Kimberly Hirsh

Disappearing from most of the Interwebs until after Labor Day. See y’all later! (Deleting Twitter, Instagram, & Fb Messenger from my phone.)

Submitted a paper to a conference before I’d run the study. One reviewer suggested the study shouldn’t be run at all. Another said it was an interesting study & hoped I’d still run it in spite of the rejection. (It was not ready for prime time, essentially.) #ShareYourRejections

I constantly have to remind myself that of the 6 semesters of my doctoral program, only 1 happened before I was almost & then actually somebody’s mom, and that comparing my research productivity to other people’s wouldn’t be healthy anyway but especially isn’t, given this fact.

I just took a little time to clear out and clean my corner desk, which was never getting used for work anyway, and dedicate it to all my magic stuff.

A few words about my beliefs: I’m mostly agnostic. With respect to magic, I believe we make our own. Action follows intention, and I find these tools - tarot and oracle cards, crystals, candles, books - useful in setting my intentions. They help me trust my intuition.

I value balance. My professional life is all about truth claims, evidence, and figuring out what counts as empirical research. I need a thing in my life that is the opposite, and this is it.

A few more words, this time about Everyday Magic, my local witch store. It’s hard as the mom of a very little, to go shopping anywhere. Now imagine taking your magpie toddler into a shop full of crystals.

You might let him choose a small one to hold. He’ll immediately put it in his mouth, of course.

It’s fine. You were going to buy it anyway.

Next time, you might let him hold a larger palm stone. He’ll probably drop it. If it’s selenite, it’ll shatter when he does. When this happens, you apologize profusely. At Everyday Magic, they tell you, “It’s okay. Babies happen. He picked a good one to drop.”

Obviously, you offer to buy it. When they don’t make you, you buy a whole one. And also a book entitled Witchy Mama.

Then you have a dream about buying the Moonchild Tarot. But you know it’ll be a long time before Everyday Magic has it in stock. But you know they have the Starchild Tarot, by the same artist, in stock. So you decide to drop by after work - toddler in tow, because he almost always is - and look at their open copy of it and, if you fall in love with it, to buy it.

Your giant baby has a lot of words now, and when you get in the store, he uses all of them to scream about the crystals. He’s clearly outraged that you didn’t hand him one immediately. As you try to look at the cards, he shrieks and you toss off a “Seriously, dude?” that elicits a laugh from the shop’s owner. But of course snide remarks don’t settle babies, so he keeps yelling. You give up on looking at the cards and take him outside because you don’t want to ruin everybody else’s day.

Then you try to reason with him. Then you remember that you have veggie straws. He accepts the veggie straws. You go back inside and move toward the cards again. A shop employee shows you a stone and asks, “Would letting him hold this help stop the crying?”

“YES THANK YOU!” you say. Then, “It won’t shatter if he drops it?” You’re already bracing yourself for the tantrum he is going to throw when he has to give it back, but you really want to look at those cards, so you hand him the rock and get your peruse on.

You pick up the box and get a chill. You open it and start to look through. Yes, this art appeals to you. And then your favorite card, VII The Chariot, is a unicorn, and you’re buying this deck.

You grab an unopened box, take the stroller over to the counter, and miraculously, when you ask the toddler to hand you the stone, he does so completely without incident.

“Thanks for letting him hold it,” you tell the shop employee.

“Oh, he can have it,” the employee responds.

And that’s why you are going to buy all your magic things at Everyday Magic forever, because instead of shaming you for your screaming baby, they gave him a crystal.

Hi Internet friends.

I have been tweaking my website a lot this week and wanted to write a few notes about my IndieWeb progress.

In my early days, I tried to just implement a ton of stuff. Then I had to tweak a bunch of things to get what I wanted. I can be too rigid sometimes, and I think some of my IndieWeb implementation efforts have fallen in this category.

I’m in a life moment where my IndieWeb commitment needs to be eclipsed by, well, most of my other commitments. So here’s where I’m at right now. I’m using the IndieMark list to work through it all. This will get a little technical, so if it’s not interesting, please move on with your day.

1. I do own my own domain, kimberlyhirsh.com.
2. I think it's set up for Web sign-in, but I sometimes struggle with the IndieAuth/Micropub plug-ins.
3. My posts do have permalinks.
4. Also they have h-entry markup.
5. Robots can index my site.
6. I'm pretty sure WordPress outputs my stuff in html.
7. You can defs use the site-specific search in Google to search kimberlyhirsh.com.
8. I have an h-card with contact info and a photo of myself on my homepage.
9. I am currently posting two post types to my site: notes and articles. Both get syndicated to Twitter and Facebook as I deem appropriate.
10. I have linear previous/next navigation between my posts.
11. I have a search UI.
12. URLs are auto linked.
13. I can both send and receive webmentions.
14. I receive backfeed from Twitter. (Facebook eliminated this functionality, sadly.)

What now?

I’m not adding any other post types just yet. For me, the inconvenience of creating replies on my own site and syndicating them outweighs the benefit of owning my replies, as my replies are rarely substantive. Occasionally, replies may inspire a longer article. But for now, I’m going to reply on the silos where I see folks post stuff. (That said: I will try to work out using webmentions to reply to folks replies that get backfed to my site, using my site’s comments. We’ll see.)

Similarly, posting photos here instead of to Instagram, events and RSVPs here instead of to Facebook, and reads here instead of to Goodreads is just not something I want to tackle all at once. So as I figure out which use cases I want to urgently own, then I’ll work that out.

But I will be posting links here instead of directly to Facebook or Twitter, so I may use the read post type for that purpose. Or bookmark. I’m trying to decide how I want to distinguish those uses.

I’m not really clear on how to make web actions happen, even though I have the necessary plug-ins installed.

I want to get back into documenting my own itches and participating more in the IndieWeb community.

But honestly, this is mostly just a post giving myself permission not to own my replies.

Hey, Twitter. If you’re one of my followers who doesn’t know me IRL but would actually recognize my name and seek me out if we were at a conference or convention together, can you let me know? Just want to know who to look out for in future travels.

I'm probably going to unfollow everybody from Twitter on Monday. Please don't take it personally. I'll then be adding my closest people back, and creating lists so it's easy to find everybody else later. I just need my default feed to be quieter.

I saw @tceles_B_hsup play Dickon in The Secret Garden. He was dreamy. A couple years later we were in a production of Brigadoon together. I played his dad. It’s been 20 yrs. Our kid is almost 2. @tceles_B_hsup is still dreamy.

@CupcakeGoth @Gwenda I actually have a Goodreads shelf called “jilli-recs” and these may have to go on there.

@Gwenda I needed to find out what all of these were, and OF COURSE @CupcakeGoth had my back… cupcake-goth.dreamwidth.org/tag/avon+satan…