#also as a local love simon enjoyer i do have to agree. love that book and love that movie

[eldritchqueerture]

Okay I thought of something to ramble about and it’s the utterly bizarre and confusing relationship the CW show Riverdale has to chronological time. Apologies in advance for how long this rant will be.

Disclaimer: it’s been several years since I’ve watched Riverdale, and I never actually finished the show. This is all based on my memories. Also, I’m pretty sure the seasons I never got around to get EVEN weirder with their timelines.

So, season 1 makes the setting of Riverdale anachronistic as an obviously deliberate stylistic choice. The characters all have computers and cell phones, but they’ve also got rotary landlines, and the cars all look like they’re from the 50s, and the costumes tend to be vaguely vintage-inspired. Honestly I always found this element kind of fun - it’s a unique-ish style, and it pays visual homage to the era the original comics were set. (Side ramble: season 1 is both the most normal the show ever was and also the closest it ever got to being “good” in a traditional sense. Season 1 was a reasonably competent teen drama/murder mystery with an interesting aesthetic - it wasn’t anything groundbreaking, but it wasn’t terrible. And then it almost immediately went off the rails in ways that are wildly entertaining but a lot harder to take seriously. Post-season-1 Riverdale is, imo, the peak of “makes no damn sense, compels me though” tv)

And then in season 2(?), there’s an awkward cross-promotional thing where a bunch of characters go to the movies to see the 2018 film Love, Simon, and talk about how great Love, Simon is, and shuts generally urge the viewers to please go see Love, Simon - now in theaters. And it’s like. Oh. So it is set in the modern day, then? This is just a modern day town where everyone drives cars from the 50s?

And from then on it’s kind of hard to tell if the writers are trying to set it in a nebulous anachronistic dreamscape like in season one, or if it’s concretely set in the modern day - they kind of go back and forth.

And then. There’s the time skip. I can’t remember what season it is, but eventually, the writers announce that after the characters graduate from high school, there’s going to be a seven-year time skip, and the rest of the season will pick back up with the characters as adults. This seems like an idea that will accomplish a lot: it will allow the show to stop pretending that these clearly-in-their-20s-and-30s actors are fresh out of high school, it will allow the characters to take different paths after high school and then just pick up the story when they’re all back in Riverdale, and also, it will explain away why none of these characters are wearing masks or social distancing or at all acknowledging the global pandemic that is currently happening. Win-win. Makes sense. But then.

The characters are all about to graduate, and Archie is trying to decide what he wants to do after high school - does he want to go to college, or does he want to join the army? And right before graduation, he’s in the high school, and he sees a photo of a previous graduating class of Riverdale High posing in their uniforms before they go off to fight in what is very clearly WWII. And Archie hallucinates some soldiers in WWII uniforms during graduation, and that makes him decide to join the army. So WWII happened in the past. Makes sense so far.

And then the time skip picks up with Archie getting out of the army, and in all the flashbacks, it is very clear that he just fought in WWI. There’s trenches, and WWI-style uniforms, and Archie has shell shock (which obviously can and does happen in any war, but the way it’s framed in this feels very WWI-coded. I don’t know how to explain it, but it is.) So WWI is the present now?

And Betty’s post-time skip storyline is *just* Silence of the Lambs. Like she’s training to be an FBI agent and hunting down a serial killer and there’s a lot of VERY on the nose references. So the costuming and set design of her storyline is super 1970s, but then she meets up with Archie the WWI vet?

And THEN, in Veronica’s storyline there’s a scene where she’s arguing with her dad about his sexism and she says something like, “It’s 2021, dad, women aren’t property anymore,” and it’s like. ??? You just skipped seven years into the future?? Shouldn’t it be 2028? Was the show secretly a period piece set, very specifically, seven years in the past the whole time?? If it’s 2021 why aren’t any of the characters acknowledging covid? Was Love, Simon released seven years earlier in this universe?

And then Jughead gets kidnapped by Mothman.

sometimes i will learn things about riverdale and its just. more unhinged than i ever expected

[depizan]

Three Formative Writing Moments

I was tagged by @serialephemera, consider yourself tagged, people reading this, if you want to do it.

Whoops, apparently I am very wordy today. Let’s have a cut.

Now i just have to think of positive writing moments. There’s a reason I’m a painfully slow, frequently writer’s blocked fanfic writer instead of someone whose books are found at the local bookstore. And it wasn’t (directly) the trying to get published...

(I am the literary version of the Harry Chapin song “Mr. Tanner” - taking myself seriously was the worst decision I could’ve made. Partly because I like all the wrong things and partly because there’s a part of me that will always think other people are righter than I am.)

And now, after that cheery start!

1. When I was in jr. high, I was writing a fantasy story about jr. high - or maybe it was high school - kids who ended up in a fantasy world somehow and were destined to stop the evil whoever, but they didn’t really believe that and were trying to figure out how to get home.

I can’t remember whether it was going to be one of those stories where the chosen ones didn’t really become the chosen ones until they decided, yes, they wanted to do the thing, or whether it was going to be one of those stories where the chosen ones just kind of accidentally did the thing while trying to get home. You see, part way through writing it, I realized I was more invested in the miserable minion of the big bad who was spending the book trying to capture them for the big bad and failing.

Good bye teen portal fantasies; hello moral conflicts, rogues, and stories not tied to Earth, circa present day.

(Dear god, that story idea sounds so very anime. Even though this was a year or two before I discovered anime at my first convention.)

2. I was home sick in ninth grade and bored enough to try the TV (we didn’t have cable). It went *click* soap opera *click* soap opera *click* ...not a soap opera. One local channel filled their bored people at home daytime slots with reruns of ‘80s detective and adventure shows, and so I discovered Simon & Simon and other shows that a decided influence on the kinds of stories I write.

I know it’s kind of strange to point to television in a writing meme, but, damn it, Simon & Simon (and to a lesser extent the other shows I discovered in those days) is one of the best examples of the kind of fiction I want to create that I can think of. Fun stories with people-level stakes, main characters who are not the best at anything, frequently lose fights, sometimes get bamboozled by their clients, but are not jokes and generally end up succeeding. Characters who are neither perfect nor giant piles of angst, who may not always agree and who sometimes squabble, but who care about one another, and about doing what’s right. But also sometimes do things because it would be fun, or out of curiosity, or other human reasons. Stories that are mostly upbeat and enjoyably tropey, but don’t always play all the tropes straight (particularly the ones I don’t like).

3. Not exactly a moment, but someday I’ve got to try to figure out why - and how - Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch works. It’s frickin’ Les Mis on Discworld, the villain is one of the more horrifying fictional villains, there’s really fucking dark shit here and there, the main character doesn’t know if he’ll ever see his family again, and yet, for all of that, it’s still Discworld, and over all the book is not depressing. It’s even one of my favorite - possibly my favorite - Discworld books. It is impossible. And yet it is.

I generally envy and am fascinated by writers managing to juggle dark and light and have it work and not be a tonal disaster or depressing, and not have the dark parts ruin the light, or vice versa. But Night Watch is definitely one of the more extreme examples. Like, how do you have a book in a comedy series where the main character has to mercy kill torture victims!? And yet...

I would love to know how authors who so successfully manage tone do so. I feel like in my own writing, it takes very little to permanently tip things in ways I don’t like, while other people can steer the tone of their stories all over the place and never lose control of it. It amazes me.

[shaizstern]

Article from NYT: To Build Emotional Strength, Expand Your Brain

The quest to understand something new is a key factor to building the resilience necessary to weather setbacks and navigate life’s volatility.

Monika Aichele

By Kerry Hannon

This article is part of a series on resilience in troubled times — what we can learn about it from history and personal experiences.

Eight years ago, while working as an assistant Cuyahoga County prosecutor in Cleveland, Gayle Williams-Byers was in the throes of a serial killer case when she decided to take horseback-riding lessons.

This summer, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Ms. Williams-Byers, 46, now a South Euclid Municipal Court judge, started free online classes in American Sign Language offered by Gallaudet University in Washington. She also took a webinar in labor trafficking. In recent years, she has enrolled in a variety of classes and workshops, including one on how to get a commercial driver’s license — not something she plans to act on any time soon.

“I don’t have a reason to use these things in my professional life, but learning helps me to focus better,” Ms. Williams-Byers said. “It’s also something that I have some control over. I take classes in subjects I am just wildly interested in learning about it. When I expand my brain, my wingspan is greater. It lets you get a little higher, to get above the headwinds.”

Ms. Williams-Byers’ quest to understand something new is an example of what many career coaches, authors and experts view as a key factor to building the resilience necessary to weather setbacks and navigate life’s volatility.

The theory: To deal effectively with change, it helps to be engaged in changing yourself. “One of the things that makes us resilient is that when we see a challenge, and when we face a struggle, we engage with it, rather than shut down,” said Simon Sinek, author of “The Infinite Game” and “Start With Why.”

“What I have learned from my career is that something I learned over here helps me over there,” he said. “Even if I don’t know that is happening, any kind of learning benefits all aspects of life.”

Embrace Your Passions

Mr. Sinek, for instance, is a dance lover. “My dancer friends kept telling me I should take classes, and it would help me and my love of the medium. I begrudgingly agreed, and I took some basic ballet classes.”

Even though it was for personal enrichment, those classes helped his developing work as a public speaker. “My posture is much better,” he said. “I move more effortlessly across the stage from my hips, instead of my shoulders.”

When you’re in the process of learning, your viewpoint changes, and you spot connections that you never noticed before. “Resilience is about being adaptable in a variety of different circumstances,” said Dorie Clark, who teaches executive education at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and is the author of “Reinventing You.”

“It is a combination of being able to pick yourself up when there are setbacks, but also it is about having the kind of cross-training necessary to be flexible in an uncertain world where we don’t know what is around the corner,” Ms. Clark said.

Learning Requires Determination

This all may require pushing yourself — not the easiest of tasks in times of crisis. “If they are relatively senior professionals, it has been years, or decades, since they have not been good at something, and it can be enormously psychologically stressful to have to face that,” Ms. Clark said. “Inevitably, when you are in the early stages of learning something you haven’t done before, you are probably going to be bad at it — at least not very good.”

Two years ago, Ms. Clark entered a program to train as a musical theater lyricist. “People in this program have master’s degrees in musical theater writing,” she said. “At first, having to surround myself with people who truly had exponentially more expertise was humiliating on a regular basis, but it was invigorating and inspiring.”

Stay Curious

Being resilient has a lot to do with perspective. “People who commit themselves to a life of learning show up with curiosity,” Mr. Sinek said. “They show up with interest. They show up with a student’s mind-set. You don’t have to be curious about everything. You have to be curious about some things.”

Those who routinely and consciously engage in learning become more confident about their ability to figure things out once a crisis hits, according to Beverly Jones, an executive career coach and author of “Think Like an Entrepreneur, Act Like A CEO.” “Each time they hit a bump, they spend less time lamenting and quickly turn to determining what they must learn in order to climb out of the hole,” she said.

Moreover, learners develop a more optimistic mind-set, which helps them jump into action, according to Ms. Jones. “In part, this is because each time you become aware of learning something new it feels like a victory,” Ms. Jones said. “You maintain the positivity that is a key to resilience.”

Tailor Your Learning

An important element to remember is that people learn in different ways, Mr. Sinek said. “I can’t read a book a week. I learn by having conversations. I like talking to people who know more than me about any particular subject. I love peppering them with questions. And I love trying to say back in my own words what I think they are telling me to see if I understand it.”

Right now, with his speaking engagements on hold, Mr. Sinek is studying kintsugi, the Japanese art of putting broken pottery pieces back together with epoxy and a painted gold solution, which highlights the breaks. The concept: By accepting blemishes and flaws, you can produce an even sturdier, more striking, piece of art. On a deeper level, it functions as a symbol of the human experience.

For one thing, it requires patience. “It turns out the epoxy dries slowly,” Mr. Sinek said. “If you do all the pieces at once, it all just falls apart again. I want to be done with my project and move on to the next. I can’t. I have to stick one piece and hold it for an uncomfortable amount of time and then let sit for 24 hours.”

There are myriad paths to learning from taking part in a free online class to reading a nonfiction book to watching a documentary to a complete immersion in a grade-free educational experience.

Chip Conley, 59, for example, founded the Modern Elder Academy, in Baja, Mexico, a group dedicated to midlife learning.

The academy’s core curriculum is based on helping people move from a fixed to a growth mind-set in midlife and beyond, according to Mr. Conley. “Those with a fixed mind-set define success as winning, which becomes problematic when they face difficult circumstances,” he said. “Those with a growth mind-set define success as learning. They’re not trying to prove themselves, but instead improve themselves, so they get less focused on the results and more focused on the journey.”

At the academy, options include collaborative bread baking, improv comedy, learning how to surf or do yoga for the first time and penning a poem to offer to your cohort.

Academic and Online Options

There are also educational opportunities for nontraditional students at some top universities through academic or yearlong programs for executives and other professionals. Students can audit classes, attend lectures, and work on projects with graduate and undergraduate students.

These include the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute, Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative, the University of Notre Dame’s Inspired Leadership Initiative, the University of Minnesota’s Advanced Careers Initiative, and the University of Texas at Austin, which offers the Tower Fellows Program.

Three years ago, Glenn Lowenstein, 60, was ready for a new challenge. The Houston resident had sold Lionstone Investments, the real estate investment company he founded in 2001, to Ameriprise. “It was a hard decision,” he said. “The business had been my dream, and then I lived the reality of it for 20 years, and all of a sudden there was a void. It was scary. When there is nothing in front of you, that’s where the resiliency has to come in.”

His solution was to return to campus. Two years ago, he was a Towers fellow. “You have to put yourself out there in an environment you have not been in before,” he said. “It’s a combination of confidence in yourself, enjoyment in exploration and going toward your fear.”

As a fellow, Mr. Lowenstein, for example, enrolled in an advanced graduate philosophy seminar. “It was way above my head,” he said. “I would try my hardest to follow every single word of the conversation. It was fascinating to me the way the graduate students articulated their arguments. It was super esoteric stuff, but I would walk out and be ‘wow, I am learning a new way to communicate here.’”

The best part, though, was his time on campus: “It was so cool to be in an environment where I wasn’t the expert,” he said. “I wasn’t the person relied on to know everything, so I could sit back and enjoy the process of learning, and that’s positive energy. My aim is to keep my mind and body and spirit healthy. I don’t think you can do that without learning.”

For those who can’t afford the time or money required for a high-level fellowship or university program, there are myriad paths to learning. Free or reasonably priced online classes are available through sites like Coursera, EdX, The Great Courses, LinkedIn Learning, MasterClass, Skillshare, TED Talks and Udemy.

Other options (online these days) include adult education centers, local libraries, community colleges and universities, and Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes. One Day University, a subscription service ($7.95 a month), offers five livestreaming lectures a week and recorded talks.

For Ms. Williams-Byers, learning is “that extra oomph to turn off the crazy in life and pour yourself into something that is fantastic that you can benefit from,” she said.

That explains her decision to take up a new sport during a particularly difficult case. “I had dealt with murder cases before, but this was unsettling,” she said. “I could feel myself disconnecting from the case because of the emotional drain. The hourlong lessons refocused my mind, so I could bounce back when I returned to the office.”

Original Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/health/resilience-learning-building-skills.html