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Kathleen Fitzpatrick
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
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<?xml-stylesheet href="pretty-atom-feed.xsl" type="text/xsl"?>
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<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xml:lang="en">
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<title>kfitz</title>
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<subtitle>The long-running and erratically updated blog of Kathleen Fitzpatrick.</subtitle>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/feed/feed.xml" rel="self" />
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/" />
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<updated>2024-11-30T21:44:40Z</updated>
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<id>https://kfitz.info/</id>
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<author>
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<name>Kathleen Fitzpatrick</name>
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</author>
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<entry>
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<title>Start by Admitting Defeat</title>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/admitting-defeat/" />
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<updated>2024-11-30T21:44:40Z</updated>
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<id>https://kfitz.info/admitting-defeat/</id>
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<content type="html"><p>From Oliver Burkeman's <em>Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals</em>, which I am reading for reasons:</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved &quot;work-life balance,&quot; whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the &quot;six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.&quot; The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen.</p>
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<p>But you know what? That's <em>excellent</em> news. (16)</p>
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</blockquote>
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</content>
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</entry>
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<entry>
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<title>In Pursuit of the POSSE Pipedream</title>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/posse-pipedream/" />
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<updated>2024-11-29T19:55:21Z</updated>
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<id>https://kfitz.info/posse-pipedream/</id>
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<content type="html"><p>Some months back, I set up the ability to push new blog posts (or at least summaries thereof) to <a href="https://hcommons.social/@kfitz">my hcommons.social account</a>, using a service called <a href="https://mastofeed.org">Mastofeed</a>. Now that I find myself using <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/kfitz.info">Bluesky</a> at least a bit, I wanted to think about how it might fit into my workflows.</p>
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<p>I'm a big fan of the <a href="https://indieweb.org/POSSE">IndieWeb POSSE</a> mode of publishing here at <a href="http://kfitz.info">kfitz.info</a> (thereby owning my content) and syndicating that content elsewhere. Mastofeed helped me do that, but it's of course Mastodon-specific. After a little searching around I ran across <a href="https://www.raymondcamden.com/2024/11/05/automatically-posting-to-bluesky-on-new-rss-items">this blog post by Raymond Camden</a>, detailing how he used <a href="https://pipedream.com">Pipedream</a> to push new blog posts to Bluesky. The post includes a link to <a href="https://www.raymondcamden.com/2022/12/06/automatically-posting-to-mastodon-and-twitter-on-new-rss-items">his prior use of Pipedream to do the same for Mastodon and Twitter</a>, so I decided to see if I could build a single workflow that (1) listens to <a href="https://kfitz.info/feed/feed.xml">my RSS feed</a> for new posts, (2) extracts the key stuff (in this case, the post title and link) from it, and (3) passes it to both Mastodon and Bluesky.</p>
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<p>Pipedream is nowhere near as no-/low-code as the long-lamented Yahoo Pipes, but it's pretty amazing nonetheless, and provides great <a href="https://pipedream.com/docs">documentation</a> for the many, many things you can build with it. There was a pre-built step for Mastodon posting, so that was easy peasy, but Bluesky required a bit of coding to connect with its API (which is also <a href="https://docs.bsky.app/docs/get-started">pretty well documented</a>). After a few <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/kfitz.info/post/3lc4crk4laj25">minorly amusing missteps</a>, I've now got a workflow up and running that should allow me to publish this post and have notifications about it go out to both hcommons.social and Bluesky within a few minutes.</p>
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<p>Now to go about the having-thoughts-worth-sharing part of the endeavor.</p>
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</content>
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</entry>
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<entry>
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<title>Rebuilding</title>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/rebuilding/" />
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<updated>2024-11-29T16:35:27Z</updated>
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<id>https://kfitz.info/rebuilding/</id>
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<content type="html"><p>At some point a month or so ago (probably more &quot;or so&quot; given my recent <a href="https://kfitz.info/time-is-weird">what is time even</a> challenges), I upgraded the innards of this site from Eleventy 2.0 to Eleventy 3.0. This turned out to require a moderate amount of tinkering in order to get things shifted from <a href="https://www.11ty.dev/docs/cjs-esm/">the older version's use of CommonJS to the newer one's use of ESM</a>. I managed to get it about 95% sorted fairly quickly, however. The one real holdout was my webmentions functionality, which I was having a hard time getting to work in the new iteration.<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://kfitz.info/rebuilding/#fn1" id="fnref1">[1]</a></sup> As my current gig does not afford me a lot of tinkering time, I had to put that aside, figuring that the site was at least doing the basics, and that would do for now.</p>
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<p>I turned back to trying to fix webmentions yesterday, and finally managed to get the data retrieved and cached and munged and filtered in all the ways, such that it landed on the right pages. But it looked <em>terrible</em>. And so there were many more hours of frustration while I tried to figure out why the new <a href="https://www.11ty.dev/docs/plugins/image/">eleventy-image</a> and its fancy transform were causing such trouble in the rendering of webmention avatars.</p>
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<p>Except they weren't. It turned out that it was a basic CSS problem -- as in the css file that styles webmentions was somehow not getting included in the build process. And now it is.</p>
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<p>So: a post to celebrate a successful rebuild! And perhaps even to inspire a bit more writing in the weeks ahead.</p>
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<hr class="footnotes-sep">
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<section class="footnotes">
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<ol class="footnotes-list">
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<li id="fn1" class="footnote-item"><p>Actually, there's one more thing: a footnote rendering issue. So that's next up for this afternoon's exploration.<sup class="footnote-ref"><a href="https://kfitz.info/rebuilding/#fn2" id="fnref2">[2]</a></sup> <a href="https://kfitz.info/rebuilding/#fnref1" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p>
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</li>
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<li id="fn2" class="footnote-item"><p>And I think that's now fixed as well. <a href="https://kfitz.info/rebuilding/#fnref2" class="footnote-backref">↩︎</a></p>
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</li>
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</ol>
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</section>
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</content>
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</entry>
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<entry>
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<title>Passivity vs. Accountability</title>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/passivity/" />
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<updated>2024-10-01T12:01:31Z</updated>
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<id>https://kfitz.info/passivity/</id>
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<content type="html"><p>I have a book coming out this month (<a href="https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12787/leading-generously">preorder here</a>) exploring the tools through which people caught in the middle of bureaucratic systems can work together to transform their institutions. These tools can also be used by folks in leadership positions to ensure that they’re using the reach that their perch on the org chart provides in order to do good.</p>
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<p>I am realizing this morning, however (for reasons), that though I talk a lot about communication, about honesty, about vulnerability, and about trust, one thing I never flat out say in the book is AVOID THE PASSIVE VOICE, especially in messages in which you are having to reckon with something bad. This is not just a principle of good writing: it’s a demonstration of willingness to take responsibility for the power that you hold.</p>
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<p>You are, inevitably, going to make decisions that turn out to be bad ones. When you do, you have to own your role in those decisions and be accountable for the harm those decisions cause. Mistakes do not just get magically made without a mistake-maker.</p>
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<p>And even when you feel -- perhaps correctly -- that the decision you made was the only one that could be made, that circumstances left you with only one option, you still need to own it. You might be able to explain, but you have to be cautious with explanations, to avoid making it appear as though you are deflecting your own responsibility. As painful as it is to be publicly accountable, you <em>must</em> take that accountability to your community seriously. Hand-wavy gestures that shift blame are visible to everyone, and are a significant factor in destroying trust.</p>
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<p>You cannot lead in the passive voice. You cannot build good relationships in the passive voice. And you cannot undo damage in the passive voice. You can only deepen it.</p>
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</content>
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</entry>
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<entry>
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<title>Time Is Weird</title>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/time-is-weird/" />
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<updated>2024-09-08T22:21:58Z</updated>
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<id>https://kfitz.info/time-is-weird/</id>
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<content type="html"><p>There's this moment that happened a lot of years ago: I was walking through the living room of the apartment I was living in and the television was on playing god knows what, and something made me think, <em>you know, the next time I'm 25 --</em>, followed quickly by <em>you big dope, that's not going to happen...</em>, at which point I stopped dead and thought <em>you do realize that standing right here, right now, is the youngest you will ever be again... right?</em></p>
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<p>All of that happened in a split second, but I stood there for a solid minute taking it in, my head more silent than it had ever been. I just kind of froze, simultaneously shocked by the obviousness of the thought and by the fact that even though I'd obviously <em>known</em> that all along, that time only moves in one direction, that we only ever get older, I hadn't really internalized it until that moment.</p>
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<p>I was 34 then, which seems like it was yesterday. Except it was the fall of 2001, and I was on my pre-tenure sabbatical, trying like crazy to finish the manuscript of my first book. It was not long after 9/11, and I was still having a hard time getting my brain to wrap itself around any number of things -- what was happening in the world around us, what I was trying to argue in my book, what time even was.</p>
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<p>I had cause to remember this moment earlier today. I'm 57 now, and there's some core part of me that is genuinely unsure how that happened. I can sit down and do the math and it all adds up, and yet it doesn't make sense to me at all -- <em>sense</em> in the same internal way as that moment of realizing that I was only ever going to get older.</p>
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<p>I have all kinds of physical evidence of the passage of time, in my creaky knees, my worsening eyesight, my ever-slowing metabolism, but there's something in me that just doesn't want to believe that it's all a one-way trip, that I can't recover parts of who I was or some of the paths I didn't take.</p>
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<p>Don't get me wrong: even if I could go back, I wouldn't -- I have enjoyed my life and my work more and more as time has gone on, and I'm happier than I've ever been. And that retirement thing -- not too many years into the future -- looks pretty sweet.</p>
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<p>It's just funny how even after all these years, I can still get tripped up by the sadness of time, the stuff that gets left behind, the things that never quite manifest. Time may only move in one direction, but I still find myself needing to learn the same things over and over again.</p>
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</content>
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</entry>
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<entry>
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<title>Like Riding a Bike</title>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/like-riding-a-bike/" />
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<updated>2024-08-03T21:45:58Z</updated>
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<id>https://kfitz.info/like-riding-a-bike/</id>
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<content type="html"><p>The cliché, it turns out, is <em>mostly</em> true. But only mostly.</p>
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<p>Since I moved to East Lansing -- seriously, for seven years now -- I have had the itch to get a bicycle. Nothing fancy, nothing fast, just a commuter bike that I can tool around town on and maybe hit a well-paved trail or two with.</p>
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<p>But I haven't scratched that itch, largely because I wasn't sure it was real. I mean, it's been at least *<em>coughcoughcough</em>* years since I've been on a non-stationary bike. (The number you missed is big enough that even I'm shocked by it.) So I wasn't entirely convinced that if I had a bicycle I'd really ride it. And as that number of years got larger and larger (not to mention the number of years old I am, which just seems to keep increasing) I got more and more convinced that riding a bike again was out of the question.</p>
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<p>I had a series of bikes as a kid, as you do, and loved to ride. In high school my bus stop was about a mile from my house, so I rode my bike there most mornings and left the bike locked to a pole, and then rode it home again. One day, though, when I was maybe 14, I hit a patch of wet gravel on my ride home and lost control of the bike. I slid one way and then overcompensated the other, and wound up with a pretty nice road rash. That healed quickly, but the fear produced by that fall didn't. I got my driver's license soon after that (this was Louisiana in the '80s, a time and place where I am horrified to remember that we let kids get full-on licenses at 15) and got a crappy car and just put the bike away.</p>
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<p>Some years later -- I think I was in my masters program -- I wanted to ride again, and so I bought a pretty cool bike and rode back and forth to campus a bit, and around the campus lakes a bit. It was nice, but not as great as I wanted it to be. I think I hadn't really shaken the fear. In any case, after my masters I moved to a series of non-bikeable places, and that was that.</p>
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<p>So when I moved here and discovered how many of my colleagues cycle -- some quite seriously, others for basic getting-around-town -- I started thinking about it again. Thinking about how fun it would be to have a bike to run errands and ride the river trail on. But I did nothing.</p>
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<p>Until today. One of the people I follow on Mastodon (hello, <a href="https://alaskan.social/@seachanger">malena</a>!) has been posting a bit lately about the feeling of freedom that riding can generate, and it's had me looking around online to see if there was something that would call to me. And today it did.</p>
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<p>Before I could let myself overthink it, I drove out to the bike shop that had the model I'd fallen in love with, got into a great conversation with the guy who worked there, and took the bicycle out for a test ride in the parking lot. Getting started was a little awkward, but once I was going... it was exactly right. It felt great.</p>
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<p>So I bought it -- spending WAY more than I wanted to, but boy do I love this thing -- and brought it home, and went out for a several-times-around-the-block ride to start the process of relearning how to ride.</p>
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<p>That cliché, again, is mostly true. Parts of riding feel absolutely natural. But there are several things that I'm going to have to work on. My balance is not what it was, and feeling a little wobbly, especially when I'm going slowly, produces a flicker of that old fear. So I need to work on balance, both for confidence and to get to the point where I can comfortably lift a hand off the handlebars to signal turns, which I'll definitely need to be able to do before I can venture any further.</p>
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<p>I so look forward to venturing further.</p>
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</content>
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</entry>
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<entry>
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<title>New Jobs</title>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/new-jobs/" />
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<updated>2024-07-20T16:08:20Z</updated>
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<id>https://kfitz.info/new-jobs/</id>
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<content type="html"><p>I've announced a few places (though apparently not here) that I started a new job a little while back.</p>
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<iframe src="https://hcommons.social/@kfitz/112565349109431529/embed" class="mastodon-embed" style="max-width: 100%; border: 0; text-align: center" width="600" height="250" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe><script src="https://hcommons.social/embed.js" async="async"></script>
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<p>It's been an intense experience over this last month-plus, not least because of the weird timing of starting this new role. During my first week on the job, I was in Austria serving on a grant panel Monday and Tuesday, traveled home on Wednesday, and then was in the office Thursday and Friday. This was, in fact, the third job in a row that I've started elsewhere: my first days at the MLA were spent at a Scholarly Communication Institute gathering at the University of Virginia, and my first day as Director of Digital Humanities at MSU was spent driving from Brooklyn to Michigan. Some day I will actually start a new job in the intended fashion.</p>
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<p>Not this time, however. During my second week in the role, I was in Montreal at the annual INKE gathering Monday and Tuesday, traveled home on Wednesday, and then was in the office Thursday and Friday.</p>
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<p>During my third week, I was actually in the office Monday through Thursday! And then went on a pre-planned vacation on Friday, which stretched through the following Thursday, which was July 4. Which means that during my first four weeks, I spent nine days on site.</p>
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<p>Other than that vacation, though, I was working, even though I felt a bit at a loss as to what it was I was actually supposed to be doing, much less how to do it. I've learned a lot in the meantime -- not least how much I have yet to learn.</p>
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<p>I've been having these flashbacks to getting started at the MLA, however, and how exhausted and overwhelmed I felt for months on end. As our executive director, Rosemary Feal, told me back then, the exhaustion is real: learning that much every moment of the day will wear you right out. The challenges inherent in any profession built around ideas of knowledge, mastery, expertise, and so on, coupled with the million daily moments of not-knowing, both large and small, that come with any kind of new job (how do we handle this kind of request? who worked on this process last year? do I have the authority to sign this document? where do we keep the sticky notes?) add up to spending a good bit of time getting really intimate with one's own sense of feeling stupid.</p>
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<p>I just keep reminding myself that it's the nature of new jobs: you haven't done these things before, so of course you don't know how to do them. I'm learning more every day. And it's an enormous privilege to get to spend this time learning, and to have the chance to work with amazing people in support of a college whose purpose and vision I really believe in.</p>
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<p>That doesn't fully mitigate the feeling-stupid parts, or the general exhaustion and overwhelm, but it does help me remember that I have been in a position like this before, and that I can learn what I need to know to succeed.</p>
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</content>
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</entry>
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<entry>
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<title>Links</title>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/links/" />
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<updated>2024-07-19T20:52:40Z</updated>
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<id>https://kfitz.info/links/</id>
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<content type="html"><p>A thing that I have only just realized that I <em>loathe</em> about newsletters: when links in the newsletters have self-referential preview URLs. So when I hover over all the many clever links in “Your Newsletter,” they show up as taking me to yournewsletter.com followed by a hash that only on the server resolves into the actual URL, leaving me with no sense whatsoever about what I’m going to get myself into if I click. In the year of the internet 2024, this is some bad privacy and security practice, man.</p>
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<p>For the love of all that’s holy, get a blog. I have an RSS reader and I’m not afraid to use it.</p>
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</content>
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</entry>
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<entry>
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<title>Expedient</title>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/expedient/" />
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<updated>2024-07-01T20:18:21Z</updated>
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<id>https://kfitz.info/expedient/</id>
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<content type="html"><p>I mentioned yesterday that I'm doing a bunch of fun reading on this mini-vacation, but failed to note (unless you happen to follow my <a href="https://bookwyrm.social/user/kfitz/comment/4786660#anchor-4786660">Bookwyrm self</a>) that a key chunk of the reading I'm doing is catching up on the parts of Robin Sloan's universe that I've previously missed, in preparation for reading his latest, <a href="https://bookwyrm.social/book/1626446/s/moonbound"><em>Moonbound</em></a>. I got my pre-ordered copy the other day and can't wait to dive in.</p>
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<p>Now, however, it's <a href="https://bookwyrm.social/book/44354/s/sourdough-or-lois-and-her-adventures-in-the-underground-market"><em>Sourdough</em></a>. Which I'm thoroughly enjoying, and which has me longing to start a culture (or clone someone else's) and get started baking, even though we really don't eat a lot of bread at home.</p>
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<p>As I was reading yesterday, though, I was taken by his use of the term &quot;expedient,&quot; which comes up one time after another across the story of life in the tech-dominated Bay Area. Our heroine purchases stuff at &quot;an expedient internet retailer&quot; and &quot;the expedient big-box home-supply store.&quot; She gets a ride from &quot;the expedient internet car service&quot; and gets information from &quot;the expedient search engine.&quot; And more besides.</p>
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<p>I was fairly sure I got what was meant here, but reading on the iPad as I am, I finally paused to check, and was gifted with the following definition from the New Oxford American Dictionary:</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>(of an action) convenient and practical although possibly improper or immoral.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>Convenient, I had totally expected, with a little bit of &quot;perhaps not the best choice, but what are you going to do&quot; behind it. But that edge of &quot;possibly improper or immoral&quot; casts a whole new light not just on the term but on my own utterly unthinking uses of those services, a light I too often find it pretty inconvenient and impractical to consider.</p>
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</content>
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</entry>
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<entry>
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<title>Reading</title>
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<link href="https://kfitz.info/reading/" />
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<updated>2024-06-30T14:04:03Z</updated>
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<id>https://kfitz.info/reading/</id>
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<content type="html"><p>I am taking a very brief vacation, not far from home, and not doing much. But reading. For fun. I finished a novel yesterday and read a quick novella this morning, and am now a chapter into another novel. And already I’m feeling re-energized in the way that immersion in other people’s awesome writing does for me: I want to write.</p>
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<p>I don't have a writing project in front of me right now, purposefully so. I promised myself <a href="https://kfitz.info/recalibrating-again/">almost exactly a year ago</a>, after finishing the revisions on <em>Leading Generously</em> (out in October and <a href="https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12787/leading-generously">now available for preorder</a>!), that I would take at least a year and just <em>read</em>, holding off on thinking about a new project until I was really certain I had something worth saying that was burning to said.</p>
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<p>I'm still not there -- I've got a lot of little thoughts tumbling around but without real connection or direction as yet -- so the reading is going to continue. But I'm hoping that the writing might begin to coalesce as well, that the energy I'm feeling generated by the reading I'm doing might manifest itself in the making of sentences and paragraphs if not full arguments.</p>
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</content>
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</entry>
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</feed>
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