Kimberly Hirsh

Me, reading Jane, Unlimited: Wait, wait, wait. Her aunt/guardian was an adjunct at this fancy private university and she got the child-of-faculty tuition benefit? 😏 📚

If you must get a flat tire, I recommend doing it on a beautiful day when you have snacks packed in the car and plenty of data on your mobile plan so your kid can watch Pokemon while you wait for AAA. Bonus if you’ve done everything you can to mitigate your migraine.

I played a LOT of the Pokemon TCG in my freshman year of college, burned a lot of scholarship money on it. When I stored it away I wasn’t planning to keep all my cards and share them with my kid but I’m sure glad I did.

Oof. Doing a second round of coding and I am R-U-S-T-Y rusty.

I let a tiny bit of crying come out at 3 am Monday morning and now all the crying I haven’t done in the past 2 years is trying to push its way through.

🔖 Read Network sitcoms are actually good again. 📺

🔖 Read It’s Called Acting: Learning to Fight for the Stage. 🎭

Hey, Kimberly. You actually are not in a good position right now to do an in-depth analysis of every mention or example of social science in the Star Trek franchise, so settle down. 🖖

How do you handle a day when your brain isn’t doing a great job but you also don’t really want to nap because you will feel logie afterwards and you’ve already gone for a walk and had a snack? Shower? Probably a shower. Or more coffee? Shower and coffee?

🍿 Watched Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Candace Against the Universe and I definitely cried twice because I’m a big sister and there were some beautiful sibling moments.

My mom’s leukemia is in remission.

It IS great news that’s my mom’s leukemia is in remission. It’s important to me to remember that there is a long road ahead, with monthly inpatient chemo and other treatment. Thank you everyone for your kind words.

🔖 Read Why does social science have such a hard job explaining itself?.

🔖 Read Curing Coronavirus Isn’t a Job for Social Scientists. (This article is from May 2020, which is probably why it has the word “curing” in the title when that seems like, you know, not a thing that is possible.)

🔖 Loved reading what Kathy Tabbutt had to say about Social Science Communication in the January 23 Fancy Comma newsletter. I’ve been thinking through what #socscicomm can be for a few years and am still in process. If you’re interested in this, too, let’s connect!

It can feel like Social Science Communication isn’t a thing, but here are some people doing it:

• Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom
• Dr. Zeynep Tufecki
• Dr. Sarah Kendzior

Who else?

🔖 Read Is it time to live with COVID-19? Some scientists warn of ‘endemic delusion’

“I don’t particularly want to be in a future where I get COVID twice a year,” Pagel adds.

Me either, Professor Pagel. Me either.

I am scared and overwhelmed. Here’s what I’m doing about it:

1. Making sure I take my meds and supplements
2. Reading and following the Gaslit Nation Action Guide
3. Planning to spend some time today crafting

Please listen to Gaslit Nation, where Sarah Kendzior & Andrea Chalupa “take a deep dive on the news, skipping outrage to deliver analysis, history, context, and sharp insight on global affairs.”

My sense of routine and timing and goal-setting has been completely exploded over the past month or so. The routines I put in place to help me cope in the face of my mom’s illness weren’t really doable last week because M was home from school Wednesday through Friday for a teacher workday and conferences. Just today am I beginning to claw some of that structure back.

Today I did morning pages. I did a tarot reading for Pisces season. (The overall gist was one of recognizing abundance, not worrying where it would come from, and letting go of the need to try to create a perfect balance.) I had a smoothie. I filled one of my three medicine cases. (Two more to go!)

I cleared several small items off my to-do list. Soon, I will get down to work-work, continuing to analyze the documentation that’s going to help us develop a typology of the challenges library staff face when implementing connected learning.

I’ve had headaches almost continuously for a few weeks, partly due to hormone shifts, but maybe also partly due to stress. I had two cycles where I thought my body had sorted out my PCOS a little bit but here we are on Day 44, no new cycle in sight (a normal menstrual cycle is 40 or fewer days long from the beginning of one period to the beginning of the next). This is fine, or rather, not catastrophic. But disappointing.

I spoke with my doctor the other day. My Hemoglobin A1C is high - that’s the number that says how my blood sugar has been over the course of the past few months, as opposed to the glucose measurement that really only tells you about the past 24 hours or so. (That one was high-normal.) My LDL cholesterol was high, too - but total and triglycerides were good, so let’s celebrate that!

My doctor recommended two new supplements and I asked about a third. One of the ones she recommended was corn silk for kidney function. When I eat things with whole corn, corn flour, or corn meal in them, I get joint pain. I’m going to try the corn silk and see how it goes, but am prepared to stop it quickly if it causes pain and ask her for other possibilities.

She also recommended berberine for cholesterol and blood sugar, and agreed with me that it would be good to try GABA to improve the quality of my sleep. And she said it was smart of me to up my l-tyrosine when I noticed clinical signs of declining thyroid function (increased fatigue and decreased body temperature).

I write about these things because my life is a constant set of calculations relating to how to handle different conditions and the fact that my health will never be “fixed.” Chronic illness is not a problem to be solved; it is a condition to be managed.

I bought this Art Oracles card deck at the North Carolina Museum of Art when we were there to see the Mucha exhibit in December and I keep the Frida Kahlo card pinned on my corkboard because it says, “Convalescence lasts a lifetime” and that is something I need to keep in mind.

I don’t expect I’ll ever get a tattoo, but inspired by both my own experiences with chronic illness and having recently read Ninth House, if I ever did, I think it would be the tarot Wheel of Fortune, and probably the Wayhome Tarot version.

(That picture is from the Everyday Magic website.)

The thing is, wherever you are on the Wheel, three things are true:

1. At some point, things will be better than they are now.
2. At some point, things will be worse than they are now.
3. You will be back here again.

It would be good for me to keep these truths in mind at all times.

That feeling when your new job pays you to work through the professional development curriculum you created as part of your old job.

Working through Project READY and I wrote an “I am” poem [PDF]. I don’t want to share the whole thing but in case you’re wondering how I define myself, the first line/refrain is:

I am smart and loving

Not sure what my dream casting for most of the roles in Ninth House would be, but @may_wise Mary Wiseman for Pamela Dawes please, okay bye.

🔖 Read More contagious version of omicron spreads in U.S., fueling worries.

This. The lifting of mask mandates. The expansion of what counts as high-risk.

Sigh.

I did the seven stories exercise & put everything into a word cloud, combining related words & eliminating irrelevant words & ended up with this word cloud. I can’t make good alt text but contact me if you want the CSV word list.