Yam Uncle's Thoughts

I recently found out that Yale has this thing called The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.  From what I can see in the website, it's a center that helps teach people like school counsellors on how to implement emotional intelligence education into their curriculum.  Their strategy is built around this framework called RULER, which stands for Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing, and Regulating emotions. I thought it was cool that there's an initiative like this to teach counsellors all over the US (the list is here , and it seems pretty geographically dispersed, pretty cool) on a tested way of teaching kids how to work with their emotions. I feel like this is the future: where kids get to learn how to work with their feelings, in a collaborative, safe place.  If they had this when I was a kid, I feel like it would have been one of the most important classes I could have taken.  I'm really glad there are people out there taking their time to make...

I don't think anything I've watched before has struck me as strongly as Jim Trainor's animations.  "The Moschops" is a masterpiece, and I catch myself thinking about it all the time: https://vimeo.com/252757093 ^ (Link to watch The Moschops.  Hopefully Blogspot shows some sort of blurb?  If not please go watch it, it's short and it's amazing) Jim Trainor's story is really interesting too.  If you've read my Bob Solomon post, you'll know that I love reading about the back stories of people.  Here's the interview of him that I read:  http://www.edgeofframe.co.uk/jim-trainor/ Few things that stand out are that he studied English literature in college (not fine arts/ animation), and that it took him 11 years to make his first animation, The Fetishist (also really good, although I think I got too scared and never watched the whole thing...).  Now he teaches at the Art Institute in Chicago and is a respected teacher of his craft. It...

Thought I would share something that I learned, that I thought was pretty cool.  I've recently tried to get more into spirituality, for reasons that I hope I can get into more depth about in future posts.  But anyways, I've always been pretty skeptical of the whole notion of a higher power, or a guiding hand.  I thought that maybe someone out there on the internet might have had the same feeling as I had, and maybe had a few words to say.  So I literally looked up "spirituality for the skeptic" on Google.  Lo and behold, apparently there was a book with the same exact title, written by a guy named Robert C. Solomon.  I read a few of the pages from the excerpt, namely the introduction and a little bit of the first chapter.  It was exciting to finally be able to read something by someone who, for most of his life, has "been dismissive of both spirituality and religion", and regarded most conversations regarding spirituality "to be platitudinous if no...