Kimberly Hirsh

It’s my birthday!

As I’m 42, I understand that according to Douglas Adams, I myself am the answer to life, the universe, and everything. (I am the one I’ve been waiting for all of my life.)

The person I wanted to be at 40 is the person I wanted to be at 41 is the person I want to be at 42:

1. I want to be a loving and mostly gentle mother.
2. I want to take care of my own body, including making clothes built to fit it.
3. I want to keep trying new things and growing as a self-employed person.
4. I want to be aware of my impact on the earth and do what I can to make it gentle.

Photo of my lovely husband W & myself in front of Ferris Bueller singing in the parade! Thanks to Retro Film Series!

I have a (relatively subdued thanks to new meds) migraine (3 hormone shifts a month cause these for me whee!). I also went and had 3 fillings all on the left side of my mouth. So my brain is not in its finest shape right now, which is why I sent 3 emails with factual errors.

Finished reading: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna 📚

What a sweet, cozy cup of tea of a book. This one made me so happy. And for the first time in a while, I feel like writing a full review. Stay tuned.

Okay it’s not noon and my library’s collective daily borrow limit for Hoopla has been reached which… I feel like we must have a really low collective daily borrow limit.

💬📚 “It was always irksome when an idea went nowhere, but Mika knew by now that there would always be new ideas.” Sangu Mandanna, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

It’s my birthday Friday! I’m keeping Kimbertide low key this year. If you want to play along, watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or The Muppet Movie, play an arcade game, or eat some pizza.

Finished reading: Hana Khan Carries On by Uzma Jalaluddin 📚

Another sweet romance set in the Toronto Muslim community from Uzma Jalaluddin. This one has Shop Around the Corner/She Loves Me/You’ve Got Mail vibes. It includes a community dealing with racial hatred and coming through in a joyous way. Highly recommend.

🔖🎭📚 Read It’s Getting Hard to Stage a School Play Without Political Drama by Michael Paulson (NYT, gift link) via Book Riot’s Literary Activism newsletter.

When I was in Europe reading censorship news from the US, I kept thinking, “I just want to fight censorship and make theatre.” Turns out these two things are related.

I’m signed up for Threads. I’ll actually use it when it implements ActivityPub and/or is available in-browser.

Finished reading: You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty by Akwaeke Emezi 📚

I read this start-to-finish in about 8 hours. It’s a romance that illuminates grief and what can come after. It made me cry. It made me hungry. Highly recommend.

My On This Day page surfaced this blog post today:

Constructing websites as constructing ourselves: Thinking out loud

I still think about this all the time. I still feel that as I build my site, I’m building myself.

I seem to have no attention span today. I’m going to blame the postdrome stage of migraine.

Apparently my idea for what counts as the prettiest hair is bound to the year 1993. This soft hair on Deanna Troi, with thin bangs, the front pulled up, tendrils in drint of the ears, and big loose curls in the back resonates for me as true beauty. (ST:TNG 7x11 Parallels, airdate 11/29/93) 🖖🏻

Finished reading: Ayesha at Last by Uzma Jalaluddin 📚

This is a beautiful homage to Pride & Prejudice, as well as to the Toronto Muslim community. A sweet love story with beautiful language. And so much tasty-sounding food and drink! Highly recommend.

📚 Me, reading Ayesha At Last: This is a Pride & Prejudice retelling, I know this, so when is Khalid going to go all Mr. Darcy?

Author Uzma Jalaluddin, on page 40: Here you go.

📝 Brilliant gem from Jaya Saxena in today’s #1000WordsOfSummer letter:

my writing got better the moment I allowed myself to be the kind of writer I am, even if I don’t work the same way as the writers I want to be.

Picard: I feel as if I’m in the Scottish Highlands.
Colonist: The cornerstone of every building was taken from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen…
Me, A Jerk: Those aren’t in the highlands.
🖖🏻

I am on Day 4 of a migraine. I’m about to try a new medication for it. Here’s hoping it makes a difference.

🔖 Read What Is A Third Place? (And Here’s Why You Should Have One) by Emily Torres (The Good Trade).

I’ve been thinking about third places, their role in fiction, what they look like online, & how they overlap with affinity spaces for a few days so it felt like serendipity when this hit my inbox.

Hey friends, what are some good values statements from organizations? (I’m deliberately not defining criteria for good, but please feel free to explain why you think the ones you mention are good.)

My desk chair broke a little bit and I’m having trouble determining whether I can fix it…

Our first foray into Amsterdam besides going to the airport was heading to the International Newcomers office at the World Trade Center (right by the Amsterdam Zuid train station) for our immigration documents. We didn’t really see much of the city that day BUT!

We did decide to first go to Van Stapele Koekmakerij and pick up some of their cookies, which are so good and so famous that they have a line waiting every day and when they run out of cookies, they close. (Think Magnolia Bakery circa 2009.) We ordered ours in advance. You go to their shop which is in between Singel and Spui, ring a doorbell, and a very kind person squeezes out past the crowd waiting in the shop and through the doorway and asks for your order number. Then they bring out your order, packaged in either a cute box or beautiful tin and slipped in a lovely bag. It’s best to eat the cookies right away, as they’re filled with a cream that is best eaten warm and gooey. (Big thanks to Jonathan Stephens, who gave us this recommendation when my friend Whitney asked him for suggestions of things to do with a kid in Amsterdam.)

Going to Van Stapele allows you to get a lovely glimpse of the Amsterdam you think of Amsterdam as being, if you have any expectations of Amsterdam at all. You climb up the stairs from the Rokin metro station and spread before you are rows of 5 story, narrow houses all smushed together along a canal’s edge, curving toward the horizon. It’s not the most touristy part of Amsterdam, but it’s touristy-adjacent. There are plenty of “coffee shops” (like if you had to consume the marijuana you get at a dispensary before you actually leave) and the smell of Amsterdam, i.e., a scent that will give you a contact high, greets you wafting out from at least a couple of doors on every block. (It was almost weird to not smell this anymore once we left Amsterdam.)

Then we did head to IN Amsterdam and that was… not the most interesting process.

Did we do all that on the same day? Now I’m not even sure. We were planning to. I think that’s what happened.

Our next time in the city was when my sister M.E. and I took M. to Nemo Science Museum, also recommended by Jonathan Stephens and every list of kids’ activities in Amsterdam ever. This was fun, with giant gorgeous rainbow twirlers hanging down from the ceiling and an incredible chain reaction demonstration that was like a giant Rube Goldberg machine. The person running this demonstration took a quick poll of the audience to determine how many English speakers were there. As there weren’t many of us, he conducted most of his demonstration in Dutch, which gave us a chance to practice the little bit of Dutch we managed to learn in the months before we traveled. M. loved this. The museum had other interesting exhibits, including a makerspace and an area dedicated to human sexuality.

There were a lot of transit strikes while we were in the area, and we could never be sure if the bus running from Aalsmeer to Amsterdam would be running at a particular time during the strikes, so on those days we tended to just stick to places that were walkable from the house.

Next time: a Valentine’s Day date in Amsterdam!

📚💬

It is precisely because common structures of evaluation and advancement in various academic jobs require homogenous thought and action… that academia is often less a site for open-minded creative study and more a space of repression that dissenting voices are so easily censored and silenced… it is dangerous for us to allow academic institutions to remain the primary site where our ideas are developed and engaged." bell hooks, remembered rapture: the artist at work

📚💬 “To me intellectual life is fundamentally different from academic careerism.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the artist at work