I saw Spider-Man 3 last week, a movie dripping with big fat man-tears. I probably wouldn't have thought much about it, except I saw it with someone who's been accused of being emotionless. You hear phrases like "emotionally unavailable," but they don't really sink in until you experience them. Anyway, maybe I'm contracting a slight lack of empathy myself because I totally agreed with a friend who said, regarding MJ's mopiness in the movie "Get over it! You're dating a superhero--you're following him. He's not going to relocate for your crappy acting career!" Of course, it was more subtle than that in the movie, but really MJ, you're going to have to toughen up if you want to keep dating Spiderman. Spiderman and all his friends will probably also have to stop welling up at the drop of a hat.
Anyway, with a real-life person lacking a wide range of emotion, it helps to re-define emotions to include such things as nausea, headache, and dizziness. True, these may sound more like "symptoms" than "emotions," but whatever it takes to get my friend to be more emotional.
A big rope of ants discovered something under my bookcase! I have no idea what they could be doing under there. I'm surprised they can even fit, or that they made it all the way to the third story of my building. I'm constantly covered with phantom ant bites now. I don't think they're really the biting kind, though. I'm just being very emotional. Itching is also an emotion.
Quick Takes
1 week ago
2 comments:
I work with a professor who talks a lot about the history of emotion, and I'm pretty sure both nausea and itching have been defined as emotions at some point in history. Or if they haven't, they could be now! You might also make use of the humors model -- I'm pretty sure people who are often characterized as unemotional are the same thing as "phlegmatic." And MJ (whom I have found desperately annoying in the last two movies) is definitely melancholic.
I found her annoying throughout the series, too, but it might just be because I don't like the actress.
Speaking of archaic tetrachotomies (?) (though I guess there are only three of the following), I've been really obsessed with categorizing strangers on the street (and also old boyfriends for some reason) by their somatotype. I like the way "Ectomorph" and "Endomorph" feel on my tongue when I say them. It makes me feel like I'm living in a sanitized science-fiction future world.
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