Human...

Today, I woke up wishing I had mood organ. I mean, yeah. As Iran says in Androids, it would probabaly be “unhealthy... sensing... life... and not reacting” (Dick, 5). But oh my goodness, I could have used a Penfield this morning. My alarm didn't ring, I ran out of shampoo, I stepped on my glasses and now they're all crooked, and I noticed that my desk is mysteriously sticky and I'm not sure why. To top it off, because my alarm failed to wake me I was almost late to class and had to run like a maniac across campus, trying desperately to ignore the fact that everyone was staring at me like I was Leslie, out from the hospital and back to my fashionable ways.

Leslie himself :)

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL4PKHoPqkTPHpyvIYll-X_jNOVhFidzZY8ofKgiNdhJ4KdJ5yEAJj3VC3cGjLOjCFWsxePH0FLiCaT_9jo4pfAXJLnRsjd-MvADyDnTmxj7d8eftSuwLL3oG7abn0_XsiwEE4JdmRnfAX/s400/Leslie+Magnet.JPG

Unhappy. That's how I felt this morning. Ridiculously, irreversibly unhappy. I wish that I could say I kept this unhappiness to myself, that I had “self control” and “[found] ways to manage [my[ disturbing emotions and impulses”(Anthology, 336) . Instead of “channelling [my emotions] in useful ways” (Anthology 336), however, I decided to be a Debbie Downer rain on the parade of every person I talked to. One girl expressed anxiety over a test: I responded not with words of encouragement but with a particularly gruesome tale of a test in my past that I failed miserably. Another boy told me a humorous tale about a childhood experience involving long hair and gum: I didn't even crack a smile. Finally, my sister called me with some news on her crush. Instead of being supportive I told her she was too young to have a boyfriend. What a joke. The girl is almost 16. I don't think she's too young to have a boyfriend. I just didn't feel like being nice and decided to emotionally vomit all over her.

Debbie Downer as portrayed by SNL. Basically she just makes you feel terrible, just like I was doing to everyone I met this morning.

As I watched myself spread my rain clouds of unhappiness over everyone else's day, I found myself imagining a world where I could press a button and all of the unfortunate occurrences that had happened to me would have no effect on my mood at all, a world where I could feel what I wanted when I wanted, a world where unhappiness could be scheduled for a more convenient time. Basically, I fantasized living in Rick Deckards world.

Let's face it: society does not encourage strong, uncontrolled emotions like the unhappiness that was emanating from me this morning. In Disney's Beauty and the Beast, Lumieure, Cogsworth, and Mrs. Pot all tell the Beast that the most important thing to remember when addressing Belle is to control his temper, something Belle repeats to him later. In Ella Enchanted, Ella's father tries to muffle her sobs at her mother's funeral, finally telling her to “get away” (Levine, 11) and “come back when [she] can be quiet” (Levine, 11). Fergie made a katrillion dollars a few years ago by singing about how “big girls don't cry”. Obviously there are some advantages to controlling your emotions. In The Secret Life of Bees, May is unable to control her emotions and they end up destroying her. And I'm pretty sure no one I talked to this morning appreciated my uncontrolled unhappiness, least of all my sister, who promptly hung up on me. I'll have to fix that later...

Anyhow, the point is that uncontrollable emotions can be a real downer. And yet... a mood organ is not the answer. I feel like emotions make us who we are. Like... the way we react to thing emotionally is our own essence. It says a lot about what we're like as people. Dick goes so far in Androids as to suggest that emotional intelligence is the defining element of our humanity, making an EQ test the primary device used to differentiate between a human and an android, who "[bounce] helplessly when confronted by an empathy-measuring test".

But here's what I don't understand. If emotional intelligence I the defining characteristic of humanity, what happens with those few people who honest to god don't have emotions? Take Gary for example. He's “emotionally flat, completely unresponsive to any and all shows of feeling,” (Anthology 275A) and yet we KNOW he's not an android. He, a human being, would fail the EQ test. And in Androids, Rachael, an android, very nearly passes.

In Androids EQ tests are used to find androids among humans.

http://www.ihhp.com/images/quiz_01.jpg

So, this reading kind of confused me because it presents an idea and then immediately provides evidence to the contrary. Is it emotional intelligence that makes us human? And if this is so, are alexithymics like Gary not human? Except... he is human. Technically.

I dunno... I do feel that what makes us human is inside. And I know that it's more then just the structure of our bodies and the order of our genes, more then our ability to talk, and walk upright. But I think it's wrong to say that alexithymics are not human, or even less human then people who are able to empathize. Maybe being human doesn't have to do as much with your ability to empathize, or your emotional intelligence, as it does with making an effort to empathize and understand those around you. I mean, it's not your fault if you seriously just cannot empathize. It's not like you can do anything about it: they don't sell over the counter empathy pills just yet. But if you fail to even make an effort to empathize... that, to me, points to a lesser degree of human-ess.

Though packets of empathy like these are not available to alexithymics, I think they can still assert their humanity by making an effort to empathize, even if they are unsuccessful.

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/files/2009/06/empathy.jpg