Kimberly Hirsh

Finished reading: Ninth House (Alex Stern Book 1) by Leigh Bardugo 📚

So good. It puts the academia in dark academia.

Me: I was so psyched about the topic and methods of my dissertation when I defended my proposal in February 2020, but I find it hard to get psyched about that stuff right now. What happened? A personal failing, probably.

Also me: A pandemic and your mom got leukemia.

Me: Oh yeah.

🔖 Not their first rodeo: How Black riders are reclaiming their place in cowboy culture

This is so cool and the pictures are phenomenal.

Scene: Today’s Micro.blog Meetup

Them: I have writer’s block and was hoping to get ideas for how to bust through it.

Me: Let me tell you about my TNG fanfic where Data teaches Geordi improv.

🖖🏻📝

I was going to ask what the best career path was for an insufferable know-it-all and then realized I should qualify the question with aside from academia.

No YOU just ordered a Mini Tarot de Marseille.

I’m RSVPing to IndieWeb Create Day on March 5, 2022. This might show up as a yes but it’s actually a maybe.

Me to W: I need to go be in the dark and quiet for a little while now because I’m overstimulated. There were so many people outside when M was playing.

Narrator: There were 4 people outside.

I am thisclose to posting a vibe shift reading list.

I realized as I was helping my family in the face of my mom’s return to the hospital that there will never be a time when I’m not a caregiver and that given my family’s medical woes, I am much more likely to need to drop everything to caregive than many other people. It would be wise to design my life to accommodate this fact, rather than hoping for some imagined time with minimal caregiving responsibilities. Even if I get my own conditions well-managed, even as M. grows and becomes more independent, I will still benefit from the flexibility I need as a parent of a young child and a chronically ill worker.

This is a radical shift in my thinking about the future. I’ll write more about it as I tease out what it means for my planning practices and daily life.

I get annoyed at the voice in my head that, when I’m stressed, offers an oh-so-helpful list of all the stress-relieving things I’m not doing, implying that I could make the stress go away but I just must not want to badly enough.

Today’s vibe: driving home from my fasting bloodwork appointment listening to “Surface Pressure” on repeat-1 while basically inhaling a Panera cinnamon roll.

I just heard my neck crack. I am really over everything. Everything except crafting and my job. And loving my kid. I guess I’m over stuff that I’m not doing impacting me, really.

I’ve been reading the Future Ready with the Library posts at the YALSA blog and it’s got me thinking about the skills I was building in middle school and how they have persisted and how I’ve leveraged them throughout my career.

In middle school, I spent my out-of-school time practicing theater, reading books, and coding in BASIC. I volunteered one summer at the library. (My memory of this is that somebody at school decided I needed more to occupy me and sent me to the counselor and when she asked my interests, “reading” was the only one she could figure out how to match with a volunteer opportunity.)

In my career, I’ve been an educator and public speaker (both use my theater training), a librarian, and a web editor (HTML is pretty easy if you’ve got a handle on BASIC). I use knowledge and skills from all of these domains as a researcher, too.

It’s fun and cool to think about the connections between that me and this me.

🔖 Read The Millions of People Stuck in Pandemic Limbo

…people are still dying, and immunocompromised people disproportionately so. Ignoring that sends an implicit message: Your lives don’t matter.

I have too many chronic conditions and I don’t like it.

Changing my profile pic to Luisa Madrigal for a while.

As we approach the spring of deception, it feels rude to me that the earth is moving forward with the seasons with my mom in and out of the hospital. I’ll try to appreciate it but it’s harder this year than in other years.

I’m intrigued by the pedagogy of uncertainty concept that Ronnie Videla-Reyes and Claudio Aguayo will introduce at this week’s SoTEL Symposium. “…the teacher and her/his students lay down a path in walking together…”

💻 Watching We Are NOT Okay: Library Worker Trauma Before and During COVID-19 and What Happens After #LibraryTrauma #WeAreNotOkay #LibraryLove

I’m a great lover of Valentine’s Day as a time to express special affection for friends & family as well as romantic partners. Today is a hard Valentine’s Day. My mom is being readmitted to the hospital. Tell me about someone special to you & how you make sure they know it. 💞

I was feeling sad about my mom being readmitted to the hospital so I took a break from work and made a pillow cover. Blog post with details forthcoming.

My mom was discharged from the hospital tonight and will be doing the rest of her induction therapy outpatient. Thought you might like some good news tonight, world.

I think the union rep at this postdoc orientation is doing this presentation outside during the Santa Ana winds, which is a choice.

Started Octopath Traveler again tonight and it made me very happy. Last time I played was almost 2 years ago. 🎮