Kimberly Hirsh

My kid is watching Doc McStuffins and I’m over here swooning over the knight toy Sir Kirby because his voice sounds like @yakkopinky is doing an impression of @Cary_Elwes. Two faves. Well done, Mr. Paulsen!

I tried Voila AI artist & this is what it says I’d look like as a 3D cartoon princess.

Happy birthday to me! W & M got me a sewing machine that has a manual! I asked for one I knew was affordable and simple. I can upgrade later.

Three makes a pattern, so this is the year that blogging about who I want to be in this year of my life becomes a tradition. Shout out to my friend Little Willow, who inspired the idea by making her New Year’s resolutions on her birthday.

Part of the tradition is looking at who I wanted to be last year and seeing how close I got. The big one, being a Doctor of Philosophy, happened in April/May. The rest were, fittingly, not so much in focus.

But the microbusiness. The microbusiness! I’ve been taking strong steps in that direction, lining up my first consulting client, creating a little trickle of passive income with my Notion templates, and dreaming big about what the future holds for The Quiet Space.

Hard as it was with the pandemic and my grandmother’s death, 39 was still on the balance a good year. (This is the moment where I acknowledge that the year I was age 39 was actually the 40th year of my life, since we live a full year before our birthday. Yes, Daddy, I know we use zero-based indexing for ages.)

So what’s next?

I think I want to be a little less ambitious about 40, to set fewer goals.

I want to be a loving and mostly gentle mother.

I want to take care of my own body, including making clothes built to fit it.

I want to keep trying new things and growing as a self-employed person.

I want to be aware of my impact on the earth and do what I can to make it gentler. I recognize, however, that this is a systemic problem that requires more than individual action, which is why I joined the Alliance for Climate Education mailing list and will start donating to them monthly as soon as I have something resembling a steady income.

I think four is a good number, so I’ll stop there.

Who will you be this year?

Want to read: The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater: Essays on Crafting by Alanna Okun 📚

Finished reading: Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett 📚

I may receive commissions for purchases made through links on this post.

Kristen Arnett is Florida’s and the Internet’s Lesbian dad. Her puns are a delight and her “The existence of ___ implies ___” joke structure cracks me up every time she uses it. I have no idea when or why I followed her on Twitter but I’m glad I did. I love her Twitter presence so much that I thought I would probably love her books, too.

I didn’t have a lot of expectations going into MOSTLY DEAD THINGS but I feel like I’d seen the phrase “darkly funny” tossed around in reviews.

I was surprised when every part that I bet other people found funny made me sad.

MOSTLY DEAD THINGS is a great book and humans who read should try reading it.

It operated on a very visceral level for me for a few reasons.

1. It’s set in Central Florida. I lived on the east coast of Center Florida (mostly on the Space Coast) for the first 7 years of my life, years that loom large in how I think of myself and what feels like home. I lived in Tallahassee for another couple of years. Even though I’ve spent almost 80% of my life living in North Carolina, I still consider myself a Floridian. The feel of Florida - swampy and magical at the same time, hot and sticky but in a way that works with nostalgia, full of things that can kill you but are also kind of cool - resonates with my heart and is all over this book.

2. The characters in it are mostly in a very specific lower middle class Florida-version-of-Southern (probably white) culture. This is the kind of culture I was familiar with for most of my life, despite my family being genteel poor (and only kind of poor but like sometimes living on federal assistance so definitely not wealthy). The main character Jessa-Lyn has deep nostalgia for her youth spent burning Christmas trees by the swamp, hanging out by the lake, drinking water out of a hose at her best friend/only love Brynn’s trailer home. I think this is what my summers might have looked like, had I stayed in Florida. For special occasions you have homemade pie on pretty paper plates.

3. It is so infused with nostalgia and I am a sucker for that kind of thing. Arnett and I are very close in age so our referents for the things people wore and the way they did their hair as tweens and teens are basically the same.

4. The dynamic of a mother who is capable of lots of cool stuff but doesn’t feel like she’s had the opportunity to do it resonates with my family history across multiple generations.

5. My last real connection to Central Florida is dissolving last week as my mother and uncle close the sale of my late grandmother’s Melbourne house.

This is just a sampling. Basically this book squeezed my heart and pushed on bruises. It eventually patched it up but, you know, mostly in the final act.

Highly recommend.

🦩🐊

Tomorrow is my birthday (40th). If you want to celebrate, here are some options:

• have donuts
• read a book
• go swimming
• watch something from or about the 80s or 90s
• sing to yourself
• replace words in song lyrics with the word “cat” or your favorite person’s name

I just signed up for 1-Day Online Nonfiction Seminar: The Scholar’s Guide to Writing & Publishing Creative Nonfiction, which I would not have done without the encouragement of Dr. Katie Rose Guest Pryal’s book (I will get a commission if you purchase using that link), Dr. Lisa Munro’s request for CNF class recs, and Dr. Elizabeth Hamilton’s reccing the course.

I didn’t see Katy Peplin’s blog post about grumping it out until just now but now is when I needed it, so that worked out well.