Kimberly Hirsh

“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them…” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray 📚💬

Beginning my third read of Katie Rose Guest Pryal’s THE FREELANCE ACADEMIC. 📚

Sleep Deprivation, Sugar Crash, or Both? The Kimberly Hirsh Story

Gonna create a literary subgenre/internet aesthetic and call it “snark academia.”

I just published another free/pay-what-you-can Notion template. This time it’s a permissions tracker to help you keep track of copyrighted material you need to reuse and its permissions status.

Welcome to September, or as I like to call it, October Part 1. The world is full of terrors. Today I’m going to deal with my to-do list and then think about how I can contribute to making the world better.

I am making a few notes here now that I hope to turn into a longer post later. As I scrolled Twitter and read there what some colleagues have been working on, I started to feel my current post-PhD existential crisis take a new and unexpected shape: the shape of wishing I knew a way to stay in academia.

Here are the things that have kept me from pursuing an academic career after graduation:

• watching tenure-track colleagues be miserable
• lack of mobility (it would be very challenging to find a position, even tenure-track, that would be worth uprooting my family for, and I refuse to live apart from my family)
• being a mother (I also refuse to prioritize career over family)
• being chronically ill/variably disabled (I also refuse to prioritize career over health)

Here are the things that today appeal to me about academia:

• pursuing a research agenda that I design

That’s actually about it, and as a freelance academic/independent researcher, I can probably work out a way to do that but today it feels like it’s in conflict with everything else I’ve got going on.

Which is why I’m going to dive into the #motherscholar literature.

More on that later.

Did not realize I was on the Motherscholar Project website so that’s cool!

If you have access to it, watch The Simpsons, Season 1, episode 3, “Homer’s Odyssey.” This bit happens at around 12:50: Depressed due to losing his job, Homer decides to throw himself off a bridge. He ties a rope around a huge boulder, then ties the other end of the rope to his waist. When he goes to open the gate in the fence around the yard, struggling to carry the boulder, he finds the hinges squeak. He then interrupts his suicide attempt to get a can of oil and oil the gate’s hinges. This cracks me up because in the middle of a devastating act that he is carrying out in a ridiculous way, he stops to take care of this mundane problem.

Is he doing it because he doesn’t want to wake his family with the squeaking? Could be. The rationale is irrelevant. It’s the juxtaposition of the extreme and absurd with the quotidian that makes this moment work for me.

Just recorded a conference session. I’m really happy about the accessibility remote conferences provide but everything feels so formal. It’s like I can’t rely on charisma and humor to carry 90% of the presentation.