I am not normally an emotional person.

This is both a true and a nonsensical statement.

It is true in that over the course of my life I am habitually a non-reactive type of person, not prone to either touchy-feely displays or to bouts of self-pity, that curse that accrues with a feeling of entitlement. Having said that, I must admit to anger. It is my most accessible feeling, and what eruptions I do have have tend to be related to rage, yet normally those only surface in moments when I am threatened, either physically or emotionally.

This is one sense of the statement “I am not normally an emotional person.” In this sense it is a true statement. Yet, as Damasio (and others) have shown, emotions are something deep and pervasive; not the simplest rational decisions can be made without reference to this, our first, discriminatory tool.

So whether the statement that started this is true or nonsensical is not really a valid question. It is both.

What all this tells me is that normally, my emotional reactions are there but that they are invisible to me. Having said this, it is not as simple as saying that I am unaware of my emotions and therefore I have a problem, but rather, when the background discriminatory tool that are feelings is functioning well, when the blare of anger is not needed to drive a self-protective response to some asshole who thinks he can play chicken with me because I am a middle-aged woman in a nice car and he is a 19 year old with his same-aged friend in his mother’s car (and with her insurance), feelings are supposed to be unobtrusive.  They are like a gentle ocean with a minor tidal pull. Feelings guide the boat of our reasoned decisions to make sure we take into account things that reason, for all its brilliance, is simply not complex enough to accommodate.

And so of late, when I go out into a sunny, brilliant day, with cherry blossoms rising in the updraft, pink flutters in the blue air, and still I feel as if I am riding under the black wing of Raven, I cannot help but wonder to what extent reason is in fact just another face, and extension of, the thing called feeling. Which, of course, makes nonsense out of a phrase like “unemotional person” or for that matter “emotional person.”  It’s like saying a four-legged biped or a two-legged biped.

My capacity to understand the day, to experience it, to think about it, and ultimately write about it, cannot occur today without the raven-wing any more than it could occur without the background swell of contentment that would more fittingly be there as a response to such a beautiful day. Normally I take my response to a day like this, to sun and fragrant air, and simply accept it as part of “how it is.” I don’t question whether it is reasonable to be happy on a fine day. This is, I think, right. I do question the sense of vulnerability that comes with the raven’s wing.

To question one and not the other is just a matter of habit I suppose and not really a matter of correctness in any moral sense. People function well together when, as a group, they respond happily to a fine day and probably wouldn’t if we all were acting like depressed over-thinkers instead. So it might just be that having feelings normally occur as a quiet (but powerful) guidance system is just what we evolved because this is what functions well for us as a group as well as for us as individuals.

To my credit, I do realize that this intimacy with Raven will go away. Since this haphazard emotional state seems to have to do with the endocrinal shudders associated with menopause, I suspect that when my body is finished turning down the tap on oxytocin and other please-let-me-take-care-of-you chemicals, things will return to the formally smooth state, although I suspect the colour of my sea will be substantially different.

I just hope the rage stays.  I rather like my “I will kill you if you threaten me” response to idiots and other undesirables.   In this, the evidence seems to suggest I may in fact have greater access to my willingness to bash the rude and dumb. I understand that once menopause has settled my body into a steady state, I will feel even less inclined to avoid conflict and even less likely to do the work necessary to keep unproductive relationships afloat. For this, I am glad. Roll on senescence, to thou I will offer tribute. And to you, Quiet Feeling, the ram’s blood.

I almost never use a seatbelt, so I watched this with that as a behavioural premise. Having said that, the following is the most effective wear-your-seat-belt ad I have ever seen. What makes it effective: I don’t mind that I am being manipulated emotionally and it’s imagery that I won’t forget. That’s good in an ad.

I have reached the point in my life where my past decisions and bad habits have caught up with me. I need surgery to correct some of the problems but there isn’t much point unless I first correct the behaviours that got me here in the first place. Consequently, in my doctor’s words, he needs to know that I “control the food” rather than the food controlling me. So I am now on a mission to divorce feelings from food.

One immediate consequence is that I now do not have an easy suppressant for my natural rage. This will cause some disruptions in my life, I suspect. For example, last night the young men (aged 18 or so) in the apartment above mine decided to party.  They find chucking beer cans particularly stimulating. They also seem to truly enjoy throwing glass bottles on the sidewalk and street. I suppose they like the splendid noise they make as the glass goes zinging across the pavement. My daughter happened to be taking the dog out as one of those contests was occurring and one empty (a can luckily) hit the dog. I ratted them out to the landlord and made an instant decision about how to escalate the situation. Next time I am going to cut their power at midnight (I have the breaker box in my apartment). The time after that it’s the police and the power. If they still don’t get it, then when I wake at 05:30 I will accidentally bang on all their doors and what windows I can reach.

Now my doctor says that it’s OK to blame everything on him.  He’s a pretty nice guy (and funny too), but I’m not sure he realizes what he’s let himself in for. He thinks I should start a blog where I bitch about all the exercise I have to do and about how hungry I am and how I can’t meet my emotional needs so easily any more, etc etc and just rant about how mean he is and how everything is his fault. I suspect that’s what he had in mind, a nice safe anonymous whinging.  The thing is that the rage (which is better than self pity in my humble opinion) I’ve been suppressing is much more likely to come out face to face.  He just better hope I don’t kill someone, because damn if I won’t bring him to dock with me.

So, Dr. B, you OK with me telling my nasty neighbors that their sudden loss of power is your fault?

There are a variety of possible emotional reactions to text. I’ve been thinking about that and what the contents of those various categories would say about a person.  So there are the books that make us mad, the ones that bore, the ones that make us chuckle, and downright snort with delight, but there are also the ones that obsess us and the ones that make us deeply envious.  Personally, I find those last two the most interesting.

Comparing lists might be just as illustrative as the Meyers-Briggs Type Inventory. (I’m an INTP, for those who know what that means.)

I suppose the trigger for this post was the discovery (in TLS) of a poem that caused me a deep pang of OMG I wish I could write like that

This is a poem by Mick Imlah about Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery which has the first line “I’m not suggesting he was Oscar Wilde.” You can read the full text here and here.

This is the next to last stanza and the one that went through all my civilized defenses and made me want to weep with envy.

Stick to the questions. So I ran them through,
scraping my cane along the sweep of gravel:
Do you regret your ministry was not
a longer one – though so much was achieved?
– or, Was it the splits within your own party,
or the Irish crisis, more, that brought you down –
no – that we should blame the more for your
untimely exit? (“Neither. The truth is,
I had to get out sharp, I was seeing things”) –
And in retirement, what . . .
When in breezed
his amazing daughter. “How d’ye do!
I’m Peggy Crewe – You must be – Modicum . . .”
– offered her hand, and gave me such a smile
I think I said, Indeed I was – I watched
the daisies on her dress – she held her smile;
and as her hand withdrew, I was wondering
at the way this being shone in her station,
whose grace was almost natural, almost
the real thing; and, how I would be the first
to fall in behind her lead or standard –

By all rights I shouldn’t be happy. All my joints are aching so every movement hurts. The one philosophy class I wanted to take just got cancelled because the school thinks nine students isn’t enough. I need surgery and every day there is a chance the pain will resurge and I will be back in the hospital and the only thing that seems to be working is a low fibre diet, and on top of that I am supposed to lose weight before the surgery, and of course the standard weight loss diet is high fibre and I have symptoms today and the apartment above me is populated by four 18 year old young men who think the beer bottle toss from the second floor is a high art form and I found out on Tuesday that T (sister to me from the Rez) is dying of cancer (she has 3 kinds!) and probably only has about 9 months to go and there is a chance I (at just that age where childrearing is safely in the past) may be the best person to take over the rearing of my (much loved but very needy and soon to get needier) deaf 11 year old niece.

Yet, I am happy.  The sun is out after a November of 1 day of sun and although it is cold the air is clear. Is it unreasonable to be happy under these circumstances? And if it is, do I care?

There is an article called “Girls Just Wanna Have Fangs: The unwarranted backlash against fans of the world’s most popular vampire-romance series.” It’s pretty good and interesting in a mildly provocative way.

Essentially what Sady (the author) says is that while “Twilight isn’t a literary masterpiece” the somewhat unrestrained criticism of the books (and the characters, and the authors, and the fans) have little to do with any lack of literary quality and more to do with the fact that it’s a girly girl story.

Here’s a question: how many readers of romance novels are fairly careful to hide what they are reading in public?  How many people do the same when they read Zane Grey?
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I’ve had a couple of bad days. Don’t know why, and, actually, don’t much care, but I do want them to stop.

Work is not hard at the best of times, but it can be really busy, but right now it is slowing down and so the pace is a bit dream-like. Not a good dream, but dream-like.

So after work today I’d had enough for the nonce and thought “where can I go so I will feel better?” I flipped through my inner-file of places-that-I-like-to-go, waiting for the emotional hit that shoots up a big red finger pointing down from my metaphorical sky saying “THIS ONE.” It turned out to be a Chinese-Canadian restaurant (you know the kind that sells standard North American-style rice and noodle Chinese food along with grilled cheese and burger fare.

I took a booth (cracked Naugahyde), ordered tea, and opened my backpack.
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Fear is an interesting thing. Or at least how people respond to it is.

We all have fear. For me at this moment I am finding myself afraid to go back to work. It’s not the work of course. That’s easy and my bosses are mellow and understanding, even in difficult corporate and economic times. What I am afraid of is being so far from the comfort of my home.  Here if I feel bad I can go to my room and take a nap. There, if I need to leave I am still 30 or 40 minutes from home.

I can’t stay home until this is all over either. Can’t afford that on a number of levels. So I am going but I am going to compromise with my fear. I am taking the car to work. It’s expensive but at least with it there (and the blankets and pillows in the back seat) I can retreat to a personal environment should things go south today. I’ll get over it soon. Probably once today is over and it all goes OK. Still, while I feel it, fear is a hard one to negotiate with any grace and especially hard to negotiate with any degree of rationality.

Do you ever have days when you don’t want to be anywhere?  Not at the coffee shop, not home, not at work, not even at the library or the beach or the cabin; you just don’t want to be anywhere where you have a history, a past, maybe even a future.

I’m in a bad mood again. Don’t know why really but it doesn’t much matter. I don’t want to read although I have Versluis with me. I don’t want to have to hear other people’s chatter so the coffee shop and library are out.  I don’t want to drive anywhere so the beach is out, so is just driving, which sometimes is quite therapeutic. I don’t want to think about where I have been or where I am going to. I don’t even want to think about books.  I just want to breathe.
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It’s nearly noon and the best part of the day is gone. I only got about 4 hours of interrupted sleep last night, woken after 3 hours by a cat fight in my bedroom and then after 3 hours of wakefulness I slept for an hour, to be woken by a bad dream. So these last hours have been hazy, headachy and largely barren.

Bleh. I am grouchy.

I think a nap at the beach is called for. It is kind of a grey, cloudy day so Jericho Beach might not be too crowded. I have my blankets in the car and a book of essays about Emily Dickinson, so I will probably survive the day.

I did read a delightful essay in my very early morning wakefulness. By Conrad Aiken, “Emily Dickinson” was originally published in 1924, 31 years before Thomas Johnson’s edition of her complete poems was released. That means he wrote that essay based on the few, highly (and mostly poorly) edited versions of Dickinson’s work that were then available. And yet Aiken’s essay is wonderfully perceptive of Ms. Dickinson and prescient with regard to what some critics would do when pondering Emily’s personal oddities.  In other words, all the things he warned against have been picked up and the resultant theories shaken loose of all evidence, so fascinated have we become about the source of Emily’s “psychic trauma.”

Alan Tate’s essay of 1932, also called “Emily Dickinson,” is in the same volume. I haven’t read it yet;  I am looking forward to it, I have seen it cited so many times.

It’s nearly noon and I haven’t had breakfast yet. I am off to a cafe somewhere, then the beach for a nap. Then Tate.  The best recipe for grouch-hangover that I can devise.