I entered 2024 on the brink of burnout. Maybe a bit past the brink. I didn’t feel secure in my job; I was still exhausted from a rushed move at the start of the year; I ignored the fact that I was already busy and tired and went for my…
How I, an immunocompromised person, am navigating life right now. With some frustrated opinions thrown in.
A post about my own burnout, with some resources for people who are, themselves, burned out or who are in a position to help prevent/mitigate others’ burnout. TLDR: It’s a lot more organizational than individual, and so are the solutions.
I started a new job last week. I’m excited about it! I also want to issue this reminder: as has always been the case, my posts here represent my own feelings and opinions and not those of any employer, past, present, or future.
This is only interesting in an historical sense; we’ve learned a lot since I wrote it.
I usually do a year-end post. That’s not happening in 2017. This year took so much from me, and from people I care about, that I refuse to write about it. But I’d like to write about 2018. Not “resolutions” so much as “plans and goals”—and maybe not even those…
I am teaching Introduction to Programming for Information Professionals, online, for the University of Maryland this semester. My colleague, Bill Kules, has taught this class (in person) several times and has included social justice/critical perspectives aspects in at least one prior semester (docx). We talked about including it in each…
I have a whole series of posts coming up, where I talk about hospitality in a particular context (spoiler: the context is interviewing and hiring). But some recent threads on the Code4Lib listserv make me want to write about it in a different context, maybe a little more broadly. Also,…
We have this ideal, in American society, of a “low maintenance†person, and I get the sense that the ideal is especially important for women to meet. We should be easygoing. We should not complain, and whatever is offered to us should be enough, should be accepted with gratitude. We must never impose on others. Taken to its logical conclusion, it also means suffering should be done in silence.
I’m a good project planner, great with logistics. I had backup plans for my backup plans. But I also had a chronic illness to contend with, and the one place where I should have known to build in extra leeway—the parts involving physical labor and the ability to sleep soundly in adverse conditions—were the parts where everything went sideways. And, oddly, they were the parts for which I’d done the least contingency planning.
