Kimberly Hirsh

It’s Sunday morning and I am back to being overwhelmed by meal planning, how’s your day? I should say that M & I made banana bread and pumpkin bread this morning, so that’s lovely.

💬📚 “Childcare professionals, many of them mothers, are three times as likely to live in poverty as workers in other professions.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

💬📚 “We are entrusting that which we say is most precious—our children, our future— to other people, yet we are not willing to pay them a living wage? What does that say about our priorities as a society? Our priorities as individuals?” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor Mothering as Social Change

💬📚 “The perspective mothers bring to their jobs—whether it’s law making, coalition building, project management—is that family and care work are essential to life, not an inconvenience.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

📚💬 “Proximity to power, however real that feels, is a simpler choice than solidarity. True allyship lives in relationships, true solidarity requires giving up some comfort, material resources, and power—and sharing it with others.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

It turns out giving yourself credit for everything you write is actually really challenging because you have to pull it all together somewhere, and sometimes you lose track of the last thing you counted.

It’s far too early to give up on NaNoWriMo.

But have y’all noticed that November is a really hard time to write in the Northern hemisphere? There’s the time change. The lack of light because of it. If you’re in the US, Thanksgiving eats up fully 5 days it feels like. (That’s 17% of your writing time!) At least it does in my family.

It’s just a brutal time!

This is why I like Camp NaNoWriMo. Especially July. July, if you work in education and can afford to send your kid to camp, is a great time to write.

Anyway. I’m not giving up on NaNo but I’m also not trying to do word counts on all my texts.

The only time I won NaNo, I wrote 25K words on November 30.

I’ve won Camp NaNo a few times with smaller goals.

I do want to write. I don’t know what a good writing goal, process, or practice looks like for me. Maybe I’ll take the rest of this month to figure it out.

The number of people grieving the loss of Kevin Conroy in my various timelines has confirmed that I’m following the right people.

Hello I require a meme where Lore is impersonating Data on Twitter, they’re both verified, will pay in high praise kthx 🖖🏻

💬📚 “Early on in quarantine, I found myself thinking, ‘What is the most valuable thing I could be doing with my time?’ The answer clearly wasn’t writing an article or making a podcast, but rather, keeping my family, and my community, safe and healthy.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

💬📚 “Weekends aren’t time off for parents; they are two long days of caregiving.” Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

Moved Mastodon instances from mastodon.social to indieweb.social because the prior kept timing out. People who were following me shouldn’t need to do anything.

Over at Mastodon, I have a lot of new infosec/cybersecurity followers. I assume y’all followed me because Kevin Beaumont follows me. Kev & I are fandom friends, so you won’t find much infosec content here, but I hope you find something interesting.

Hello friends!

It’s been slow-going working on my TNG fanfic. Early in October, I toyed with the idea of being a NaNo Rebel with the goal of writing 50,000 words of literally anything at all. At the time, I meant fanfic, original fic, and academic writing.

But at 4 AM this morning, I decided to return to that, with a much more expansive definition of “literally anything at all.”

Here are the things I’ve added to my word count so far:

• Blog posts (including short notes)
• Emails
• Texts
• Slack messages
• Meeting agendas
• Comments on other people’s documents
• Forum posts

And once I log back into social media tomorrow (I’m posting this via micropub), I’m going to add replies and quote tweets.

Why am I being so generous to myself with this definition?

A lot of the time, I use a goal like NaNoWriMo to prove to myself that I “can* write.

But lately, I’ve felt not that I have writer’s block, exactly, but that I’m just at a moment in life when writing is beyond my current capacity, that I just don’t have the bandwidth to write at present.

So I’m using this expansive definition to prove to myself that I do write, that I an writing, even when I feel like I can’t.

How’s NaNo going for you? Can you find a way to be more generous with yourself this month?

🔖📝 Read “You Make the Space, You Fight for the Space”

“…every draft after the first draft for me is a kind of process of stripping away the stuff that I had to write for myself & happening upon the stuff that I want to offer to other people.”

“I don’t have the sort of life where I can write every day and that’s fine.”

“…so much of writing is not writing but you have to inhabit that not writing space as a writer and not as a mother or a teacher or the 3,000 other things you are.”

🔖📝 Read This Machine Will Make You Write More: A Product Recommendation with a Twist.

I covet the Alphasmart/Freewrite, but I don’t think it’s the tool for me. Gonna try & figure out what motivates me.

🔖📝 Read How to Finish.

Should I force myself to Make New Work or should I let the blank pages stay blank and sharpen pages I’ve already made? Should I go run or walk and shake the fog out? Could the fog be interesting, if I try not to have too much control? Should I read or go look at art or ride the subway back and forth with a notebook?

This is all writing.

Just moved a publication on my CV from “In Progress” to “In Press.” An RA gathered data in 2018-19. A professor & myself wrote the first draft in 2019-20. It’s been submitted 2x, accepted w/revisions & revised, w/an additional author. This is fast for scholarly publishing.

🔖 Read Emma Thompson’s Third Act.

I’ve always loved Emma Thompson, envisioned her as a kindred spirit, a screen aunt like Carrie Fisher is a screen mom. This profile made me love her even more.

“[When I act] I’m taking a holiday from myself.”

🔖📺 Read ‘Bad Sisters’ Captures the Intensity of Having and Being a Sister

Ooh. When I’m ready for intense TV I might try this.

“Sisterhood was a world unto itself… together, we made bewildering terrain familiar.”

Over and over again I search for this comic by Sylvie Reuter that is the best depiction I’ve ever seen of how I, personally, experience depression. Maybe next time I’ll find it on my own site instead of having to hope Google helps.

“if you’re looking for a sign from the universe that it’s okay to stop trying to force your work, that it’s not just okay but good to tend to yourself in whatever way that brings you joy and doesn’t hurt yourself or someone else—this is your sign.”

🔖📝 Read Writing Advice Isn’t Made for Bodies In Pain.

Too many things I want to quote here, so if the headline appeals you should just go read the whole thing.

Cooking is really hard with chronic illness, because both pain and fatigue reduce your options for homemade food that won’t eat up all your energy for the day.

When Suzanne Scott mentioned the cookbook I Dream of Dinner (So You Don’t Have To) at the Fan Cultures/Food Cultures session at FSN North America, citing the ease of prepping its recipes when you’re exhausted, I immediately put it on hold at the library.

I picked it up over the weekend. Today I made my first recipe in it: Marinated Beans with Crunchy Veggies. TL; DR: It’s tasty and I still had energy left after making it.

Right away the book delighted me by including all prep work in the written instructions rather than ingredients. Author Ali Slagle doesn’t say “Fresh shallot, finely chopped” in the ingredients list. Instead, it’s the first step in the recipe. Slagle also encourages substitutions.

I modified the recipe a bit to make it even friendlier for my chronically-ill self. Here are some photos with explanations.

The first change is that I subbed garlic powder in for chopped shallot. Target didn’t have shallots and I didn’t want to go to another store. Plus, I already had garlic powder on hand.

The second change is that I used canned diced green chiles instead of chopped fresh chile. I’m a spice wimp and once again Target had limited selection.

I then followed the recipe as written, using canned black beans, salt and pepper, red wine vinegar, and olive oil.

Slagle suggests chopping and adding veggies right before serving but I wanted to do that in advance, so I sliced celery and cucumber and stored them in a Mason jar to keep them crisp until serving time. They’ll only keep in the fridge for 3 or 4 days, but so will the beans.

When it was time for lunch, I spooned a quarter of the beans into a bowl, then pulled some celery and cucumber out of the jar and stirred it all together. It was a lovely, easy lunch.

(The real star of this photo is my beautiful new kitchen counter.)

🔖📚 Read The Art of Reading While Feeding (with a Newborn).

I love articles about how other people enjoy things that aren’t necessarily parenting-related as they parent. Good stuff here.

Logging out of socials until at least Wednesday. See kimberlyhirsh.com/hello if you want to get in touch.