🔖 Read What Is a Strike? Reflections from the Virtual Front Lines of the UC Academic Worker Strike by Mary Jirmanas Saba (LA Progressive).

In November, when I realized there was no way I was going to be able to get 50,000 words of writing done, I decided to try writing 750 words a day using the website 750words.com. I enjoyed doing morning pages this way. The traditional writing-in-a-notebook way tends to give me hand or wrist pain. But I was using the new site, and after a streak hiccup, I realized that it wasn’t quite the write tool for me. I actually do better without streak tracking, because if I mess up (and I didn’t, their system didn’t save my 750 words even though I’d written them), my perfectionism has me go NEVER MIND!

So I decided to use a combo of my Google Calendar to send me an email reminder like 750 words does and Scrivener to set up a journal where each entry had a 750 word target. That went well, for a while, until I hit a day when I just didn’t feel like it. And I gave myself permission not to. And that was fine, too.

I got back into it but overtime it just felt like… not quite what I was looking for. I would write things in there, and then I would think I had said those things to someone, but I hadn’t. And I realized that private journaling is great and valuable, but if I’m looking to be motivated to keep up a regular practice, I want an audience. (Can you tell I’m an obliger?)

I’m not a journaler. I’m not a diarist. I am an escribitionist. I have been for over 20 years. So if I want to keep up a writing process, blogging is the best way to do it.

I also really appreciate blogging as a mode of thinking, as a way of finding out what I think. When I write for no audience, words come out, but they don’t have sticking power in my mind. I do best when my ideas are things I can talk out with another person, even if that other person is a silent reader. I love having my blog as a tool I can refer to when I need help, a place where advice from my past self bubbles up for me.

So hi. I’m trying out daily blogging, again. I’m not setting a word target. I’m not going to stress if I miss a day. But this is my plan, to get something a little more deliberate than a quick note written every day.

🔖 Read

A year of new avenues robinsloan.com

I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet.

Yes! This! (hat-tip to Austin Kleon)

🍿 Watched Santa Games (Hulu).

Super cute. A sweet story about family & the power of second chances mixed with a funny take on social media, livestreaming, and reality competitions. A mostly Black cast which is rare in TV holiday movies.

I want my hair to look like Emily Axford’s hair.

🔖 Read Attention, trust and GPT3

“If your work isn’t more useful or insightful or urgent than GPT can create in 12 seconds, don’t interrupt people with it.

Technology begins by making old work easier, but then it requires that new work be better.”

Currently reading: Rule of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo 📚

Kind of resent that I have to do anything besides read this book, even though I love a lot of the other stuff I do.

Lately I often find myself feeling alert but unable to focus. This is a new vibe for me. If you’re a person who experiences this feeling regularly and has found a way to manage it, I’d love your advice. (I’m going to start by having a cup of coffee.)

🔖💀 Read If You Want to Give Something Back to Nature, Give Your Body by Caitlin Doughty (New York Times Gift Link).

I hope we get human composting in NC eventually. For now, we can donate ourselves to Western Carolina’s body farm.

📚💬

“I had been so well socialized by graduate school that I was torn between which writing path to pursue, agonizing over whether I could write from various standpoints in various genres.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

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“I am most interested in confessional writing when it allows us to move into the personal as a way to go beyond it. In all my work I invoke the personal as a prelude.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

Y’all ever think about how the worst moments in your life personally align with some of the most personally important cultural moments? 1989-1992 was a rough run personal but wow the movies of that time look large.

This week’s Craft Talk from Jami Attenberg is another great one:

“Don’t ever talk yourself out of writing something because you don’t know how it fits in the world yet.”

“Perhaps having children makes one increasingly distrust the symbolic world. Because suddenly nothing is as important as the very real particular.” Sara Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write

📚🎭

Finished reading: 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl 📚

Read this because it’s on Austin Kleon’s list of books about motherhood & art. But it held extra delight for me because it’s also about the theater.

🔖📺 Read Wednesday Addams Is the Ultimate Outcast by Miyako Pleines (Catapult).

🖤

🔖📺📝 Read TV Recaps Taught Me How to Write Criticism by Joelle Kidd.

I love Kidd’s discussion of the role of pleasure in criticism.

📝🎭🎨🧶🧵🎵💃🏿 This is a reminder that I write Genetrix, a very occasional newsletter curating stories of creative mothers. If those are the kind of stories you’d like to know about, please sign up!

🔖 Read Creativity as Spiritual Practice by Rabbi Adina Allen (My Jewish Learning).

“Each of us is endowed with creative capacity simply by being human.”

My kid’s best friend’s mom got a new job and isn’t starting it until January, but has already left her old job. She has all of December to just be, with her kid in school for the first two weeks.

I told her that sounded amazing.

She said, “I feel like… I feel like myself. I was going to say I feel like a whole new person, but really I feel like myself.”

I said, “I want to feel like myself. I’ve gotta figure out how to do that.”

2022 feels like a year that was stolen from my whole family of origin, thanks to my mom’s leukemia and paraplegia. My mom has obviously had an incredibly hard year. My dad is learning what it is to be a primary caregiver at almost 70 years old and it’s a very different life than he’s ever known before. My brother has gone from being cared for to needing to give care to. My sister and I have both experienced frequent chronic illness flares.

In the spring, I resented the flowers for blooming. Didn’t they know my mom had leukemia? I didn’t do any of my normal springtime stuff.

In the summer, I made a whole plan to achieve summer vibes, but I only really did it halfheartedly.

In the fall, my mom was in the ER about once a week, with an extended hospital stay due to the cognitive effects of a medication reaction. Halloween was fun but I didn’t appreciate the gorgeous weather nearly enough.

And now Winter Is Coming 🐺, and I am realizing for the first time that I have always been A Christmas Person, but when we were decorating our tree I suddenly got very grouchy. Because of how different this year is and will be.

This is not just me sharing the bad — it’s me elucidating the things that have made me feel Not Me.

In a very Me move, to figure out what feels like me I went to my blog archives to see how I was coping in year 2 of the pandemic, before my mom got leukemia.

How to Feel Like Myself

Books & Reading

• Share quotes from what I’m reading.
• Read lots of books in a variety of formats & genres, but come back home to fantasy frequently.
• Talk to other people about what we’re reading & what else we might want to read.
• Read & write fanfic, especially for sitcoms and Star Trek: The Next Generation.
• Read a lot of interesting articles.
• Re-read Austin Kleon’s books.

Health & Wellness

• Blog about my experiences with chronic illness.

Work

• Blog about my research.

Crafting

• Gather references for a cosplay but don’t make it yet.

TV & Movies

• Watch holiday rom-coms.
• Watch Star Trek.
• Introduce my kid to older kids TV.
• Blog about what I’m watching.

The Internet

• Think about cool possibilities for the web, mostly late at night.
• Take occasional breaks from social stuff.

Uh oh, I’m doing me things and I still don’t feel like myself

I’m reading, especially fantasy. I’m watching holiday rom-coms and Star Trek. I introduced my kid to Wishbone 🐶. Why don’t I feel like myself?

The Missing Piece

I’m not reflecting, blogging, and talking to people. Metacognition is key to Kimberlying and I have let it get away from me. Time to get back to it.

🔖 Read How’d That Thing Go? by Kate McKean.

“I don’t want a schedule, I want a sandbox. I want a list of things that need to be done and a container of time to do them, and then I get to pick.”

Yes! Life as sandbox game! I needed this.

My personal Pokémon avatar was behind today’s advent calendar door.

Want to read: Screaming on the Inside by Jessica Grose 📚

🔖 Read Haunted by the Ghost of 2019, Helena Fitzgerald

“A return to 2019 is an attempt to erase all of the losses that happened between then and now, but those losses, like the monster in a horror movie, will devour us if we refuse to face them.”

Just listened to a super stressful strike townhall and I’m tempted to watch tonight’s Neverafter but I think TNG is the smarter move right now.