everything to caregive than many other people. It would be wise to design my life to accommodate this fact, rather than hoping for some imagined time with minimal caregiving responsibilities. Even if I get my own conditions well-managed, even as M. grows and becomes more independent, I will still benefit from the flexibility I need as a parent of a young child and a chronically ill worker.

This is a radical shift in my thinking about the future. I’ll write more about it as I tease out what it means for my planning practices and daily life.