Hi! I'm Kimberly. This website is my online home and commonplace book. A large language model called it "a digital diary that no one asked for." This front page houses a complete stream of all of my short notes, blog posts, and photos.
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Welcome!
I’m doing a daily tarot pull starting today. Four cards popped out of the deck at me today.
The tarot always knows what we need to hear. Daughter & Son of Cups are my signifiers; pulling them is always special. Daughter reminds me to play with my creativity. Son reminds me that I can leverage it for professional/financial gain & still have an artist’s soul.
5 of Cups is about grief deferred; I choose to read reversal as a special highlight for a card rather than its opposite. I am still moving through grief at the loss of my grandmother. I keep thinking how I loved late night easy conversation with her & my mom. She & my grandfather slept in separate beds. After he died, my mom & I would sit on his bed while she lay in hers & talk about lots of random things. I’m still so perplexed that this is a world without her in it. In this card, it’s worth noting that not all five cups have spilled. There is grief in me, but there’s also love and memory.
10 of Wands is about burnout, as this deck depicts so clearly. I know so many of us are feeling this right now. I myself am tired of my dissertation (though not its topic or research more broadly). I’m tired of the neverending nature of this pandemic & especially the way it limits what I feel safe doing with my kid: I love taking him to museums & zoos but I don’t feel safe doing it right now.
In this layout, the Son of Cups is facing the Daughter of Cups. Perhaps her propensity for play and chasing her interests is a healing for the problems the other cards represent: where to take my career next, how to move through my grief, and how to refill my empty well.
💛
Deck is the Wayhome Tarot by Bakara Wintner & Autumn Whitehurst.
Every night I lie in my kid’s bed until he falls asleep and every night I wish someone would pick me up and carry me to my own bed.
I’ve got that sweet, sweet book hangover where you finish reading and then look around and think, “Where am I? What is this strange ‘real world’? Wasn’t I just in a cafe in France in 1972?”
I’m having to remind myself that the reason a 2 yr ethnographic dissertation I’m reading is more expansive than mine is bc I wrote mine on a compressed timeline in a pandemic with reduced childcare, and not because I’m a garbage scholar.
GENTLE WRITING ADVICE: You could write some words sometime if you feel like it, but if you’re in more of a taking-a-nap or binge-watching-Star-Trek place, that’s cool, too.
The model for a dissertation defense in my head is still f2f. When I try to envision my inevitable remote defense my brain just shuts down. Will I really be a Dr if I don’t have milkshakes or Mediterranean food with Drs Hughes-Hassell, Rawson, Sturm, & Gibson right after the defense?
🔖 I am a Book Person. I don’t love the shots this piece takes at Book People, but I appreciate its conclusion: it would be good to calm down about books. (The verbs attacks Book People are defending themselves against are published, rather than imagined.)
Just got “Wait, you’re KIBA?” for the first time in several years and it still feels kinda good… I’m not a classy fan.
If I have any friends/followers diagnosed with hEDS or HSD who would be willing to talk with me about the diagnostic process & benefits of having a diagnosis, will you let me know? Email or DM is good if you want to talk privately.
How are you holding up? Here's what's up with me.
How are you holding up? Are you holding up? I have a headache today. I really want to write about ideas: craft as healing, being a parent and being other things too, what we mean when we talk about information literacy. My brain though can’t gather all the floaty fragmentary bits of thoughts about these ideas that are whirring through my mind, so I guess I’ll write about them later.
I got my car inspected and its 60K maintenance done. It feels nice to have a car that should be in good shape for another 30K miles. The guy who helped me was the same guy who helped me the last time I took my car in, a year ago, and he recognized me, even with my mask on. He said he remembered my eyes.
So now I think I have memorable eyes.
Last night I had a desire to listen to Michael Crawford sing some distinctly un-Phantom of the Opera songs. I don’t know why. He always sounds ghostly to me, so it’s really funny to hear him do brassy songs in a ghost voice. It makes me happy. The most hilarious is probably The Power of Love, but that’s not on Spotify so last night I went with Any Dream Will Do. Hilarious! They should rename the show Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor DreamGHOST when Michael Crawford sings it.
Have you ever noticed that Michael Crawford doesn’t do a lot of Sondheim? He plays Hero in the movie of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum but on his solo albums there’s not much Sondheim. Maybe a little. (Only vaguely related, another role Crawford had in his early career was Cornelius in Hello, Dolly! and the story of how he got that job is hilarious.)
I’ve been thinking lately about how to be a theater person again, because I miss it and it was a huge part of my identity until the college theater scene kind of beat it out of me. (I made the mistake of aligning myself with the far too serious drama department kids instead of the more fun non-majors putting up their own shows.)
There’s a Theater & Drama Crash Course and it was nice looking through the titles of the videos to realize how much I remember from my BA in dramatic art. I might watch some of those videos and revisit that stuff.
Now is, of course, a terrible time to get back into theater; there’s not much live stuff going on and I’m not really in a position to do virtual shows because my kid could walk in at any minute.
But there are other angles I can approach it from; play reading, playwriting, watching recorded productions, theater history… We’ll see where I go with it.
Anyway, back to my first question.
How are you holding up?
Hi. I’m Kimberly, and everything you need to know about me can be summed up by the fact that I’m currently bullet journaling while rocking out to The Phantom of the Opera’s cover of The Power of Love.
Just over here having an anxiety attack about taking my car to the mechanic for some routine work and state inspection, NBD.
If somebody could get on replacing Larry in “Pinky & the Brain & Larry” with Bernie, that’d be great.
🔖 The Power of German Playwright Bertholt Brecht’s V-Effekt: Oliver Mayer discusses the connection between the January 6 insurrection and Brecht’s work with alienation.
🔖 What’s Behind the Label ‘Domestic Fiction‘?: Soledad Fox Maura writes about why we need to reconsider genre.
🔖 An old piece that the Rec Center brought to my attention: How Writing Fanfic Introduced Me To Myself.
I’ve been feeling the need to do some fun, low-pressure writing. Fic may be just the thing.
🔖 I continue to be proud of my city: Durham Moves to Protect Residents Against Natural Hair Discrimination