Faye Cheadle

iPhone Addiction

faye — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 11:55:45 +0000

So…remember when I posted that Henry has forced me to use technology? Or, more accurately, how he was the impetus for me to find new uses for my iPhone? Well, now I’m addicted to the damn thing! Crap.

I do love my “space phone”, as someone called it the other day, but I’ve been reminded recently that you have to be mindful of how you use technology. I think the social applications are the worst. On the one hand, they’re fantastic for keeping up with friends and family, finding fascinating news from unexpected places, and in general being connected with people that aren’t near you geographically. On the other, it’s a time suck!

How many of those links you follow will genuinely improve your life and mind? Are you staying in touch with your friends or passing idle time? Do you really need to know that your friends in Atlanta are going to happy hour next Tuesday? Oh wait…I do, I might be there…

I thought about all this last night when Tim and I just sat and played with Henry after dinner. We didn’t watch TV. We weren’t playing Kickin’ Momma on our phones or checking our Twitter feed. We all just sat together. Henry was so content. He didn’t try to grab at our speakers or pull the books out of the shelves, which is what he normally does if we’re with him but not really paying attention. I guess he’s been trying to tell us something.

Later that night I thought about all the books I’ve been meaning to read and how they’ve been piling up. Blogs and stories I’ve been meaning to write and haven’t gotten to. Tasks that have been languishing on my todo list. Basically, my life. And then I thought about all the levels on Cut the Rope I’ve beaten.

Watch out for that idle time. Stop and think about how you really want to be using it.

My Baby Is Forcing Me to Use Technology

faye — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 22:18:14 +0000

I’m such a luddite, which is funny, because I’m a Computer Science major. It’s mostly the influence of my parents. My dad doesn’t even have a cell phone. I don’t usually stay on top of new technologies, but that’s all changing now that I have a baby.

I barely have time (or the free hands) to brush my teeth let alone hop on the computer. However, since I have an iPhone, there’s a lot I have at my fingertips now that I never explored before. I didn’t have to explore, so I just didn’t. Now my phone is one of the few links I have to the adult world.

It all started when I’d hop on my iPhone while nursing. I use an application (which I didn’t even download myself; Tim did) called Total Baby to keep track of diapers, nursing, and other various baby things. So I started using that. And then I started just reading my e-mail or checking Facebook while occupied with Henry. Because I was nursing so much in the beginning, it was the easiest way for me to do anything, so I started exploring what I could do on my phone. I remembered that there was a Kindle application, so I could read books on it. I could play games on it. I could update my blog on it. I even went and got a Twitter account. Oh my goodness, would you look at that! Technology is useful :p

So, thank you, Henry. Thank you for forcing Mommy to use the interwebs ‘n stuff.

Beginners

faye — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 03:26:09 +0000

Beginners

A gay Christopher Plummer : They had some wonderfully loud music in the club tonight! *nnn st nnn st nnn st* What kinda music’s that?
Ewan McGregor as his son : It’s probably house music…
Christopher Pummer : House music…hehe…ok… [writes it down on notepad]

I want to see this movie for that scene and that scene alone. Plus there’s a dog that speaks in subtitles.

Ann Druyan and the Separation of the Mind and the Spirit

faye — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 21:09:00 +0000

Ann Druyan cowrote the Cosmos television series with Carl Sagan, and was his wife for the last 15 years of his life. I don’t recall how I came across this speech, but it’s great. It’s a talk she gave to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. She describes the prevalent schism between material reality and the spiritual just beautifully. Have a look!

What happened four or five hundred years ago? During this period there was a great bifurcation. We made a kind of settlement with ourselves. We said, okay, so much of what we believed and what our parents and our ancestors taught us has been rendered untenable. The Bible says that the Earth is flat. The Bible says that we were created separately from the rest of life. If you look at it honestly, you have to give up these basic ideas, you have to admit that the Bible is not infallible, it’s not the gospel truth of the creator of the universe. So what did we do? We made a corrupt treaty that resulted in a troubled peace: We built a wall inside ourselves.

It made us sick. In our souls we cherished a myth that was rootless in nature. What we actually knew of nature we compartmentalized into a place that could not touch our souls. The churches agreed to stop torturing and murdering scientists. The scientists pretended that knowledge of the universe has no spiritual implications.

It’s a catastrophic tragedy that science ceded the spiritual uplift of its central revelations: the vastness of the universe, the immensity of time, the relatedness of all life and it’s preciousness on this tiny world.

The Vegetarian Myth

faye — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:50:05 +0000

Hi Everyone! Here’s a little review of a book I finished recently. It’s adapted from a short speech I made in Toastmasters:

After 20 years as a vegan, author Lierre Keith sat at her kitchen table, distraught. Her health was in shambles, and she had just been told by her doctor that needs to eat meat again to heal. It was an emotional experience for her, but she was at the end of her rope. She had caved in and bought a can of tuna fish. Ms. Keith describes this scene herself in her book, The Vegetarian Myth.

I sat at my kitchen table with a plastic fork. I didn’t use my silverware or my dishes. I opened the can. How could I actually do this? I broke it down into the tiniest steps. Pick up the fork. Put the fork in the tuna. I was so desperate. Pain was the inhabitant of my body, and I was only the shadow it cast. Lift the fork toward you. I had come to the end. Open your mouth. And I was so, so tired.

I ate it.

I don’t know how to describe what happened next. ”I felt like I was coming out of a coma,” one ex-vegan told me. ”It was like being plugged into a low-voltage battery,” another friend said. I could feel every cell in my body — literally, every cell — pulsing. And finally, finally being fed.

Oh, god, I thought: this is what if feels like to be alive.

I put my head down and sobbed.

Ms. Keith’s journey started at 16, when she decided to become a vegan. She grew up in the 60s and 70s, looking up to environmentalist icons like Iron Eyes Cody and Rachel Carson. She had rejected the factory farming model for it’s inhumane treatment of animals and the harm it does to the environment. However, after twenty years with episodes of low blood sugar, an absent menstrual period, and debilitating back problems, her deteriorating health was one of the main reasons she began to question whether or not it was right for her to be a vegan. In addition, the difficulties of raising her own garden without the use of animal products led her to see the real consequences of her choices.

The most important elements for healthy soil are Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium. You can get all of these things contained in a simple bag of fertilizer. Simple, that is, unless you’re a vegan. Lierre Keith read the label on her fertilizer. There she saw two important ingredients: blood meal and bone meal. A traditional source for Nitrogen is blood meal or manure, but using these would violate Ms. Keith’s vegan ethics. She could get nitrogen synthetically, but the fossil fuels needed to produce it would thwart her desire to be ecologically sustainable. Phosphorus is another problem. The traditional source of phosphorus? Bone meal. The non-animal source? Sedimentary rock. But again, this non-animal source has to be mined and transported, which isn’t exactly a green solution. Finally, to enrich the earth with Potassium you can use wood ash or cover crops, which are both sustainable and from non-animal sources, but this is a moot point without the other two elements of this important trio.

And then there were the slugs. They would destroy her garden and eat everything that she tried to plant. She couldn’t use pesticides, again, because of her moral and ecological views. Her first solution was something called diatomaceous earth. It’s organic, so at first glance it seems ok. However, then Ms. Keith found out how it worked. It kills soft bellied slugs by cutting them repeatedly, after which they die from dehydration. So that was out. There were also copper barriers, but that was much too expensive. Next, the author tried to pick them off herself and release them to the woods, but she was faced with yet another problem. The whole reason they were in her garden was because that’s where the food was. If she put them in the woods, she wouldn’t have to see it, but they would die there too. The solution she stuck with was this: ducks and chickens. The chickens she brought in ate anything that moved, including the slugs. Her duck, whom she named Miracle…well, this is how she described what happened, “One bite of bug and she exploded into quacks of joy: this is what I was born for! The slugs were history.”

This was the beginning of Ms. Keith’s moral conundrum. Every life form on this earth evolved in a relationship with other forms of life. There are predators and prey, grazers and the plants that they graze. What do animals eat? Either other animals or plants, or a combination of both. And what do plants eat? They don’t just get their energy from the sun, they get their energy from us. Plants essentially eat animals. And this is what Ms. Keith learned from her garden. The food chain is not a line, but a cycle. To put it very simply, an animal eats a plant, it gets eaten by another animal or dies on it’s own, it decomposes and the plants use this material to nourish themselves and grow, and the cycle starts all over again. The author had accepted a way of life where she didn’t believe that death was necessary to eat. However, in growing her garden, she discovered that she had been flouting the cycle of life, and of nature, for years. In order to grow her food, she realized that it begged for the blood of animals. In order to save her lettuce from slugs, she had to either kill them herself or have her ducks and chickens root them out and do the killing for her. Every plant and animal has it’s place in nature, and by industrializing our food supply, we’ve removed ourselves so far from this that we have to relearn where each of these plants and animals should go. This isn’t just something that meat eaters have to examine, it’s something that vegans and vegetarians must keep in mind as well.

Ms. Keith’s book is split up into three sections, “Moral Vegetarians”, “Political Vegetarians”, and “Nutritional Vegetarians”. The stories I’ve related above are part of her exploration of the moral reasons to be vegetarian in the first part of her book. In the sections exploring the political and nutritional reasons for cutting meat out of your diet, she challenges the notions that it’s both environmentally sustainable to eat a vegetarian diet and the fact that it will improve your health.

Do I think it’s impossible to thrive and live on a vegan diet? I’m not completely convinced of that yet, but I thought this book brought up questions that both vegans and non-vegans should consider. Questions like, how does an annual crop – like wheat, soybeans, or corn – affect the earth differently than a perennial - like grass, berries bushes, and trees? What are the environmental effects of having an industrialized agriculture and farmers only planting one or two crops repeatedly? How does eating soy affect your body? What are the nutritional effects of removing animal products from your diet? This is a fascinating book, and I’ve only told you a portion of it.

As a former vegan herself, Ms. Keith approaches the subject matter with brutal honesty, but also compassion. I admired this greatly even when I didn’t agree with her politics and values, and she definitely lets you know what these are. For instance, one of her suggestions at the end of the book is that we shouldn’t have children in order to curb population growth, which I certainly don’t agree with (I’m not convinced that the world’s current population can’t be supported by the earth). However, this is someone who dedicated herself to a way of life and an ideology that she found crumbling before her eyes. She could have turned away and ignored the questions that kept coming up in her mind, but instead she bravely faced each one. We should all use her example to be a little more brave and learn about where our food comes from.

More reviews of this book (some detailing more on the political and nutritional parts of the book):
Review by Dr. Michael Eades
Review at Free the Animal (links to his 4 other mini-reviews as well)

Spiders are rad…

faye — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 21:58:16 +0000

This is incredible. And those spiders are awesome. I love the gold color of the tapestry! Here’s a link to the NPR story.

The Insidiousness of What Other People Think

faye — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 16:52:54 +0000

I don’t remember how I found this, but it’s a good article:

The Good Guy Contract

Here’s how the author defines it:

The Good Guy Contract was simple: I would agree to be nice to you, to advise you, to sacrifice for you, to care about you—and in return you would agree to believe that I was wise, compassionate, excellent as a human being in every way, and finally and most importantly, you would like me.

It’s common in the present culture to believe that altruism is a noble philosophy. But what does it really mean? That sacrificing yourself for others is moral and good. Your entire morality and self-esteem (for how can you feel good about yourself without knowing that you’re moral?) is built upon other people. I hear a lot of lip service paid to “doing something for yourself” so that you don’t go crazy, but more often, when you see a person or their actions held up on a pedestal, it’s because of their sacrifice.

You might go through life thinking that you’re doing things to make yourself happy, but I see so many people hung up and anxious about what other people think. I have this problem myself. It’s pretty easy to figure out what you want, and if no one else is around, it’s trivial to do exactly what you want to. But it’s so rare that other people aren’t involved. Ay, there’s the rub. All of a sudden, there are these other pressures involved. Well, I want to stay home and relax tonight, but I don’t want to disappoint so-and-so because of whatnot. Then the anxiety comes. I want to do something, but I don’t want to feel that someone is displeased with me. Well, should you be making decisions because of what you want or because of what you don’t want? That’s what I try to keep in mind. The author is right, it does take practice. You just have to bite the bullet and risk finding out that someone doesn’t like what you’re doing. Most of the time it’s not so bad, and when you survive another’s disappointment one time, you gain more confidence for the next time.

So why are the opinions of others so insidious? Because it feels so good to get praise. However, praise is fleeting, and you can’t bring up old praise in your mind to make yourself feel better down the road. You have to learn to feel good because of your accomplishments, otherwise you’re left constantly needing a praise fix. You’ll surround yourself with people you don’t care about because they happen to be there. Your relationships are built, not on values, but on whether or not the other person can give you your fix. When your self-esteem comes from inside yourself, you can feel happy without anyone else around. If you feel down, it’s easy to think of all of the good things that you’ve done. Life seems so simple once you realize this and live your life for yourself.

What’s Up with Faye?

faye — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 21:07:59 +0000

Since I haven’t updated my blog in about a month, here’s what’s been happening for the past few weeks:

I finished my fiction writing class. It was fun! Some of the class members are trying to get a writing group started, so we’ll see how that goes.
Helped shoot for a couple of films.
Decided I like writing better than filmmaking. More on that later.
Found out my dad wants to write a memoir. Neat! He has some really good stories about being a Chinese refuge in WWII and immigrating to the US. Apparently he wanted to be a writer when he was young. I guess now I know where I got my storytelling bug from :)
Got sick. Boo!
Work…oooo…fun!

To expand on #3, I’ve decided that I don’t like working on a film set. Granted, I’ve only tried it a few times with amateurs (both experienced and inexperienced), but I found it boring. I didn’t feel any spark for it whatsoever. The people were usually nice, and now at least I’ve tried it, so I don’t feel like it was a waste. I was hoping that if I did something like directing or cinematography, I would be more excited. However, that’s a really small part of the film.

Most of the time on the set was setting up a shot and moving the camera around. So there’s a lot of waiting…and some more waiting…and then you do a scene for about a minute. And then you do the scene again. And again. And then you set up the next shot. This is alright if you get to wait around in a nice comfy chair and read. But you’re mostly standing around all day. Add in some cold and wind, and you have a pretty miserable day. A pretty miserable day of waiting around.

Part of the reason I thought I’d like making movies is because it’s collaborative. But that can be good and bad. They make it look pretty cool on all the behind the scenes features on DVDs. You see Akira Kurosawa hanging out with his friends, having tea, talking about the film they’re writing and just having a grand ol’ time. That’s if you’re buddies with everyone. What if you don’t gel with the crew? What if they’re not as excited as you are? It’s awkward. You don’t have this wonderful, inspired feeling that comes from collaborating with other creative people, all while combining each of your best assets to create a work of art. It just falls flat. You’re trying to inspire a bunch of people who are bored or have motives other than creating art.

*sigh*

I could keep trying at this, but that’s what I did in college. I liked something just fine, but I didn’t love it, and after “giving it one more shot” for 4 years, I hated it. I was depressed and full of self-doubt. What I do like is writing. When I was in my writing classes, I was excited. I had fun. I liked thinking of stories. So I’m going to focus on that. Maybe I’ll come back to film at some point and maybe I won’t. You have to follow what excites you and cut out the cruft. And right now film is cruft for me. I still love watching movies though, so look out for some film reviews soon :)

Boot Camp

faye — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 20:47:06 +0000

I’ve been going to a Boot Camp twice a week for a few weeks, and I finally feel like I’m progressing. I haven’t lost any weight yet, but I feel like I’m getting stronger. Today was the first day I was able to run up the hills we work out on without totally dying. It was definitely hard, but I felt like I could handle it, whereas before, I had to stop and catch my breath. I can also do more pushups. Hooray! The beginnings of arm strength!

When I’ve exercised like this in the past, it’s always taken a while for me to see results, so I’m hoping that now my weight will start going down :) Especially since I’ve been waking up at 5:30am twice a week for the past month or so!

Homework

faye — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:34:10 +0000

I used to hate doing homework when I was in school. There were always more fun things to do like play Monkey Island or read really long ubernerd fantasy books late into the night. And yes, I also did the “but I want to hang out with my boyfriend” thing in college. Don’t look at me that way…he’s nice to hang out with. I married him after all! Anyways, I have homework again, and it’s been hard to break my procrastination habits, but I don’t have the anxiety and loathing for it that I used to. Probably because I’m doing something I actually like this time (more on the “Faye Decides To Be a CS Major” problems later).

What kind of homework do I have? Well, the first assignment is from Toastmasters. I joined to become a better public speaker and improve my communications skills in general. The reason being that I needed to practice this whole… talking thing. Being shy, that was something that I always had a problem with. There was even a moment in high school when I realized I was so awkward at verbally communicating that I just decided to talk less. Good one, Faye :p

There’s a Toastmasters club at work, and they meet at lunchtime once a week, so it’s quite convenient. It seems like a bit of a cheesy corporate thing to do, but the club I’m in is full of really fun people. I liked the meetings, so I joined up a few weeks ago and now have to write my Icebreaker speech. I’ll basically do what so many people love to do, and talk about myself. The speech I have to come up with is to introduce myself to the rest of the club and to get me started down the road of practicing public speaking.

I’ve also been taking a fiction writing class. It’s through The Writing Salon, a small writing school housed in a San Francisco loft. I’ve taken classes with them before and really liked it. I started these to get into the habit of writing more (that’s what this blog is for too) and to hone my wordsmithing skills. I haven’t written very much since high school, so I thought this would be a good way to get back into it, and it’s been worth it so far. Most classes have you free write every week, so it’s definitely a good workout for the right side of your brain. My writing habits aren’t the best yet, but I feel like those are getting better as well.

The homework I have for this class is to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations, and try to figure out when they’re lying. Someone is actually telling me to snoop on what other people are talking about! The trouble is, I think I’m around too many honest people, because I haven’t been able to pick out any lies yet. I guess I’ll just have to keep listening.

So I actually have homework that I want to do now. The problem I had so often when I was in school was that I didn’t see the point. Everything is given to you as something you’re just “supposed” to know, but the reasons why it’s important for your life are so vague. Integrals are important because you can build bridges or…something. History is important so we don’t repeat bad mistakes…and stuff. This book is really important to read because people have been reading it for a long time. Never anything like, it’s important for you to read this book as an inspiration for how to live your life or, you need to know about this period of time so that you can relate it to the principles of good and evil and human survival, later using this analysis to judge and be involved in current events.

So, to wrap up this somewhat rambling post, why are writing and speaking important to me right now? I want to learn how to be a filmmaker, and so far I think that I may want to be a screenwriter or director. The connection from screenwriter to writing classes is pretty easy. But what about public speaking? Well, if I want to be a filmmaker, I’ll have to be able to communicate my ideas, not only on paper, but amongst other people. And possibly (if I’m successful enough), amongst many, many other people. So Toastmasters seemed like a good place to start.

It’s funny that when you realize you’re in control of your own life and you know where you want to go, you start to make up your own assignments. Attend writing classes and finish all assignments given. Attend Toastmasters meetings and complete speeches in the Competent Communication booklet. Sign up for Scary Cow and pick 2-3 films to work on in order to get experience on the set. All of a sudden homework isn’t just drudgery being forced on you for arbitrary reasons, it’s how you become one of those exciting, fleshed out human beings.