Emotions are Stirred

Well, it's the first day of the new year, that's 2008 for those of you keeping track, and I guess its no surprise that I find myself in a retrospective mood.  As if I needed a reason to stop and think, right?  It's a time of emotions and feelings, and don't be too confused, this is not a Lifetime original movie.  More so, it's just my thoughts.  In fact, today it is a time of thinking about my thoughts: metacognition.  Let's get right down to business.  The topic: emotions (and if there's time, a short discussion on the proper uses for a colon (:) as punctuation).

I've been kind of tired today: sort of lethargic, and hungry but not really wanting to eat.  I started thinking I was getting a cold, but then I realized that I never get sick (true story).  Instead, I came to the realization that my emotions were stirring.  I wasn't sick, I was just feeling.  A couple questions popped into my mind.  First and foremost, "why," and coming in a close second, "how?"  Why is an interesting question (those are the only kind I have).  

Boomhauer on The King of The Hill once made an interesting observation about money, "Money is like the dang-old wind, man, you only feel it when it's moving."  I really like that analogy, and I like to think of emotions in the same way.  That is, my emotions are all present in me at all times: anger, love, joy, and video games.  Most of the time they just kind of sit there in a good-enough equilibrium.  They sit until something comes along to jostle them.  My anger emotion makes its move when I slip on some ice, and just as if there were some force hitting that emotion, at first it's really noticeable, but emotional friction kicks in right away, and eventually the anger resides into my pool of emotional good-enough-ness.  Once it stops moving, much like the wind, I don't feel it anymore.  Joy gets a kick (or gets kicked, I should say), when I return to the ice to see it a soggy, salty, and sticky mess.  Another fleeting emotion falls victim to Boomhauer's analogy.

Love is my favorite one to apply this analogy to.  I think it works pretty well, at least from what I've experienced.  Just like any emotion, you only feel it when it changes.  Love changes in many different ways, but think just about starting a relationship, and ending one.  At the beginning of a relationship there are all these exciting forces messing with that love emotion.  There's some excitement kicking it around, there's anxiety taking swings at it with a baseball bat, and all in all that love emotion is all over the place.  Fast forward a few months, maybe a year if it is a good enough relationship (or the two parties are just that uninteresting), and the love emotion has probably settled down from its initial thrashing.  Sure, some things come along now and again to mess it up a bit, a fight or an anniversary, but on the whole it's pretty much just there.  I think there are times in any relationship where it's easy to forget why the other person is special, or to take him/her for granted.  Maybe it's in the middle of its lifespan or maybe somewhere else, but it ties in nicely with that initial analogy.  Your love isn't changing, so it's easy to not feel it.  Should this relationship have an end, the results are consistent with the previous wind and money exhibits.  Maybe it's a messy end and you feel it a lot: the love emotion is bouncing like a pinball in the pool of emotions.  Maybe it's a mutual thing and the net result is just a little movement.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I'm a huge nerd.  I've basically just applied Newton's Laws of motion to emotions (is it a coincidence that the laws apply to two words with such similar spellings?  I think not...).  Nerdiness aside, it does a good job of summing up the "why" my emotions were stirring and making me lethargic/sickly.  But what about "how?"

I like this question because it's one that I can't really answer.  To me, it's a question of immaterial things (emotions, thoughts) manifesting themselves as physical changes, annoying changes at that.  I think it's safe to say that one of the emotions stirring within me is anxiety: I've made a new friend, and I'm not sure where it will lead.  Now, this is certainly "real" enough, right?  It's a thought or a "feeling," but it's not something I can touch or see.  As far as I know (which is not a lot, bear in mind (no, there are no animals in my brain)), these are just electrical impulses in my brain.  For some reason, these anxiety thoughts are a signal for my stomach feel like it has just a little bit too much acid than base, and manage to make me hungry yet full at the same time.

I think I may be making some headway here.  Thinking about emotions as thoughts and thoughts as impulses from my brain, makes me wonder if emotions are only emotions because we think about them, and we react the way we do.  Maybe this anxiety emotion is exactly that impulse that makes my stomach all gurgly.  Maybe love is just that impulse that makes your heart feel like it's on fire (or maybe that's acid reflux)...

Conclusion: I think my emotions were really just gas.  Some gas just escaped me and I feel much better.  I'll let you decide what did the trick.