📚 I’ve got about 100 pages left in #LEGENDBORN & won’t write a full review til I’ve finished but I think the headline will be BLACK GIRL MAGIC + DARK ACADEMIA + ARTHURIANA ON MY CAMPUS! (Affiliate link goes to Bookshop.org.)
Reply to Another day in Hellsville:
It is a lot. Having caregiving responsibilities adds another level of difficulty to dealing with the pandemic. I’m sorry you’re having an exceptionally challenging time, and I’m glad you’re able to find a creative outlet through writing and to make time for exercise. Please take care and know you’re not alone.
Current professional goals: 1. Be a qualitative researcher. (I am now, but I think I would like to continue after I graduate.) 2. Talk with people about books. (Another thing I do now and want to continue doing.) 📓
How did it take me until just now to consciously verbalize the fact that THE SECRET GARDEN is a Gothic novel? In my heart I always knew, and it was a huge part of its appeal, but it only occurred to me when Alex Acks (@katsudonburi) was tweeting about the archetypes in MEXICAN GOTHIC. 📚
The internet has been full of productivity-in-a-pandemic advice for months and I’m over it. I tell myself: Do what you can, when you can, and let the rest go as much as possible.
I have become super enamored of the #darkacademia aesthetic, but being in actual academia, this is what I thought it meant at first. (Thanks @myfairesttreasure on Instagram for the visual inspiration!)
Teen, new adult, and undergrad librarians, let me introduce you to your new best friend: the Aesthetics Wiki. This thing is a goldmine for programming ideas that will feel relevant to many of the people you serve.
📚 17/31 THE ONE WHERE I RUIN YOUR CHILDHOOD by Daniel Crocker. Excerpt from “C is for Cookie”: “You don’t have to talk when you’ve got/a fig newton in your mouth. There’s no/room to think with a mind full of sugar” #TheSealeyChallenge
Hi. I don’t feel like it today, and it’s okay if you don’t feel like it either. Whatever it is.
I'm done with exfoliants and goals. #TeamLowBar
Recently, I squeezed some of my Shea Moisture African Black Soap Soothing Body Wash on a washcloth while I was in the shower, and then rubbed it across my upper arm, as one does when washing one’s arm. It felt like it was scratching me. It’s got oats in it, which act as a gentle exfoliant. It felt like scratching, though. I think my nerves are just done, you know? I think it’s probably a fibromyalgia thing, and now my body is just immensely sensitive to the tiniest stuff. My kid pokes me with his elbow in a way that I wouldn’t even notice in the past, and now his elbow is just the sharpest thing and OW. So my skin was like “No, oats are not gentle, actually, please stop using this.”
So I thought about it. I said to my skin, “Okay skin. You know what skin? We are done with exfoliants.” What are exfoliants for, anyway? I’ve never had a good experience with them, and I’ve been using them since I was in middle or high school. All they do is feel like scratching to a greater or lesser degree. And why would I do that to myself?
For the same reason we do all kinds of things: self-improvement. But you know what?
I’m already pretty great.
I’m letting go, for the length of this pandemic if not longer, of the idea that I need to be improved upon in any way: that I need to acquire some skill I don’t have that will suddenly make me employable, that I need to scratch my skin to make it healthy, that I need to eat cleaner than my doctor suggests or my medical conditions require.
Anyone who has worked with me will tell you that my talk about not being a perfectionist and working up only to my own standards, not perfectionism, is some kind of nonsense and that my standards are too high to be reasonable during a global crisis.
“I’m going to set the bar low,” I said to myself. “All I’m going to do is completely fix my kid’s eating and sleep patterns so they don’t make me crazier than I naturally am, enforce a school-like schedule for him, meditate, do yoga, read a lot about possible next steps in my career, and start embodying my middle-aged-version-of-dark-academia aesthetic more fully. It’s basically doing nothing.”
AHAHAHA.
Kimberly: that is not nothing.
Yesterday, I told W. that I didn’t really do anything with my time during M., just let him watch TV and play games and just kind of play. He said, “You built him a Thor hammer.” (There may have been an intensifying expetive between “a” and “Thor,” and he might have said “Mjolnir” instead of “Thor hammer.” I don’t remember.) And I said, “Oh yeah, I did, didn’t I?”
Apparently turning a box, tape, construction paper, and aluminum foil into a cosplay prop is doing a thing.
I have some cognitive distortions, is what I’m getting at here.
So. I took that metaphorical bar and I put it ON THE FLOOR.
This happens once in a while: I decide to just not be so harsh on myself anymore. Let’s do it together.
In that light, I’m getting rid of all goals that aren’t basic living needs or dissertating and graduating. I said I was doing that already, but I hadn’t really done it. But now, maybe I am? I’m declaring that I am. Hold me to it, will you?
Now I’m going to go lie in a hammock.