"Come to Life"

"Come to Life"
Originally uploaded by Tokyorosa

"You're treated like other humans, so stop with the angst." --Batou, from 攻殻機動隊, Kōkaku Kidōtai, Ghost in the Shell

The Photo

This was taken with my cell phone at Target of all places. In the toy department. Of all places. Where else would you keep the robotic Shetland-sized pony that retails for $199 + tax?

The Quote

The quote comes from one of my favorite movies of all time, Ghost in the Shell. I was looking for my favorite quote from the movie, when the major asks Batou how it is that one knows that one is human. Or isn't human. I forget how it goes exactly. But it reminded me of when I was nineteen years old and taking a class in existentialism and the teacher wrote a comment on one of my essays something like, "Relax. You need to get used to being sentient."

At the time I thought it was too much to ask of me. How can anyone get used to that? Sentience, I mean. I sometimes felt--feel--like one of those "supertasters" you read so much about these days, only instead of supertasting, I superfeel. Or something.

What does this have to do with anything?

For me, it really comes back to blank days, those times in my life when the intensity of feeling gets turned up to the point where the feelings burn out--I burn out--and I can't feel anything at all. Those blank days sometimes go on for months or years. At the other end is when I try to buy those blank days with things like food, blotting out feeling by eating myself into a carb coma or into a sugar high. I've spent years battling those demons, and the minute I think I've got a handle on them, I turn a corner into some unlikely place like the toy department at Target and there's this stupid mechanical horse with its stupid sign, exhorting passersby to pet one of its sensors, and that one demon, the one who cranks up the feelings until it's almost unbearable to leave the house or to get out of bed, grins at me from horseback and says, "Remember that guy who told you you had to get used to being sentient? Remember that part about you being human? That's a joke. You don't even know what that is."

From Fussy

This past week just wiped me out, it was exhausting, emotionally. It made me realize that there's like this emotional reservoir we have in our bodies and how exhausted you are depends on how big your reservoir is and what you fill it with. If you fill a medium-sized emotional reservoir with the unsweetened lemonade of unrequited love, for example, you're kind of 10-20% exhausted. If you fill a deep reservoir with the lumpy pancake batter of putting your pet cat of sixteen years to sleep, you're maybe 50-65% exhausted. And if you're diagnosed with terminal cancer on the day your spouse and child get killed in a plane crash, it doesn't matter what size your emotional reservoir is, you're pretty much up to the top with quick-drying cement and you are allowed to cry all you want until you die and no one is allowed say to you, Well, it could be worse, you're a spoiled American, at least you don't live in Rwanda, now those people have something to cry about. No, you get to cry based on the total volume of your reservoir multiplied by the density of what it's holding, and if people in Rwanda have emotional reservoirs full of hydrochloric acid that still doesn't mean you don't get to cry a little bit with your pancake batter.