That consumption life: Enneagrams, Jessica Jones, more Celeste

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

The song for this post is Can't Truss It, by Public Enemy.

It's been a while since I've written about fun media I'm consuming, so here's a more recent edition!

(previously, previously)

Enneagrams

ALL GLORY TO THE DIAGRAM

Karen and her friend Sara introduced me to a personality-classifier called The Enneagram. As Cambridge Analytica can tell us, personality quizzes are great fun! As a kid I loved reading the Chinese Zodiac descriptions on the placemat of our family's weekly night out, and Charly often incorporated elements of astrology in our stories (Year of the Tiger and Virgo, baby). Myers-Briggs is its own industry, even though it's largely for funzies.

I approach the Enneagram with a similar degree of whimsy, though I give it a bit more credit than most because its basis for personality types are fears and motivations, rather than what year or month you were born in. This makes it feel a bit more directly applicable: these are, in my experience, great ways to model people and their decisionmaking.

Online treatments of the Enneagram are pretty lovely, but Karen and Sara always seemed to know a lot more about the types and what their characteristics are, so I picked up The Enneagram in Love & Work, by Helen Palmer. The bits that make the Enneagram good and fun are still present, but it can be a bit repetitive; certain personality types feel like a slog to read through (which, itself, is decent data for why I might find it hard to relate to some people over others).

The way you know your "type" is literally "read through them and see which one speaks to you." Most will in some circumstances but one or two will likely speak to your general state rather than circumstantial ones. I think I'm a One or a Nine, but there's a lot I relate with on the Five and Fours. A great high-level blog post is here.

Give it a try!

Jessica Jones, Season 2

I'll keep this spoiler-free: I love a few compositional choices they made with the plot, specifically with the antagonist, if you can call them that. You can't really follow-up an enemy like Kilgrave with a traditional villain playing the same game, and I really like what the writers did in its place. Marvel villains tend to be flat in the movies, and when they threaten to be interesting in the Netflix shows (Stick in Daredevil, Cottonmouth in Luke Cage) they get flattened out by something way sillier (The Hand? Diamondback?!). This felt fresh!

I think it's criminal that Carrie-Anne Moss hasn't spent the two decades after The Matrix as a major, major star: she stole every scene she was in. Malcolm and his arc was exceptional as well, and Oscar was a welcome addition. Latinx people in Netflix Marvel's New York were largely a strange prop in Daredevil, Oscar is a step in the right direction.

It wasn't perfect: Trish's arc near the end gave me eye-rolls, and the pacing was often uneven. On the whole, it wasn't as lasting to me as the first season, but it's still better than both Daredevils and I'd put it after Season 1 and Luke Cage, in the Netflix spot.

It also had one of my favorite bits of dialogue in TV, when interrogating a side character about someone named Inez Green:

Inez Green? I call her Meanez Mean!

😙👌

More Celeste

I mentioned Celeste before, and I'm still playing through it. I've beaten all the B-Sides and all but the last two C-Sides; while I'm still mostly focusing on my Deconstruct talk when I sneak away I'm trying to get Golden Strawberries. Wish me luck!