Ahoy-hoy, Dear LiveJournal!
I will not be resuming the Story Data Stories just yet, but I do have Updates regarding it!
My perfectionist behind has finally completed the Google Data Analytics capstone and it can be seen here or here as well as my GitHub portfolio. This project makes it look like I can code in Python, but I don’t yet believe that. I need to take another course to be sure.
Similarly, while the Google cert hypothetically taught me R, I want to do another project or take another class until I believe I can use it.
That said, I've completed enough courses on Tableau that I’m three-fourths done with my next cert!
I’ll be keeping my completed homework assignments on my Tableau Public page with the assumption that there’s nothing wrong with transparency as you learn.
I find Tableau quite fun! I plan to add more projects with greater style, complexity, and skill. Likely, the rest of the SDStories will be hosted here. I’ve long known what kind of visualizations I want to use (sankey, chord, dumbbell chart, dendrogram/tree, etc…). Now that Tableau is becoming intuitive to me, I feel like I’ll be able to do these more quickly.
At some point, I will boast about all of this growth on LinkedIn but I want to do more conscious lurking first, boost up others before I say a thing about myself. First I’ll post about some of the community orgs whose events I went to. Destination Joy was fun, I hopefully made new friends at the local creative meetup, there’s a good number of urbanist groups my partner has introduced me to, and I need to overcome my night-owl ways in order to attend the next Creative Mornings—such a fan of that space.
I can’t shake the feeling that I need to do more and more and ever more to show up on social media, and that I don’t deserve to post if I’m not minding my 3Cs. I was so worried that my request for support in my job search would result in radio silence. (Classic social anxiety-haver…) But even as I was drafting this post, two friends sent me opportunities, serving as direct evidence that my worst fears are less justified than thought.
Take that pessimism! We got two more points on the side of optimism today. At this rate, I won’t be able to claim I have little/no friends/community soon.
Updates on the jobs front:
I said yes to a temp job at the county!
However, “the average time to hire in the public sector is 119 days, which is almost four months, according to research by NEOGOV.” “State governments in the public sector have the shortest time-to-hire, filling open positions in 96 days, on average. The local level takes the longest, where government agencies need an average of 130 days to find a qualified hire”.
Thank You Public Sector, Very Cool!
I have moved forward a bit in one of the opportunities I have my fingers crossed for.
As for the other opportunity, hmmm… I’ve spoken with some helpful people and had indications of good news. I think my chances and choices have broadened, but I got some following-up to do today.
Oh, and I will be going to XOXO Fest this weekend! It was my partner’s idea—he’s been before and is already in Portland for it, texting me about how their best-in-the-nation airport has gotten even better. Recently, he has been into “rawdogging” flights, so naturally we’ve been talking about semantic bleaching. Gosh, I love that dude.
On the writing front:
My lovely editor agreed to give me until the end of the month, so I’ve been plugging away.
Recently made it out of writing block, so that's good. I keep getting stuck on the scenes having to do with the mother’s mental illness, which is not surprising at all. 😓 I’m trying to balance scientifically accurate with true to my experience of my mother’s mental illness with not too traumatizing for the target audience. I swear I gave myself Medical Student’s Disease by researching prodromal symptoms. I had to stop and take a quick Do I Have Schizophrenia? test, just to be sure.
(My results were 0 out of 97. “You have answered this schizophrenia screening in such a way as to suggest that you are not likely currently suffering from schizophrenia or a schizophrenia-related disorder.” Well, it’s good to be certain! I’m sometimes paranoid that people are secretly reading this blog and then giving vague or indirect responses online or in person. I usually tell myself that it’s all in my head though. If anyone has something to say to you, they’d say it directly because they know you’re a part-time anxious overthinker, part-time obtuse himbo who can’t read a room.)
This book is hard to write, though! It’s hard, I admit it.
It’s a vibey kids’ book about witches, yes, but it’s also about marronage and therefore necessarily about the reverberations of slavery and the thin line between exclusion and seclusion. So yes, I’m influenced by other kids books like the Tristan Strong series (I’m big fan of Kwame Mbalia, especially his newsletter), there’s also the influence of reading Black Marxism, Lose Your Mother, and Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity as I was drafting it.
Even in the most recent scene, I am proud of myself for working in a reference to Ghanian witch camps in a way that adults can understand but kids may only intuit. My goal is to create something that sticks with kids until they become adults, and then they go back and reread it. “I want to write a classic” is a lofty goal, I know, but lofty goals are my modus operandi.
It's been grounding for me to be writing in San Diego about San Diego, though. I can catch sight of my inner child if I look around the block, try some Internal Family Systems ish, or do the right amount of edibles. Recently, my eczema was acting up due to stress so I took my macbook, my swimsuit, and a beach chair to write on Coronado Beach while getting darker and hotter. I finished a chapter that way.
Lastly, I failed to win a major grant recently. 😢 I’m dragging my heels on letting all my mentors know that their references came to naught. It’s hard to be too upset if the granter in question has shifted from a “big money to individuals in the know” model to a “big money for community orgs that serve everyone” model. Good on you, EG. (I just wish you funded me first.)
I feel like I don't talk about books enough for a literary person so behold: a performance of my participation in literary culture.
After seeing Patrice Caldwell of Phoenix Must First Burn fame posted about it in a super relatable blog post, I started reading listening to What My Bones Know. It also happens to be one of the handful of books a brilliant relative of mine gifted another relative of mine in hopes it would spur them to try therapy. One of the relatives has a CPTSD diagnosis (like me! They also did a multi-hour multi-day psychological battery) and had already read the book.
The other relative is my dad (lol). He has so many symptoms of CPTSD and a life much more hardscrabble than mine, but doesn’t fully believe in mental illness. Obnoxious daughter that I am, I have been pressuring him to read the book, because it’s good medicine.
I kept texting the relative who recommended it: "This is a thing?" or "So that's why that happens…" or "This explains so much!" or “Shoot, I need to work on that.” Some of Stephanie’s insights were kind of “Wait, that’s part of the pattern?” Like, this book also explained why reproductive issues run in my family. Not only did it teach me about emotional flashbacks, I realized some of the ways in which I’ve been placing myself in situations that reinforce and justify maladaptations. Just last week, these insights led me to crying in my partner's arms like an actual emotion-having human person. That's quite impressive for someone who cries as rarely as I do.
I may be a snob about most popular things but this book is a bestseller for a reason. I would recommend it to every other POC in America, particularly the high-achieving children of immigrants or socially-mobile parents. (A+++ Would hawk harder than an MLM girly.) I plan to discuss it with my next therapist, although therapy is also on hiatus.
I won't be giving a more thorough book report because book reviews are unpaid labor. JK—I hope to talk more openly about books once I have the stability of a job. This too is on hold.
That said, here are six books I have all started to read & quite enjoy:
One is by a friend/colleague and helps me feel less alone, one is super indie but similarly speaks to shared Black female/femme experiences, one is a kids book from one of the authors I most admire in this space, and one is by my favorite living writer working her usual magic. The other two just caught my eye in their respective bookstores. I haven’t been devouring them like I did What My Bones Know, but they’re all enjoyable in ways I’m too tired to verbalize.
I also keep buying colleagues’ books. For months, I’ve been dragging my heels on making an Insta post about how I have enough of those to fill a shelf or two. At some point, I plan to post something like even if I'm not loud about it, I support you! I’m afraid the admiration is one-sided, however, hence the heel-dragging.
I halfway feel like I've been too stressed for fiction recently¹. Since 2016, I've been turning to nonfiction more. Nonfiction can teach concrete & real things about the world, whereas fiction can feel too akin to withdrawing from the world instead of participating in it. Publishing is slow, but the Internet is hyper-topical in its breaking news, current events, and local concerns. Nonfiction offers the possibility of becoming a better person in terms of material conditions, whereas fiction is more like an immersive thought experiment—and I say this as a lover of thought experiments!
I've also been reading a lot of nonfiction for my thesis novel. For the heck of it, here's the slide on representative texts that I created for my thesis defense presentation:
I own all the books on these lists, but am ashamed to admit that I haven't finished every one of them. They are the highest priority reads for my current project. I’ve since added Ours by Phillip Williams to the TBR pile of my personal library. I also want to add Abeni's Song by P. Djèlí Clark, Adia Kelbara and the Circle of Shamans by Isi Hendrix, and Keynan Masters and the Peerless Magic Crew by DaVaun Sanders to my middle grade to-read list, but haven’t bought them yet.
That said, I feel a bit estranged from the literary world and likely won't feel part of it until this novel is out. I suck at finding beta and alpha readers so this is my Mathersian one shot to introduce my writing to the world and see who it excites, who’s on a similar wave, who wants to trade work and grow together. Hopefully, the strength of the work will lead reciprocity to me—even if from existing connections.
And because I have been dangerously influenced by manga and anime, I’m tempted to declare rivalry to those who have pulled ahead of me in terms of literary success. I vow to reach the same stage someday and have them acknowledge me as an equal!
Something silly like that, haha.
