Kimberly Hirsh

📺 Shrinking is doing a great job dressing a teen in 90s throwback clothes and if y’all see me walking around in overalls with one side undone now you know why. THIS IS OUR MOMENT, XENNIALS, find a grown-up way to wear the clothes you loved as a teen!

Had abbrevia.me describe me based on my tweets. Alt text contains the text of the description, which was too many characters to include here. I know personal branding is whatever, but “friendly and knowledgeable” is a brand I’m happy to have.

hey hey you know how that moral philosopher profiled in the New Yorker would solve the trolley problem? whichever way would give her the most material for her next book

I had my first high-pain day since we came to Europe yesterday (or today, if you’re in the US when I’m writing this).

I think I must have eaten something with cornmeal in it, because my joints and muscles were (and still are, though less so) sore from the moment I woke up.

It was a rough time to walk around Cologne in the cold and rain. I know I complained about the pain often, and I really appreciate my sister, her husband, and my friend Kessie having such patience with me.

We’re in Cologne for another day and I hope if I rest now, I’ll have a better time.

This is such a classic variable disability/chronic illness scenario. Sometimes you’re walking around Aalsmeer in 40 degree weather with no problems, and sometimes you ache with every step and even if you’re lying down. It’s easy to forget you’re disabled at all, until it isn’t.

The tricky thing is that you need rest, but if you’re in pain, it’s hard to sleep.

📚💬 “Life is absurd. It has no meaning. But it has beauty, and wonder, and we have to enjoy that.” Frieda Menco, Holocaust survivor, quoted in Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City by Russell Shorto

Finished reading: Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City by Russell Shorto 📚

This has been a great read while wandering Amsterdam. I have a much better understanding of the significance and uniqueness of the city, and have been able to attach more meaning to particular places, than I would have if I hadn’t read it. Highly recommend.

“She didn’t die. She was killed. Because she was a Jewish girl.” Hannah Pick-Goslar, a friend of Anne Frank’s 💔

Anne Frank kept a commonplace book.

Haven’t listened to Worlds Beyond Number yet but Erika Ishii in this TechCrunch interview is making me cry so that’s cool:

“When you find people to create with, you gotta grab onto them and just keep doing that for the rest of your lives together.”

I guess I missed World Book Day & International Cat Rescue Day in Europe but it’s still March 2 back home, so happy both of those! As I like to say when beatboxing poorly, BooksAndCatsAndBooksAndCatsAndBooksAndCats. (Because boots are good but books are better.)

🔖 Read Understanding Blogs by Tracy Durnell.

An excellent exploration of what makes blogging its own medium.

I’ve got a couple recent co-authored articles:

Description framework of makerspaces: Examining the relationship between spatial arrangement and diverse user populations in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

&

Makerspaces in Libraries at U.S. Public Colleges and Universities: A Census in portal: Libraries and the Academy.

My excellent co-authors are Dr. Maggie Melo, Dr. Laura March, & researcher Emily Arnsberg.

Hi friends! It’s time for an Amsterdam Photo Dump! There are 8 photos here so if you’re viewing this on a timeline, be sure to click through to kimberlyhirsh.com to see them.

Here’s what you’re seeing:

1. A street lamp that has been decorated to look like Nijntje (known as Miffy in English).
2. The facade of the Royal Palace Amsterdam. (The word for “rabbit” in Dutch is “konijn” and the Dutch name for the Royal Palace is “Koninklijk Paleis,” so I keep trying to come up with a rabbit-palace pun.)
3. A detail of a relief on the front of Amsterdam Centraal Station featuring the patron deity of our household, Athena.
4. The clock tower at Amsterdam Centraal Station.
5. A pedimental sculpture on the National Maritime Museum featuring Neptune, whose image is used heavily in Amsterdam due to the importance of sailing to its history and economy.
6. and 8. Votive ships made of wax at the National Maritime Museum.
7. A house near the Vondelpark that I thought looked cool and haunted.

🎮 Playing Kirby’s Return to Dreamland Deluxe with my kid. Super fun. Couch co-op Kirby seems to be his gateway to playing instead of just watching. Might do Kirby Star Allies next.

🔖 Read Sci-Fi Publishers Are Bracing for an AI Battle by Elizabeth Minkel (Wired).

I’m interested to see how this shakes out.

🔖 Read The Battle for the Soul of Buy Nothing by Vauhina Vara (Wired).

This is an excellent long read. There are a lot of good questions here. How can we scale non-capitalist initiatives in a capitalist world? How can we acknowledge volunteer labor in that scaling? How can we support local action without resorting to geographic discrimination?

Austin Kleon blogs about pilers and filers, a dichotomy/spectrum he learned about reading Temple Grandin’s book, _Visual Thinking _, in which Grandin discusses Linda Silverman’s work:

In a presentation about the differences in learning styles, Silverman flashes a slide showing a person with a tidy file cabinet and a person surrounded by messy piles of paper. The “filer” and the “pilers,” to use her terms. You probably know which one you are. What does it say about the way you think?

Kleon says:

All of these “versus” type situations can be rethought as spectrums and/or creative tensions. There are times when I want to access that sequential part of my brain and bring order to things, and filing does that, but there are other times I want to access my visual brain, and piles help.

I am my father’s daughter, which means I’m a piler-filer.

Both my dad and I often have stacks that look like a mess to other people. But when I was a teacher, my colleagues marveled at my ability to run exactly what I needed from one of these piles within seconds.

I also had immaculate file cabinets full of things like student paperwork. I love a label maker.

For me and for my dad, piles are for current projects and files are for reference materials and archives. If something goes into a file before we’re done with it, it ceases to exist until an external event prompts us to track it down, by which point it may be too late for us to have done what we needed to do with it.

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This is a panorama of my desk when I was managing editor at LEARN NC. The stacks on the desk and in the standing file were projects in-progress. I filed finished projects in the drawers in the file cabinet/snack station on the left side of the desk.

So. We’re piler-filers. Are you one, the other, or a combination?

Finished reading: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers 📚

Happy to have read it. Turns out vibes are enough when you’ve got charming characters.

Currently reading: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers 📚

Now that I’m reading for vibes & character instead of a narrative arc, I’m enjoying this properly. The book didn’t work for me the first time I tried it.

My kid’s school is hiring a classroom teacher in his age range. So if you got the gig you might get to teach him, and I hear he’s pretty delightful.

🔖📝 Read IF YOU LOVE WRITING, YOU SHOULD RELISH REJECTION.

This is a really helpful piece that reframes rejection as the water writers swim in.

🔖🎓 Read All my classes suddenly became AI classes.

I love the assignment here that asks students to work with ChatGPT as if it were a student and they were a teacher coaching it to get better writing out of it.

Yesterday I saw 3 people (I’d guess women) at Amsterdam Centraal 🚄 walking together wearing matching pairs of gorgeous plain black Docs and then felt super sad that I’d only had room for one pair of Docs in my suitcase and went with the floral ones.

Hi friends.

I wanted to take a moment to share my blogging “process,” which I put in scare quotes because it’s not very refined.

First, I have a thought or encounter something to which I have a response and decide I want to share that thought/response.

Then, I open up Google Docs and type what I want to share into a file called “Current Blog Post Draft.” I mainly do this to avoid losing a post because of a browser or app crash.

I sometimes read over it before posting. Sometimes I post right away.

My posts aren’t reviewed by an editor or even a beta reader. They go out fresh, raw, and often flawed in either form or content. The ideas are sometimes half-baked. I’m sometimes writing in the heat of emotion. I’m going to be wrong sometimes. Perhaps often.

Blogs are tools for thinking. As such, the thoughts expressed in them will not always be our most polished.

This is a personal blog, not a professional publication. I don’t mean for it to be anything but a personal blog and portfolio.

Thanks for reading it.

Status: in a parasocial relationship with the crew of the Enterprise D.