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Active Learning
Jul. 8th, 2019 09:31 am
While I'm waiting for a final verdict from Coursera, I received a few "thanks but no thanks" emails from Santa Clara University, Sage Intacct, and a couple of other places. That's to be expected, of course -- a lot of these places are looking for specific experience that I just don't have. It's honestly better that I've received a response from them, so I can keep my job search document updated.
This week, I really want to knuckle down into a productive routine. I'm still working out what that means, but I have the time to play around with it. While I'm not employed, I want to devote at least an hour of every day towards writing, reading, studying, and cleaning. Right now, the plan is to use the entire hour for one project -- though I think I might have goofed slightly on that today just because of how things have turned out. Nothing wrong with that, though. I might find that shifting gears actually works better with my ADHD brain, anyway.
For writing, I'd really like to maintain my momentum with "Crushing The Competition", my Patreon story. For a long time the characters have languished in this nebulous uncertainty realm, where I wasn't sure who they were or how they would react to situations. Part of this was because of the trouble I was having with the world and the main character; there are broad strokes that I wanted to paint, but when it came to specifics I was kind of lost.
Honestly I think the block stems from my own unwillingness to be open about my own sexual preferences. They're highly dependent on mood, and as I get older I find myself shifting in ways that are hard to put to words. As much as I really love being in a position of service, I find myself resisting the authority of others almost constantly. Maybe it's the inherent distrust in our institutions out in the real world, but the idea of having autonomy -- or some form of choice about how I serve -- is really important to me. This doesn't lend itself to a traditional dom/sub relationship, and I have trouble imagining what scenario fits well within that paradigm.
With "Crushing The Competition", this puts the main character in a bit of a bind. I had drawn him as someone who secretly wants to submit but has an unspoken disdain for the ways submission tend to be expressed in his culture. I didn't quite know how to frame that without making the protagonist unlikable or wishy-washy, but thinking through my own issues regarding trust and reciprocal respect has helped me focus a lens on HIS internal conflict. Ultimately, rethinking the serial as a vehicle for me to work through my own tangled thoughts on dominance, submission, and servitude gives the project a narrative and personal momentum that had been missing.
This week, I'm focusing on finishing up two classic novels -- "Brave New World" and "Steppenwolf". I had never read Huxley's dystopian novel before and thought it was high time to give it a try. It's quite fascinating so far; I hadn't realized that dystopian novels weren't a thing before he helped to popularize the genre, so the first half presents this new London as a finely-tuned machine where all needs are met and the protagonist stubbornly resists it because of some personal failing. It isn't until he comes into contact with other outsiders -- expat 'savages' he discovered while on holiday -- that the flaws within the society really come into focus. It's so curious that Bernard is such a sympathetic but unrootable character; maybe it's because he really goes off the rails when he comes into just a little bit of power.
I'm reading "Steppenwolf" for the third time, and I'm picking up a lot more about how the nameless main character relates to the society he's in. He reminds me a lot of Ryan, actually. A free thinker who builds his identity through opposition to the mainstream, and how that can actually, strangely, be the root cause of so much unhappiness. At the same time, it's easy to see how we fall into these traps. Still, the very idea of a 'conflicted' self is an illusion. And by extension, the idea of conflict with society can be just as illusory. Self, society, and the images we build of them are snapshots of a truth that is no longer accurate; self-definition is so impossible to pin down because nothing is ever static. We are ever-changing, as people and a civilization. How can we possibly be in conflict when there are no permanent sides to push against one another? Before I saw Steppenwolf as a wise man in a dark night of the soul. Now, with a bit more experience, I see him as a bit of a warning. In order to recognize who we are, we can't stand apart from the world: we need to embrace it.
I've signed up to another Coursera course called "Mindshift", which is a bit of a sequel to the first one I took -- "Learning How to Learn". It extends and deepens some of the concepts in the previous course, and so far has shown the value of "slow" learning, perseverance, and flexibility with studying. It's been really great so far, and has inspired me to go back and become more "active" with learning the building blocks of the English language and modern storytelling. I'm quite excited to carry those lessons over to my writing.
Finally, I think the time has come to "Kondo" a lot of my possessions. I want to carve out an uninterrupted chunk of time to look at my clothes and books and such, keep the things that bring me joy and start unloading the rest. You tend to accumulate so much stuff in a life, and it helps to remember that in order to get where you need to be it helps to shed some baggage every now and again.
That's all for now. Time to push ahead.
This week, I really want to knuckle down into a productive routine. I'm still working out what that means, but I have the time to play around with it. While I'm not employed, I want to devote at least an hour of every day towards writing, reading, studying, and cleaning. Right now, the plan is to use the entire hour for one project -- though I think I might have goofed slightly on that today just because of how things have turned out. Nothing wrong with that, though. I might find that shifting gears actually works better with my ADHD brain, anyway.
For writing, I'd really like to maintain my momentum with "Crushing The Competition", my Patreon story. For a long time the characters have languished in this nebulous uncertainty realm, where I wasn't sure who they were or how they would react to situations. Part of this was because of the trouble I was having with the world and the main character; there are broad strokes that I wanted to paint, but when it came to specifics I was kind of lost.
Honestly I think the block stems from my own unwillingness to be open about my own sexual preferences. They're highly dependent on mood, and as I get older I find myself shifting in ways that are hard to put to words. As much as I really love being in a position of service, I find myself resisting the authority of others almost constantly. Maybe it's the inherent distrust in our institutions out in the real world, but the idea of having autonomy -- or some form of choice about how I serve -- is really important to me. This doesn't lend itself to a traditional dom/sub relationship, and I have trouble imagining what scenario fits well within that paradigm.
With "Crushing The Competition", this puts the main character in a bit of a bind. I had drawn him as someone who secretly wants to submit but has an unspoken disdain for the ways submission tend to be expressed in his culture. I didn't quite know how to frame that without making the protagonist unlikable or wishy-washy, but thinking through my own issues regarding trust and reciprocal respect has helped me focus a lens on HIS internal conflict. Ultimately, rethinking the serial as a vehicle for me to work through my own tangled thoughts on dominance, submission, and servitude gives the project a narrative and personal momentum that had been missing.
This week, I'm focusing on finishing up two classic novels -- "Brave New World" and "Steppenwolf". I had never read Huxley's dystopian novel before and thought it was high time to give it a try. It's quite fascinating so far; I hadn't realized that dystopian novels weren't a thing before he helped to popularize the genre, so the first half presents this new London as a finely-tuned machine where all needs are met and the protagonist stubbornly resists it because of some personal failing. It isn't until he comes into contact with other outsiders -- expat 'savages' he discovered while on holiday -- that the flaws within the society really come into focus. It's so curious that Bernard is such a sympathetic but unrootable character; maybe it's because he really goes off the rails when he comes into just a little bit of power.
I'm reading "Steppenwolf" for the third time, and I'm picking up a lot more about how the nameless main character relates to the society he's in. He reminds me a lot of Ryan, actually. A free thinker who builds his identity through opposition to the mainstream, and how that can actually, strangely, be the root cause of so much unhappiness. At the same time, it's easy to see how we fall into these traps. Still, the very idea of a 'conflicted' self is an illusion. And by extension, the idea of conflict with society can be just as illusory. Self, society, and the images we build of them are snapshots of a truth that is no longer accurate; self-definition is so impossible to pin down because nothing is ever static. We are ever-changing, as people and a civilization. How can we possibly be in conflict when there are no permanent sides to push against one another? Before I saw Steppenwolf as a wise man in a dark night of the soul. Now, with a bit more experience, I see him as a bit of a warning. In order to recognize who we are, we can't stand apart from the world: we need to embrace it.
I've signed up to another Coursera course called "Mindshift", which is a bit of a sequel to the first one I took -- "Learning How to Learn". It extends and deepens some of the concepts in the previous course, and so far has shown the value of "slow" learning, perseverance, and flexibility with studying. It's been really great so far, and has inspired me to go back and become more "active" with learning the building blocks of the English language and modern storytelling. I'm quite excited to carry those lessons over to my writing.
Finally, I think the time has come to "Kondo" a lot of my possessions. I want to carve out an uninterrupted chunk of time to look at my clothes and books and such, keep the things that bring me joy and start unloading the rest. You tend to accumulate so much stuff in a life, and it helps to remember that in order to get where you need to be it helps to shed some baggage every now and again.
That's all for now. Time to push ahead.
