I had an interesting conversation with T* today, where I was asked if I have emotions. Izznt dat veerd? Well, maybe not so wierd. I hadn’t really given this much thought before. That is, how this whole uneasy agreement between mind and body that is me appears to the casual observer. Probably a little too quiet and a little too dull, at first anyway. Maybe a question, for us eccentric wierdness types, of how much we can expose before scaring people away.
Of course, general logicality may have something to do with it too. Excessive emotional involvement is not conducive to sane, rational thinking; I’ve seen this cause too many problems, in inter-personal matters and elsewhere. Any of my funks, fugues or general malaise tend to be seasonal in nature, so I tend to more or less write them off as an irrational fluke of biochemistry; yet more meaningless noise signals from my body that I tend to ignore.
I am probably not as expressive as I could be. Kinda the diametric opposite of the drama queen who makes sure you hear about every little thing that however transiently affected her mood that day. I’ve always fancied myself this rock of stability, remaining to a high degree balanced-ish and logical even while those around me are losing their heads. Maybe this is not always a good thing.
Come to think of it, this idea goes entirely too well with this bloggg’s current title-of-the-week (The uncanny valley). The term, the English translation of a term coined by a Japanese robotics guru, refers to a person’s negative or generally creeped-out response to something that is almost, but not-quite humanlike…you know, where there’s something just a little off about it. (Interacting with a walking, talking mannequin would probably unnerve you quite a bit….well it would me, anyway.)
Anyway, since my internal state is not easily guessed (much less via bloggg), I will try to explain my dominant emotion of the moment…although it seems to defy easy classification. (Which is not necessarily bad, since it isn’t much of an emotion if it can be described in one or two words). Wistful hollowness? OK – I think that didn’t make sense. Let me try to explain. I’ve just been listening to some CDs that I don’t listen to often and haven’t heard in a while. (NIN – Pretty Hate Machine; Ministry – With Sympathy) Specifically, haven’t heard since the tail end of this summer, just as the days were beginning to shorten and the nights to cool. Out at the cabin, all-nightering it up with some college buddies, cranking tunes against the stillness of the woods, playing around in the pool and soaking in the outdoor hot tub, just BSing, talking philosophy and gazing at the stars. Toasting to anything and everything, swilling Guinness and rolling our own cigarettes, having a great time that simply evades description. An empty bottle of Cap’n Morgan drifting lazily by as we gaze skyward and ponder just how we might have come to be. One would expect that a reminder of times like these would instill happiness, but mostly, it just gives me the feeling of missing those times, and makes me think how unlikely it is that we’ll have the chance to do things like this again. With me in Boston, the college crew spread around Indiana and Michigan, my forever official home near Chicago, and everyone with fulltime lives, it just doesn’t seem like those lazy summer days can return…
QOTD: “If it shits on land, you can eat it.” — South African take on which animals are an appropriate source of food
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