Kimberly Hirsh

My On This Day page surfaced this blog post today:

Constructing websites as constructing ourselves: Thinking out loud

I still think about this all the time. I still feel that as I build my site, I’m building myself.

I seem to have no attention span today. I’m going to blame the postdrome stage of migraine.

Apparently my idea for what counts as the prettiest hair is bound to the year 1993. This soft hair on Deanna Troi, with thin bangs, the front pulled up, tendrils in drint of the ears, and big loose curls in the back resonates for me as true beauty. (ST:TNG 7x11 Parallels, airdate 11/29/93) 🖖🏻

Finished reading: Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin 📚

This is a beautiful homage to Pride & Prejudice, as well as to the Toronto Muslim community. A sweet love story with beautiful language. And so much tasty-sounding food and drink! Highly recommend.

📚 Me, reading Ayesha At Last: This is a Pride & Prejudice retelling, I know this, so when is Khalid going to go all Mr. Darcy?

Author Uzma Jalaluddin, on page 40: Here you go.

📝 Brilliant gem from Jaya Saxena in today’s #1000WordsOfSummer letter:

my writing got better the moment I allowed myself to be the kind of writer I am, even if I don’t work the same way as the writers I want to be.

Picard: I feel as if I’m in the Scottish Highlands.
Colonist: The cornerstone of every building was taken from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen…
Me, A Jerk: Those aren’t in the highlands.
🖖🏻

I am on Day 4 of a migraine. I’m about to try a new medication for it. Here’s hoping it makes a difference.

🔖 Read What Is A Third Place? (And Here’s Why You Should Have One) by Emily Torres (The Good Trade).

I’ve been thinking about third places, their role in fiction, what they look like online, & how they overlap with affinity spaces for a few days so it felt like serendipity when this hit my inbox.

Hey friends, what are some good values statements from organizations? (I’m deliberately not defining criteria for good, but please feel free to explain why you think the ones you mention are good.)

My desk chair broke a little bit and I’m having trouble determining whether I can fix it…

🔖 Read Katy Simpson Smith on Writing a Southern Woman Louder Than Herself.

Writing, as a career, is inherently boat-rocking.

Our first foray into Amsterdam besides going to the airport was heading to the International Newcomers office at the World Trade Center (right by the Amsterdam Zuid train station) for our immigration documents. We didn’t really see much of the city that day BUT!

We did decide to first go to Van Stapele Koekmakerij and pick up some of their cookies, which are so good and so famous that they have a line waiting every day and when they run out of cookies, they close. (Think Magnolia Bakery circa 2009.) We ordered ours in advance. You go to their shop which is in between Singel and Spui, ring a doorbell, and a very kind person squeezes out past the crowd waiting in the shop and through the doorway and asks for your order number. Then they bring out your order, packaged in either a cute box or beautiful tin and slipped in a lovely bag. It’s best to eat the cookies right away, as they’re filled with a cream that is best eaten warm and gooey. (Big thanks to Jonathan Stephens, who gave us this recommendation when my friend Whitney asked him for suggestions of things to do with a kid in Amsterdam.)

Going to Van Stapele allows you to get a lovely glimpse of the Amsterdam you think of Amsterdam as being, if you have any expectations of Amsterdam at all. You climb up the stairs from the Rokin metro station and spread before you are rows of 5 story, narrow houses all smushed together along a canal’s edge, curving toward the horizon. It’s not the most touristy part of Amsterdam, but it’s touristy-adjacent. There are plenty of “coffee shops” (like if you had to consume the marijuana you get at a dispensary before you actually leave) and the smell of Amsterdam, i.e., a scent that will give you a contact high, greets you wafting out from at least a couple of doors on every block. (It was almost weird to not smell this anymore once we left Amsterdam.)

Then we did head to IN Amsterdam and that was… not the most interesting process.

Did we do all that on the same day? Now I’m not even sure. We were planning to. I think that’s what happened.

Our next time in the city was when my sister M.E. and I took M. to Nemo Science Museum, also recommended by Jonathan Stephens and every list of kids’ activities in Amsterdam ever. This was fun, with giant gorgeous rainbow twirlers hanging down from the ceiling and an incredible chain reaction demonstration that was like a giant Rube Goldberg machine. The person running this demonstration took a quick poll of the audience to determine how many English speakers were there. As there weren’t many of us, he conducted most of his demonstration in Dutch, which gave us a chance to practice the little bit of Dutch we managed to learn in the months before we traveled. M. loved this. The museum had other interesting exhibits, including a makerspace and an area dedicated to human sexuality.

There were a lot of transit strikes while we were in the area, and we could never be sure if the bus running from Aalsmeer to Amsterdam would be running at a particular time during the strikes, so on those days we tended to just stick to places that were walkable from the house.

Next time: a Valentine’s Day date in Amsterdam!

📚💬

It is precisely because common structures of evaluation and advancement in various academic jobs require homogenous thought and action… that academia is often less a site for open-minded creative study and more a space of repression that dissenting voices are so easily censored and silenced… it is dangerous for us to allow academic institutions to remain the primary site where our ideas are developed and engaged." bell hooks, remembered rapture: the artist at work

📚💬 “To me intellectual life is fundamentally different from academic careerism.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the artist at work

🍞 This bread is from Simple Mills’s Artisan Bread mix. It has a beautiful crack, but vinegar as a leavening agent leaves something to be desired. The texture is a bit dense. Motivation for me to use the copy of Gluten-free Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day I ordered on @cygnoir’s recommendation.

I loved Amsterdam almost immediately, at first because of how the major roads are laid out. Buses have their own two lanes, totally separate from the car lanes, and then bikes have their own lanes, too. This isn’t true on the smaller roads, but it is on the big major arteries. We got off the plane and managed to figure out the trains eventually (at first I didn’t understand how tapping in and out worked, so I had to work that out but I got it eventually) and while having the luggage on the bus was stressful, it was otherwise a perfectly pleasant bus ride. The house was not as close to the bus stop as I expected, I think because when the bus route changed, they probably changed which stop they used. But that was still fine, and a cat greeted us as we turned down Seringenstraat. (Van Cleeffkade was the big road nearby where the bus stop was.)

The cat walked us all the way home to Weteringstraat 6, and we also saw a lot of adorably painted bricks on the sidewalk. It seems that these were painted by students at the primary school nearby. (Education attendance law is super different in Amsterdam than the US. I think it’s compulsory from age 4+, and we got a scary letter just a couple of weeks before we were planning to leave Amsterdam asking us to share the information about where we had enrolled Michael at school. But we hadn’t. But based on my poking around it seemed that if he was enrolled in a school in the US, which he was, then it wouldn’t be a problem. So we told them that he was, and we didn’t hear from them anymore.)

We were one block from a canal. The canals are the other thing that made me fall in love with Amsterdam. So much water! It’s funny to think that I was positively indifferent toward Amsterdam when Will decided that’s the school he was going to ask to sponsor him for the Fulbright, versus how much I came to love it once we were there. (And funnier still that as much as I loved it, I loved almost each place we came to after it more.)

The house at Weteringstraat 6 is a townhouse with a narrow staircase, 3 bedrooms (one teeny tiny and not unlike a walk-in closet), a lovely patio, a big kitchen with eating area, and a nice living room. The living room fireplace was plugged up and the TV sat in front of it.

One of the big things about visiting lots of different houses in the course of a few months (I believe we stayed in 7 total, including our short trip to Cologne) is that you have to re-learn how to use the appliances everywhere, and of course if you’re in a country where English isn’t the official language, you better hope the Google Translate on your phone can help you figure out what the text on the appliance says. (What a blessing Google Translate is, though!)

Weteringstraat 6 is two blocks away from an Albert Heijn grocery store, likewise to a drug store (Kruidvat) and a department store (HEMA), also near a discount store called Action that felt sort of like a Dollar Tree or Big Lots without the furniture, a little farther from LIDL, around the corner from an Indonesian/Indian restaurant, and about half a block away from a chocolate shop. There were a lot of other businesses and shops nearby, but those are the ones we tended to frequent.

We were also a short walk away from a working windmill, which we toured. We went all the way to the top and got to see the mill working and the windmill’s wings or sails outside.

The nearest playground was clearly for toddlers and Michael found it disappointing. There were a couple of better playgrounds for him, but they were a 20+ minute walk away. One was in a little neighborhood and the other was on the shore of the Westeindeplassen, a lake, at a little spot called Surfeiland. There was also a cute little greenway nearby and we could stand on a bridge there and watch ducks swim along the canal. There’s a watertoren (Water tower) on the Westeindeplassen that was really cool, but we never went inside. There’s an escape room inside it but you have to climb the 200ish stairs to play. The top wasn’t even open because of some birds that lay their eggs there. Peregrine falcons, that’s what it was.

Every time we went for a walk in Aalsmeer, we seemed to run into at least three cats. I made a zine about the cats of Aalsmeer.

More about Amsterdam itself soon!

📚💬 “Science fiction is the literature of social and technological change.” Nalo Hopkinson, “What is science fiction for?” in Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination

In response to @mbkriegh’s In Praise of the Choir:

This post reminds me of Austin Kleon’s writing on Brian Eno’s concept of “scenius”:

• Scenius
• Further notes on scenius
• Maps of scenius

I myself feel the same way about choral music, as well as a variety of other forms of collaborative art (theatre, movies & TV, video games). I’ve been a choral singer and I’ve been a soloist, and for the longest time I thought my worth as a singer was to be measured by how often directors wanted to give me solos. But over time, I’ve come to realize that people don’t want a choir or chorus full of bad singers, that being a choral singer is a special skill, and that I tend to get chills more often listening to a good choral piece than a solo.

💬📚 “Real life is people leaning on each other when things are hard. It’s loving each other so much there’s no question about facing things together. It’s fighting for each other and with each other and being damned grateful for every morning you wake up together.” The Widow of Rose House, Diana Biller

Finished reading: The Widow of Rose House by Diana Biller 📚

This is a lovely romance set in Gilded Age New York, where a scandalous society widow and a famous inventor fall in love as they try to exorcise a ghost from the Gothic mansion she just bought. Content warning: spousal abuse, neglectful parents, bad treatment in a mental health facility.

📚💬 “Love isn’t naïve, Alva. It’s hope, and it’s faith, and it can outlast buildings and wars and empires.” The Widow of Rose House, Diana Biller

Halfway through the week of no school or camp and we’re not doing too badly, thanks to grandma time, the pool, and a moratorium on screen time limits…

🔖📚💖 A couple of links about pleasure reading for your reading pleasure:

• What Romance Novels Taught Me About Taking Pleasure More Seriously by Stephanie Fallon (The Good Trade)
• Don’t Call Them Trash by Sophie Gilbert (The Atlantic)

There’s something really special about being a 90s comedy nerd married to another 90s comedy nerd.