Kimberly Hirsh

🔖🎵 Read Patiently Holding the Sound: Gretchen Parlato on motherhood as a musical inspiration.

What a great interview.

Je suis à Paris. J’adore Paris. Yesterday I sat in the reading room of Shakespeare and Company, wrote in my notebook, and pretended to be A Writer. (I am a writer. But I am A Reader.)

Reading the souvenir book they sell at Shakespeare and Company, Shakespeare and Company: A Brief History of a Parisian Bookstore.

For George, it was more important to have a community of readers and writers than just to sell books.

😍

I’ve been obsessed with this chandelier for a long time and today I finally got to see it in person.

My blog host, Micro.blog, has declared it the Summer of Blogging and is offering 4 months of their standard hosting plan at a price of $1/month. I highly recommend them. If you want a simple way to have your own website, this is worth a try.

🔖🌐 Read Bring Back Personal Blogging by Monique Judge (The Verge).

There’s an AP news piece confirming what I suspected when I first saw Manton’s post about Heather Armstrong’s death.

Heather Armstrong, also known as dooce, was a prolific personal blogger, called “queen of the mommy bloggers,” a writer of books, a person who lived with depression and alcoholism. She was an early and high-profile example of someone who lost her job because of her blog. Her episode of The Hilarious World of Depression is one of my favorites. I didn’t read her blog consistently at all but I definitely read it both in some of its earliest days and in the past couple of years. She has been an influence on me without me even realizing it.

Armstrong leaves behind two children.

A little over sixteen years ago, my friend Sherrie died by suicide. It sent me into a big anxious spiral. Sherrie left behind a four-year-old son.

When my brother was a baby or toddler and I was fourteen or fifteen (and my sister was eight or nine), my mom had untreated hypothyroidism, pernicious anemia, and depression. She had suicidal ideations. She later told me that she didn’t act on them because my brother needed her. She believed my sister and I would have been fine.

We would not have been fine.

Even though I know that she was listening to the lies depression tells, I felt angry hearing that we were not enough to stay alive for.

Depression makes me so angry. Suicide makes me so angry.

I, too, live with depression. It’s usually in remission.

Every day, I choose to live. Most of all for my son, but also for myself, for the rest of the family. I think about how angry I am when I hear someone has died by suicide. I think about how I don’t want the people I love to feel that anger. I think about how I don’t want them to be angry at me.

I don’t have a strong conclusion for this post. Depression is bullshit and I wish nobody ever had to deal with it.

I’m grieving dooce by going through her archives and reading this post while I am in Paris is extra beautiful. I was cranky and tired and in pain the day we got here, and even so as soon as I stepped out of the train station into the city, it took my breath away. I’ve always suspected Paris would be my heart’s true home (I was born on Bastille Day) and it’s lovely to have it confirmed.

Starting Season 7 in my rewatch of Star Trek: The Next Generation, finding myself very glad there’s so much other Trek media including TNG tie-ins so I basically never have to say goodbye to my Enterprise D friends. 🖖🏻📺

Want to read: The Witch of Woodland by Laurel Snyder 📚

Over the past week, I’ve worked through Esmé Weijun Wang’s workshop, Building a Writing Habit While Living with Limitations. In the workshop, we assess our limitations, set writing goals, inventory our resources, explore how we can make the most of our 24 hours. Highly recommend, $117. 📝

🔖📝 Read My Commitment to Wellness as a Lifelong Writer by Yolande House — Breathing Space Creative

I’ve learned that honouring my needs each and every day is a part of what loving myself looks like. When I finally learned how to love myself, I learned it’s not a goal with an end. Rather, it’s a process of committing and being true to myself each and every day, even when (and especially when) it’s hard.

🔖📚 Read BookTok encourages reading as an aesthetic and no one is safe from its gaze by Elena Cavender (Mashable).

Insightful piece about how limiting our reading to a particular aesthetic connects with our attention being commodified.

Finished reading: Mr. & Mrs. Witch by Gwenda Bond 📚

Loved it. Scorchingly hot, fun secret agent hijinks. Highly recommend.

I am reading Gwenda Bond’s Mr. & Mrs. Witch right now and one of the 🔥 scenes actually made me cry because it was so beautiful and made me so happy. 📚

Want to read: How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information by Jillian M. Hess 📚

🔖📓 Read Automated transcription and some risks of machine interpretation.

Dr. Daniel Turner does a great job illuminating how large language models work and how we need to think about indigeneity and colonialism when choosing our transcription method.

Want to read: It’s Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World by Mikaela Loach 📚

Want to read: Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc 📚

Me: I put my hair up and brushed my teeth! I’m ready to face the day! flops onto bed

I’m trying to see myself as others see me. Would you please tell me:

1. When have you seen me happiest?
2. What do you come to me for?
3. Where do I stand out against my peers?

Qs from Christina Wallace’s The Portfolio Life 📚

🔖📚 Read Roman Polanski, David Bowie, and a New Solution to the Problem of Art Made by Monstrous Men by Laura Miller (Slate).

The magnitude of an artist’s personal transgressions sometimes matters less than the nature of the attachment it disrupts.

🔖📝📚📺🍿 Read What the Universal Translator Tells Us About Exploring Other Cultures by Charlie Jane Anders (Happy Dancing newsletter).

Anders talks about the way a universal translator gives us shortcuts to understanding other cultures that don’t really show how hard it is to actually understand another culture.

She offers a lot of examples of this and asks,

How is it that Han Solo understands Chewbacca, but doesn’t speak Wookiee himself? And vice versa?

It’s been a long time since I was getting my Master of Arts in teaching and had to take a course on how Language Acquisition happens (almost 20 years), but I recall that we tend to understand much more of a language than we can speak, and I’ve certainly found that to be true recently.

For W’s Fulbright, we spent two months in the Netherlands, and had learned some very basic Dutch using Duolingo before heading over there. I often didn’t understand what people were saying, but I always understood more of what they were saying than I could ever speak myself.

Our first week there, some young people overheard my son saying his favorite Dutch word, “kat,” on the bus. They asked us about our being Americans and then one of them wanted to know if we were full of “kattenkwaad.” We didn’t know this word, and the person who asked didn’t know English well enough to explain it, but his friend tried.

I asked if it meant behaving like a cat, and he indicated not exactly. He tried to explain by example: pushing the stop button on the bus, then not getting off when the bus stopped.

“Oh, like, pranks!” I said.

“Yes, like pranks.”

“Mischievous,” my sister suggested. He wasn’t sure about that one.

Weeks later, I found this book in the shop a short walk from our house:

Google translates this title as “First Aid for Mischief: The Survival Guide for Cat Parents.”

I don’t think it captures the sense entirely, based on our bus conversation, but it’s hard to be sure.

Went by the Oscar Wilde house yesterday and the plaque saying he lived there said:

OSCAR WILDE
POET, DRAMATIST, WIT

and I liked it so well I’m changing all my bios to read “Mother, learner, wit.”

I first encountered music from The Phantom of the Opera when I was 9 years old. I had taken a lip syncing class, because the Leon County, FL gifted program in 1990-91 was awesome, and at the performance where the most effective lip syncers gave a performance, a boy lip synced “Music of the Night,” complete with tux, cape, mask, and hat. (I was not selected for this performance, because the teacher said my performance of “Material Girl” showed that I cared more about the look than about lip syncing well, and she wasn’t wrong.)

I was immediately in love - with the song, with the costume, in my imagination with the lip syncing boy (who had been in a different class from me and who I hadn’t met nor would ever meet).

My mom promptly added the original cast recording to her next Columbia House order.

And the whole show was much bigger than that one song, endearing itself to me more than “Music of the Night” ever could have to me alone.

I stayed obsessed with the Phantom of the Opera. I read Gaston Leroux’s original novel. I read Susan Kay’s Phantom (highly recommend). I read The Phantom of Manhattan (fun but I recommend it not as highly). I went to see it when it came to Raleigh on tour. (1993, I think.) I played the computer game, Return of the Phantom.

When I met W in 1998, our mutual love of Phantom of the Opera was one of the things we first bonded over. That October, I hosted a costumed sing-along of it at my house. He was the Phantom and I was Christine. We did the same thing the following year.

We saw the show together when it came on tour. We saw it when they did a movie theater cast of the show in 2011.

Our son, M, has listened to the first act with me. We looked at The Complete Phantom of the Opera book together as we listened. He was very interested.

Next month, I hope to visit the Palais Garnier and see the places and things that I have only seen in pictures and my imagination so far: the grand staircase, the chandelier, box five.

The Phantom of the Opera has its last Broadway performance today. It’s been hugely important to me, even though I’ve never seen it there. I’m so glad it ran for so long. I know we haven’t seen the last of it in the US.