Kimberly Hirsh

In case you wonder what kind of parent I am: yesterday, my kid was recounting a Halloween episode of Muppet Babies and said that Miss Piggy was in costume as “Frankenstein’s monster.” (We’ll get to calling it the Creature eventually.)

I have input days and output days. Today is an input day: learning about UX and user research.

I just moved my next follow up doctor’s appointment up two months to the week after next because I’m still so tired all the time and not convinced my increased thyroid supplements are helping enough. Celebrating my birthing day (kid’s birthday) by taking care of myself.

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I love to read about writing. I’m the kind of person who finds Strunk and White fun. I keep buying books about writing: Stephen King’s On Writing, Ursula K. LeGuin’s conversations, and many more. And I do write: mostly blog posts and email messages these days, but I have written just about every format there is. I have not shared or attempted to publish much of that writing, though.

What keeps me from doing it? What has me loving reading about craft but rarely implementing what I read? It’s not that I never write but rather that I enjoy reading about writing perhaps more than writing itself. (No, that’s not quite right. I actually enjoy writing, even genres/formats I think I don’t enjoy, like book reviews. I loved writing last week’s book review of Brent Spiner’s Fan Fiction, despite constantly telling myself I don’t like writing book reviews.)

I think one of the things that keeps me hoarding and absorbing resources but leveraging them less frequently than I acquire and engage with them is my love of learning. I was working on a blog post about qualitative research for a client today and my head started swimming with how much I love learning about different methods of qual research. And I love doing it, too! I love creating a research design. I love finding the meaning in the data. But I think I love learning about new techniques for it even more. I was talking with W. about how readily I forget that I actually love doing this thing I spent six years learning to do - I went into the PhD explicitly because I wanted to devote time to understanding research methods. My PhD is in qualitative methods as much as or more than it’s in my discipline. (Except I love my discipline, too, which I also sometimes forget!)

Back to the point, here: W. suggested that perhaps UX careers would be a good fit, a place where a person could do qualitative research. I told him yes, that or market research. And then I told him that I don’t want to just do it in service of whatever business would want to hire me for it as much as I want to learn about it and share what I learn with other people so THEY can do it.

And then I said, “But what I REALLY need to remember is that I already have a client paying me to do exactly that.”

So I’m actually getting paid to do the learning I love. In a very real sense, I am at present, living the dream. It would serve me well to remember that.

Amy Gentry’s second guest post for The Professor Is In, about transitioning from academic to novelist, is one of the most helpful post-ac pieces I’ve read.

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Portrait of the Mother as an Artist – Guernica guernicamag.com

Read: www.guernicamag.com

To think of the mother as artist does not necessitate a conflict, nor does it require a choice between passive domestic surrender or total domestic rejection, although for a long time the world demanded that it did. Such frames only reinforce hierarchies, limit her to merely a fragment when, of course, she is com posed of many pieces.

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Craft — a designation used to subjugate many art-making practices that have been the domain of women: needlepoint, pottery, quilt making. With their connections to the home, these mediums have been historically dismissed, supposedly lacking the rigor and intellectual complexity of high art.

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“I have drawn my children and painted them endlessly and I cannot distinguish them from my soul…"

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she sometimes wonders why an artist must inhabit turmoil or drama to be taken seriously.

Watching the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Offspring” as a parent adds a whole new perspective to the experience.

Have y’all read THE DARK TIDE by Alicia Jasinka? because I started it tonight and it is gorgeous. 📚🌊🧙‍♀️

Whoopi Goldberg has done a lot of great work in her career, but I think I’ll always feel that Guinan has been her greatest role. 🖖📺

Finished reading: The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski 📚