Kimberly Hirsh

As always, The Trans Advice column is helpful. The latest: Should cis folks use gender neutral pronouns?

Your pronouns shouldn’t be some sort of political statement or show of support for others, they should be how you want to be referred to.

I love Discovery and I’ve enjoyed Picard and Prodigy, but Strange New Worlds feels like nostalgic Trek in a way that of the new shows, only Lower Decks does. I’m happy to have such an embarrassment of Star Trek riches. 🖖🏻📺

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Angela Garbes Is Reclaiming Realistic Motherhood thecut.com

Read: www.thecut.com

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“This is the Book I’m Meant to Write Right Now” sarafredman.substack.com

Read: sarafredman.substack.com

This interview is huge. Life-alteringly huge.

Angela Garbes, who usually line edits as she writes:

I can’t revise an idea, no matter how good it is, in my brain. I can’t revise it if I don’t write it down.

Interviewer Sara Fredman says:

I personally feel torn between feeling like motherhood is the most significant thing I do and that I’ll ever do in my life and also feeling like that’s a trap of some sort.

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Can Motherhood Be a Mode of Rebellion? | The New Yorker newyorker.com

Read: www.newyorker.com

An amazing essay in conversation with Angela Garbes’s new book, Essential Labor.

a person can get paid more to sit in front of her computer and send a bunch of e-mails than she can to do a job so crucial and difficult that it seems objectively holy: to clean excrement off a body, to hold a person while they are crying, to cherish them because of and not despite their vulnerability.

Her husband’s job provided health insurance and regular paychecks; Garbes writes that it “may take me a lifetime to undo the false notion that my work is somehow less valuable than his.”

It feels shameful to admit that I don’t have the desire to hustle up that same ladder.

Parenthood likewise forces an encounter with the illogic of the market: good fortune means getting to pay someone less than you make to do a job that’s harder and probably more important than your own.

parenting toward a more just world requires more than diverse baby dolls and platitudes about equality.

She quotes the writer Carvell Wallace, who, after the 2016 election, told his children, “One of the most important questions you have to answer for yourself is this: Do I believe in loving everyone? Or do I only believe in loving myself and my people?”

How can mothering be a way that we resist and combat the loneliness, the feeling of being burdened by our caring?

motherhood has also granted me a chance to see what my life is like when I reorganize it around care and interdependence in a way that stretches far beyond my daughter.

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Raising Us Wrecked Her Career But My Mom’s Thriving In Her Second Act romper.com

Read: www.romper.com

My mom was just hitting her second act stride when leukemia knocked her down. I hope that as the treatment side effects are better managed, she’ll be able to get back into it.

I just wrote the beginning of a fiction story after being inspired by Amanda Cook’s “Weaving Serenity” in issue 1 of @wyngraf. I also found a writing tagline for myself: “Kimberly Hirsh writes about badass moms doing awesome shit.” 📝📚

It’s a rough time right now so I’m trying to notice small joys and one of today’s is that I learned how to use regular expressions in advanced text editors to remove timestamps and extra lines from Zoom transcripts.

In case it would help other people, here’s how I did it. I would have something that looked like this:

9
00:00:36.900 –> 00:00:40.560
Kimberly Hirsh (she/her): Do you agree to participate in the study and to have the interview audio recorded?

With the help of this guide from Drexel and replies to this Stack Overflow post I now can remove the number, the timestamp, and the two extra lines created when I remove those. Here’s how I do it.

1. Open the VTT file in my advanced text editor.
2. Use the find and replace feature.
3. For the thing to be replaced I use the regular expression ^[(\d|\n)].*$. You don’t need to know what a regular expression is. Just copy and paste that little code bit into the “Find” box.
4. Make sure either “Regular expression” or “GREP” is selected.
5. Click “Replace” to test it once and be sure if it works.
6. If it works, click “Replace all.”

For BBEdit:

7. Paste ^\s*?\r in the “Find” box.
8. Make sure the replace box is empty.
9. Repeat steps 5 and 6.

For Notepad++: 7. Then switch so that “Extended” is selected instead of “Regular expression” or “GREP.” 8. Paste \r\n\r\n in the “Find” box. 9. Put a single space in the replace box. 10. Repeat steps 5 and 6.

I hope this is helpful!

“…is that not what a Scholar does? Question the world, examine it from every angle, and marvel at the wonder of it all?”

• Natasha Inwood, “The Road to Fjallmark,” Wyngraf Volume 1 💬📚

🔖📚 Kate McKean writes in today’s Agents and Books about professional jealousy. Her advice applies to academics, too, and probably any field. “No one is being successful AT me.”

Josh Radnor writes a beautiful newsletter. It always feels like a gift. Here are some gems from the latest issue - italics are emphasis from the original, bold are mine.

There are no unwounded people. Wounding and trauma are features and facts of being a human being.

Why is it that I’m convinced my life should be linear and predictable, devoid of obstacle, conflict, and challenge, the very elements that make a story engaging and worth telling? Don’t I want to live a great story?

Nothing is the heaven or hell I want to make it out to be.

🎙️ I listened to the first episode of A Beautiful Anarchy on my way to pick up the kid. It was about imposter syndrome. There were some really beautiful bits that I’ll add to this post later.

📚 I joined Austin Kleon’s Read Like an Artist book club today and am also going to read his past choices. I’m starting with a re-read of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing.

If I took a day off every day that I felt sick I would almost never work. Chronic illness is not my fave.

“Other people are… challenging for me.” La’an is the new Data, pass it on. #StarTrek #StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds #StarTrekSNW 🖖🏻

Oh hey, I should probably share that my husband Will is a 2022-2023 Fulbright Scholar. Very proud of him & super psyched to take this opportunity both to see & do cool stuff & meet scholars in my own areas of interest.

It’s a work in progress, but I’m curating a woodland goth playlist. I recommend playing on shuffle. 🎵

Finished reading: Redwall: A Tale from Redwall by Brian Jacques 📚

Cozy fantasy, just what I need right now.

Two quotes that stood out for me:

“Many times in our history has tragedy been forestalled by miraculous happenings.”

“Even the strongest and bravest must sometimes weep.”

Today I wish you nurturing love and bodily self-determination, extra if you have a uterus.

I hope everyone who had to mother their own mother is doing something fun today. 9-year-old Kimberly salutes you.

Screw General Order 1? SCREW GENERAL ORDER 1?! 😍 #StarTrek #StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds #StarTrekSNW 🖖🏻📺

Anybody else assume based on TNG that Picard & Guinan had a friends with benefits situation? 🖖🏻

I just took the IPIP Big Five Factor Marker test. According to the results, I’m intellectual/imaginative af, pretty outgoing, friendly, and optimistic. I am also very neurotic and kind of a mess.

Now I’m only halfway through the Strange New Worlds pilot but the Kilean makeup looks to me nearly identical to vampires on BtVS. 🖖🏻📺