Things I Hate: Emotions

So I was watching "The Real Housewives of New York City" the other day, because that's something you do when you're married, and it's not as bad as you think. "The Real Housewives of Orange County" is too painful to watch, but the New York City chicks at least have some modicums of personality -- some of them anyway. 

Point is, there's a real-life countess on the show, and one of the ongoing fights was about an incident in which she insisted on being called "Mrs. De Money" or whatever her name is instead of "Luann" when speaking to their limo driver. "Why does it matter?" everyone asked quite reasonably. The argument went on very well for a while until Countess Luann DeSnootypants said "Well, it just makes me feel uncomfortable." And the other New York chick, who would normally stay on the attack until her opponent was crying in the corner and flagellating herself with barbed wire, suddenly let up. I was disgusted.

And I hated being disgusted because I hate emotions. What they ever done for us? Why do people get angry and start wars? Emotions. Why do people watch and enjoy "According to Jim"? Emotions. Why do people fall in love, get married, and have fulfilling lives? Emotions. Blech.

But seriously, I do think emotions are sort of a low-level, oversimplified program for connecting observations with actions. Like, when we were all lizards (in the 1980s, during the time of the TV mini-series "V"), we operated entirely by emotions. Thing moves past us quickly. Scared! We jump and run away. Thing looks edible. Happy! We eat it. 

But what if that thing moving past us was a hot female (or male, depending on your lizard-y sexual orientation), and we just blew our chances at some hot lizard sex? If we had an intellect, we could stop ourselves from overreacting and say "Well, hold on. The last ten million times I ran away, nothing chased after me, not even a little. Maybe this is a hot lizard of the sex I am predisposed to want to mate with. Is this the case, indeterminate fast-moving thing?" And then the fast-moving thing stops and says "Duh! 'Bout time you noticed -- I've run past you real fast ten million times already! What's it take to get a man around here?" And then "Let's Get It On" comes on the soundtrack and the lizard lovin' begins. 

Instead, without an intellect, we'd keep running away and die childless, and then wait for the slow march of evolution to create a genetic mutation that would tell lizards to stop and look at fast things before running away like a punk. Bah. I ain't got that kind of time -- I want hot lizard sex now. 

But I know, I know, we couldn't get rid of emotions entirely, or we'd have no motivation to do anything, ever. We'd just sit around coming to conclusions, most of which would be, "yeah, but why bother?" We need the emotions, but we also need the intellect to tell us when the emotions should shut the hell up. 

Which gets me back to Countess Luann De Pretentious. When she said it made her feel uncomfortable, the argument was over. Instead, the response should have been "Well, that emotion is wrong. Get over it." 

The way I look at it, emotions are a big lumbering lug who comes into a party and says "Eat!" "Fuck!" "Punch!" The intellect is, ideally, standing behind him, leading him on a leash and whispering in his ears, "OK, you can eat, but no fucking or punching. Understood?" 

Don't get me wrong -- I'm a namby-pamby liberal pants-wetting type who does believe in acknowledging emotions and crying and shit like that. But I think too many people feel all emotions are legitimate and should be acted on or at least expressed. Actually, a lot of emotions are stupid and should be ignored or changed. 

If you feel icky about gay people, that's an emotion you could get past, and not use it to fuel an insane paranoia about the evil gay agenda to turn everyone gay and abort all babies and abolish all pickup trucks and drink only cosmos and etc.  

Maybe it's all about judgment, knowing which emotions to act on and which ones to try to ignore. And I acknowledge that judgement is a very hard thing to get right. 

Example: When my dad left home and was trying to express emotion for the first time in his life, he would express everything, regardless of what effect it would have on others. I would answer the phone and say "hey" and then he would berate me for not sounding excited enough to hear from him. I would be thinking "hm, well, you just left home and shacked up with someone else, shattering mom's psyche and breaking our family apart,  and also you lied about where you were living for six months ... and I'm supposed to answer the phone and be like, 'Yo, what up, my nigga!!!!'?" But, see, I felt that, and didn't say it -- instead I said "Oh, of course I'm happy to hear from you, but I'm tired from thinking all day about how great you are ..." etc.

My point there is that I'm glad my dad was learning how to express emotions at the time, but he hadn't learned yet that it's not an all or nothing proposition. Some you express, some you don't, and the ones you don't express you should probably try to get over in other ways. You can change your emotions, too, by the way. It's very hard, usually requiring a lot of thought and self-reflection, but it's necessary to grow up as a person. I guess that's what therapy is right? Hm. I'll have to think about that. Rationally, that is. Not with my emotions. I hate my emotions!!!!!!!!! KILL!!!