Kimberly Hirsh

📚🍳 Started reading the introduction to Jules Sherred’s Crip Up the Kitchen: Tools, Tips and Recipes for the Disabled Cook and I might cry.

“The kitchen is the worst room in the house if you are disabled. I’m about to change that and make life easier for everyone.”

🔖📚 Read Falling in Love With the Avengers, America’s Most Toxic Work Force by Leigh Bardugo (New York Times, gift link)

I love Leigh Bardugo so much.

🔖📚 Read Shadow and Bone author Leigh Bardugo: ‘People sneer at the things women and girls love’ by Sian Cain (The Guardian).

She really is my hero.

Twenty-five years ago tonight, W. and I went on our first date. (Yes, we were young.) We went to see a cross-cast production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Afterward, we went to Ben and Jerry’s.

I was going to catalog a bunch of memories of those early days together here, but I think I want to keep them in my heart. And, of course, as heady as that first rush of falling in love is, it’s the time after it that builds to an anniversary this big.

It feels like and is a long time, 25 years. It’s wild because it doesn’t seem to me that we’ve been together that long because how could I still find someone so incredibly delightful after all that time? How is it that every pun he makes still cracks me up? That the way he moves through the world, like literally physically carries himself, can still bring a flush to my cheeks? What miracle is this, to get to spend this much time with someone so great?

It’s a choice every day to wake up and keep loving each other. To show up, to have patience when we’re not on the same page. To know that even when we’re not on the same page, we’re on the same team. And it’s a blessing, a gift from whomever gives us cosmic gifts, to have the chance to make that daily choice.

We’re celebrating a quarter century by taking M. to the animal shelter to pick out two kittens to add to our family.

Currently reading: Final Girl: And Other Essays on Grief, Trauma, and Mental Illness by Kelly Baker 📚

Austin Kleon says to climb your creative family tree. Kelly is like an intellectual big sister, so I’m starting with her. (Katie Rose Guest Pryal is another.) 📝

💬📚 “I hunker down with books when I need time to process what’s happening in my own life.
Books give me the space to breathe.”

• Kelly J. Baker, Final Girl: And Other Essays on Grief, Trauma, and Mental Illness

Meet Midnight and Wednesday.

W: I just don’t have a framework for doing this kind of writing…
Me: You need to read a lot of it and then just start writing.
W: holds up invisible mirror

📚💬 “Disaster and hero, monster and martyr, beauty and beast . . . Choose your own dichotomy. Because it doesn’t matter. We were always built to be both.” Lana Harper, For Better or Cursed

Finished reading: From Bad to Cursed by Lana Harper 📚

Loved it even more than Payback’s A Witch. Full review coming later this week.

If generative AI traffic is declining, does that mean AI can just become another tool we use and we can talk about it normally without talking about it exclusively?

I just donated to and joined Students Protecting Education, a national organization that a group of high schoolers started in response to book banning in their community. It’s awesome that young people want to step up to save the world. It’s critical that we don’t expect them to do it alone.

The belief at the beginning of a writing project that we don’t know how to write it comes for all of us who write, no matter how many writing projects we’ve finished or awards we’ve won, and IT HAS COME FOR ME RIGHT NOW.

Everybody else: You seen Barbieheimer yet?
Me: Nah, I’m going to the theater to see Terminator & Robocop. (Time travel is rad. So are retro cinema experiences.)

Welcome to the analog part of qualitative data analysis. Whenever I get to the coding-the-codes stage, I need to channel Austin Kleon and use my hands. I sometimes handwrite the codes on index cards, but this time I printed them up and am cutting them into strips.

🔖🖖🏻 Read ‘Star Trek: Picard’ Had to Update the Look of Beloved Characters — and Battle the Pitiless Gaze of HD.

I love that they were able to let Worf’s skin be the same color as Michael Dorn’s.

In the US? You might think the Kids Online Safety Act is good but before you decide, please read this piece at Ars Technica, this piece from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and this week’s newsletter from Charlie Jane Anders. Then if you think it’s bad, contact your congresspeople.

I find myself resentful of my body’s need for sleep.

My aspiration as a parent is to one day have a plan for the day and a half of free time my kid has the first week of school.

My infant starts first grade tomorrow, nbd.

If you’re in New Zealand and you have improv experience, you should probably go do this workshop with Bianca Casusöl. She’s the best.

🔖 Read To Be a Consumer of Culture Means Living in a Hostage Situation by Aaron Bady (Slate)

A great exploration of the role of fan labor in culture work.

📚 Book Riot’s Literary Activism newsletter is always valuable. This week, Kelly Jensen takes a deep dive into the use of ChatGPT to decide whether books should be removed from libraries.

📚🔖 Read The Parentified Protagonist: From Shifting Roles to Shapeshifter, a guest post by Stephanie Willing (Teen Librarian Toolbox).

Looking at my On This Day page, I found this blog post about letting go of self-punishing goals. I really needed it, as I’ve spent much of this vacation staring into the ocean and making plans for how I’ll do everything better once I get home.