Kimberly Hirsh

Closing out the year with a couple of runs in Hades 🎮 followed by some Star Trek: The Next Generation 🖖🏻. Here’s to staying on-brand in 2022.

🔖 Read 6 ways to deal with anxiety and uncertainty this winter.

One way to embrace radical uncertainty is to develop coping mechanisms. This NPR piece suggests some possibilities.

Happy New Year from the hair I just cut off in a literal and symbolic act of lightening my load.

Selfies to come after a shower and hair air drying.

💬 “We are being asked to no longer abandon ourselves, to embrace and make space for all parts of ourselves to come alive and be honored.” Lindsay Mack’s Monthly Medicine for January 2022

Here are a couple of earlier year-in-review posts:

• 2020
• 2019
• 2018

This one’s going to be a little different. I will write up my catalogue of great stuff that happened but I want to give some space to the hard stuff first.

My family has definitely been playing the pandemic on easy mode, as it were, but I have hit a wall of not hopelessness exactly, but grim resignation. Resignation specifically to the fact that things will keep shifting, that it will probably get worse before it gets better, that making plans based on timing of perceived lowered risk (for example, When-My-Kid-Is-Vaccinated) is more likely to lead to disappointment than not. Resignation to the extreme unknown.

Anticipating a year of shifts, the only goal I set was for the first quarter off 2021: to complete and defend my dissertation. I did it! Goal achieved! Setting such a straightforward goal means I can feel good about how I spent my time this year.

I only set a word for the first quarter, which was PLAY and I have no idea how I did with that.

I did some great stuff in addition to defending my dissertation this year:

• I made extensive use of the public library. My kid actually bumped up against the checkout limit.
• I got vaccinated and boosted.
• I got my thyroid managed and hit my target lab results for the first time in the 10 years since my Hashimoto’s diagnosis.
• I consulted for Quirkos and developed content for their blog.
• I organized a FanLIS panel for the Fan Studies Network North America conference.
• I got and swam in a mermaid tail.
• I had a pool party for my 40th birthday.
• I presented at MIRA, Micro Camp, ALISE, and World View.
• I took M to swim lessons.
• I embraced my Trekkie nature.
• I applied for, was offered, and accepted my dream postdoc.

I couldn’t have done these things without immense help:

• from my advisor & committee.
• from W’s mom, who provided me with time for both work and rest.
• from W, who provided for my basic material needs, kept the house clean, continued to be an awesome dad, and made me feel good about myself.

If there was a theme for this year, it was Star Trek. The Next Generation was a balm in the weeks after my grandmother’s death. Lower Decks, Discovery, and Prodigy revitalized my love of Trek. Discovery, in particular, helped me remain hopeful and trust in my values as a guide for living.

(My core values, by the way, are curiosity, creativity, and care.)

I’m doing a New Year New Moon retreat with Katy Peplin on January 2nd, so I will probably dig into my dreams and plans for 2022 then.

For now, I’ll say my word of the year for 2022 is MEND. My goal is to keep going.

My only resolution for 2022: Embrace [radical uncertainty] (https://www.johnkay.com/2020/02/12/radical-uncertainty/).

🔖 Read What the Aztecs can teach us about happiness and the good life.

This is an excellent way to think about how to live.

Me, watching STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION and seeing a newborn in a glass bassinet in sickbay with the birthing parent nowhere in sight: “What, in the 24th century there’s no rooming in?” (Rooming in wasn’t common in 1990 but it was a thing by 1994.) 📺🖖🏻

I just finished the midseason finale of #StarTrekDiscovery and I thought it was beautifully done. Space family talking through problems is my fave. This is SOCIAL science fiction. ❤️ Replies may contain spoilers. 📺🖖🏻

🔖 Read There Is No “Best of” List From Me This Year. 📚

Beautiful writing from Kelly Jensen: how books impacted her this year; where she is in her journey as a writer, book blogger, reader. I’ll revisit this as I think about how I want to engage with & around books in 2022.

I just watched the SHORT TREKS episode “Q & A” and it has me really excited for STRANGE NEW WORLDS. 📺💻🖖🏻

🔖 Read How your brain copes with grief, and why it takes time to heal.

This time last year, my grandmother was in the hospital. She’d been non-responsive for several days but had just started indicating that she was aware of what was going on around her. She recovered enough to talk to my mom on the phone and to be transferred to hospice. She died on January 2. I didn’t go to her memorial service because it was in a county with a very high COVID-19 positivity rate. Not gathering with my people has delayed my grieving significantly.

Mostly, at times when I would normally call her, I forget that she died until I start working out the logistics. I wanted to invite her to watch my dissertation defense. My graduation. To call her and tell her about the postdoc.

I only called her for big things: getting engaged, being present, Christmas, her birthday. There are many granddaughters more communicative than I ever was. But I made sure she always knew about the big moments.

I have to trust that if her spirit persists in some form, she still knows about the big moments. But it’s really hard not to actually hear her talking to me about it.

It’s hard knowing I’ll never again sit in her bedroom and talk with her and my mom late into the night, or lie in bed and watch TV with her until we both fall asleep, or sit out by her pool, or insist she come to the beach. Never amble about the little neighborhood market Wal-Mart around the corner from her house with her picking out groceries, or go to the Chinese buffet with her. There are so many little mundane things that I miss.

She didn’t die of COVID-related illness, but it’s COVID that kept me from seeing her for a scheduled visit in April 2020, that kept my mom from rushing down to Florida to bring her here to visit before Christmas or to be at her bedside when she was in the hospital.

I really appreciate how this article ends by urging people to remember that those of us who have lost loved ones in the past 21 months have traded everyone’s safety for the last moments with the people we love, and that in making that trade we have shifted our own grieving processes in ways we’re still discovering.

🔖📚 Read

Millions of Followers? For Book Sales, ‘It’s Unreliable.’ - The New York Times nytimes.com

Read: www.nytimes.com

🔖📚 Read

Yes, Social Media Can Sell Books. But Not If Publishers Sit on Their Hands | Jane Friedman janefriedman.com

🔖📚 Read

All Your Followers Will Not Buy Your Book - by Kate McKean katemckean.substack.com

I’m that annoying friend who loves Christmas way too much but, like, the exhausted goth version of her. I hope you have a good December 25, whether it has any additional significance for you or not. I wish you ease and fun and freedom from anxiety. ❤️

I don’t know how your December 25 is going, but my spouse gave me a Roy Kent Christmas card so mine is going very well.

🔖 Read if we’re all about to get Omicron, here are 5 tips from a long-hauler (via @agilelisa on Micro.blog).

This is sound advice for living with any chronic illness.

Bodies donated to Western Carolina University’s forensic anthropology program end up in the John A. Williams Human Skeletal Collection and I’m not sure I can think of a better way to deal with an academic’s remains than to put them in a skeleton library.

💬 “North Americans practice embalming, but we do not believe in embalming.” Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty 📚

It’s unseasonably warm here in central NC and will be even warmer tomorrow. Many people have complained that this doesn’t feel like Christmas, but I have had many Florida Christmases, so to me it feels just right. Just before Christmas 2015 was my last Florida Christmas.

Until now, you’ve had to have a Micro.blog account to reply to my blog posts or sometimes, when I’ve had it active, use Disqus to reply. Thanks to @sod’s plug-in, @maique’s tutorial, and @pimoore’s Tufte theme, I now have a “Reply by email” option!

I may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

This was a slow reading year for me. I read a lot more fiction than last year, a little less nonfiction, many fewer comics, and no poetry.

I only read 28 full-length books for myself (as opposed to for my kid). I range widely each year, usually coming in the 30 - 50 book range, so this is a little less than even a normal slow year would be.

But of course, year 2 of a pandemic, especially when finishing a PhD, is not a normal year.

All of the fiction I read this year was good, because I don’t keep reading things that aren’t. But my favorite was Gideon the Ninth . It took me a little while to get into, but once I was into it, it blew me away. It also helped me realize, along with the Star Trek: Discovery episode “Su’Kal,” that space gothic is a subgenre I love.

I’m still into Dark Academia, which explains the presence of The Historian , If We Were Villains , Bunny , and Ace of Spades on my finished books list.

My other fiction reading decisions were driven primarily by media tie-ins. I read the Shadow and Bone trilogy and Six of Crows duology in anticipation of Shadow and Bone on Netflix, then decided to stick with Leigh Bardugo and read her Wonder Woman book . I also read The Last Wish , the first book in the Witcher series. It will probably be a while before I get around to that show but I enjoyed the book.

None of my nonfiction reading blew me away, but it was all good.

I definitely read some fanfiction, but I couldn’t tell you what. And I read a lot of articles, most of which you can find in my Links category.

I hope to read for pleasure a lot more next year.

What did you read in 2021? If you had a hard time reading, what did you do instead?

🔖 Read The Scholarship of Sexy Privilege: Why Do I Love Dark Academia Books?

…there will always be fringe groups who parade their complete rejection of the source material and make it their own. This ownership over dark academia gives me the courage to keep going with real academia; to forge a space again in the gaps and achieve immortality in the sharing of ideas without boundaries.

I had assumed that since I, a 40-year-old mother of a young child, have been very into Dark Academia for more than a year, it must be over. But it looks like I was wrong.