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📚 Just finished reading The Power by Naomi Alderman. It’s so good and I want to write about it in light of some articles I read recently about the end of #girlboss culture. I hope I’ll get to it tomorrow.

Looking back at the first half of 2020

We’re coming up on Q3 of 2020 and I don’t know how the year is going for you (except to the extent that I totally do), but 2020 has gone differently than I thought it would back in December 2020. Most years, I buy Leonie Dawson’s My Shining Year Life Goals Workbook, and indeed I did at the end of 2019. If I’m remembering correctly, it was my gift to myself for finishing writing my dissertation proposal.

I never get all the way through the workbook, and that’s fine. This year, I set myself a goal of finishing it by March 21 in time for the astrological New Year but, guess what, it didn’t work out. I still got pretty far though, and today I’ve been looking at it and noticing where I’ve been sticking to these even though, due to the pandemic and the vibe it’s given me, I haven’t looked back at the workbook since I last worked on it in early March.

I wrote in the workbook that this year, I want to feel creative and connected. I’m moving in those directions, but only recently recommitted myself to both of those desired feelings, even though I didn’t remember that I’d put it in the workbook. I said, 2020 will be the year that I defend my dissertation proposal and it’s possible I wrote that down after I’d scheduled the defense for early February. (By the way, I finished writing the proposal at the end of November but didn’t get to defend it until February. THANKS FOR NOTHING, HOLIDAYS. j/k, holidays can be great.)

I said I wanted to learn more about web development and build a foundation for my own business. These are both things I’ve been taking steps toward and will keep working on.

I brilliantly didn’t have any conferences or workshops in mind to go to, so that’s worked out fine. (I did get to travel to Charleston in February, which was lovely.)

I said I wanted to invest in Leonie’s Money, Manifesting + Multiple Streams of Income ecourse and that was my reward to myself for defending my proposal successfully. I haven’t completed it yet, but just working on the first parts has helped me save a lot of money and be a more responsible financial custodian.

I also said I’d like to read books that Dr. Katie Linder and Dr. Sara Langworthy recommend on their podcast Make Your Way, and I’m doing that. Again - without looking back over the workbook.

I wanted to reuse or buy used instead of new more, and I’ve done that. (Ask me about the $17 Nook battery I got on eBay rather than replacing my Nook with a $170 Kobo eReader.)

Hilariously, I said I wanted to do Zoom calls with friends. And guess what? I HAVE.

And I said I wanted to do my dissertation research, on which I’m making good progress.

Is there a bunch of stuff I haven’t gotten to yet? Of course. Am I going to get to everything I wrote down? Probably not, and that’s okay.

I’m still really impressed with what I’ve done so far this year. What about you? What things that you wanted to do this year have you already done?

Hi friend.

I’m taking a break from most social media right now. It can be valuable for a lot of reasons, but I need a little time away. Usually I’m back within 24 hrs of making these declarations, but we’ll see. I’ll still be posting here at my website.

What’s up with you? I’m making good progress on my dissertation. I have finished my first round of coding for information horizon maps and am going to move on to collapsing some codes together. For example, “YouTube,” “youtube,” and “YouTube tutorials” can probably just all fall under “YouTube.”

I’m having widespread pain A LOT this week. I don’t know if it’s what I’m eating, or what. I’m also having some unpleasant side effects from upping my magnesium supplement, I think, but I’m going to give it another week or two to see if my body adjusts. I assume lots of people with chronic illnesses have been having flares during quarantine, because of the stress.

We got my kid a little pool - it’s technically a dog bath pool, but it works for kids, too. It’s the best thing. He will play in there for a really long time, and it’s so cute to watch. Yesterday, he was playing in there and a bunny came over to the garden he and my mother-in-law have set up, and it must have sat there munching within 6 - 10 feet of us for an hour or more. So cute!

I’ve been doing a lot of exploration related to what comes next after school, and have circled back around to thinking some sort of librarian role is best, though probably not a traditional sort of public or school librarian. Maybe working for a library vendor, or something remote. I took a bunch of assessments, and my values, priorities, and skills all align with librarianship which, well, makes a lot of sense, given that I will have spent 8 years in library school by the time I graduate.

Last week, or maybe earlier this week, I was feeling tough and awesome. Today I’m feeling noodly and a little sad. I know I’ll come back around, though. It’s always important to remember the coming back around.

Anyway, I’m off to work.

Love to you all, friends!

Oh oh oh, so THIS is what it feels like to care about something besides keeping your child and yourself alive. 💓💗💖 (I’m referring here to my excitement over conversations with NoveList & Ludi Price about the intersection of fan studies and Library & Information Science.)

Move Slowly and Mend Things 📚

I’m re-reading Jeff Goins’s book, You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) and I came upon a bit that I highlighted and made a note on. Goins, writing about legacy, quotes Steve Jobs:

we all long to “put a dent in the universe”

And in my annotation I respond:

I would rather have a legacy of having added something to the world rather than damaging it. Is Jobs’s language here reflective of the tech industry as a whole? Disrupt. Move fast and break things? How is that working out for us? What if instead we moved gently and restored things? Pretty sure I’m stealing this idea from Jenny Odell.

Jenny Odell writes in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy about how our current American society values growth over maintenance. She writes about the value of restoration and care. Her writing makes me want to mend and tend and fix.

I’m going to keep thinking about this. I think if I keep reading and thinking, I can connect it to visible mending, Kintsugi, the idea that women respond to stress with a “tend and befriend” approach, and the New Domesticity. Stay tuned.

When I express frustration about squeezing work in around childcare, I am NOT complaining about beautiful moments like this.

Hands can blog today, but brain won't, so have some stuff from other people that's great. 📚 🖖

  1. Kelly J. Baker’s book Grace Period, which I devoured over the course of 2 days. I want to say so much about it, but my brain just won’t get it all together right now. For now, I’ll point you to the post that is the source of the chapter about which my only note/highlight was highlighting the title with the note, “This whole chapter”: “Writing Advice.”

  2. Max Temkin’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation in 40 Hours.” The best of the show selected for you. As Temkin suggests, if you like these 40 hours, go ahead and watch the rest. I watched the show as it aired, so after about 8 of Temkin’s recommendations I felt confident that I still love the show now as much as I did then and went back to the beginning and am slowly making my way through. Great crafting TV, as well as incredibly soothing and full of delightful characters and truly, if you ever need to understand me, imagine if Data had the big feelings of a toddler and the empathic abilities of Deanna Troi.

  3. Dr. Olivia Rissland’s thread about learning from reading a paper a day. I’m going to start this today (though I’ll be mixing in book, thesis, and dissertation chapters) with my key areas of interest: where information science and learning sciences intersect and where LIS and fan studies intersect. (And then I’ll keep researching and writing at the intersections of those, I hope.)

  4. Alexandra Rowland’s thread about growing and caring for super long hair, written right before Alex got a haircut that is short and very cute. (Alexandra Rowland is probably my favorite Internet person discovery of the past couple of years; I maybe ought to write Aja Romano a thank you note for this.)

Okay, that’s all for today, I can now use the restroom and get back to data analysis. (SO INTERESTING! Like, no sarcasm, it’s really cool finding out where cosplayers go to find and share information!)