It’s that time again! My grandma emailed me (which is the trigger for my reports, to maintain randomness) so I took this tiny screenshot, without changing any tabs (which ensures enough vulnerability to hopefully make you feel less ashamed of your weird-ass internet habits):

May 23, 2012 at 11:17am:

• My own Facebook profile
• A psychology blog post titled “How can you maintain self-control during emotional highs and lows?”
• Article about writing titled “The Female Character Flowchart”
• Lifehacker post titled “If You Want to Actually Finish the Tasks on Your To-Do List, Include Why You Should Do Them”
• Google Reader, with 22 unread blog posts
• Calendar someone made of “San Francisco Comedy Open Mics”
• Gmail, with 2 unread messages

Remember folks, you’re not alone.

The glorious Naomi Wolf on Madonna:

She has the egoless honesty of the serious artist that reads like ego, especially in women.

Some psych articles on how women are expected/desired to be:

• Not angry
• Happy
• No more than moderate in self-esteem

Hey there, fellas ;)

Hey look at this psych article this is what the whole post is about sort of.

Psych article summarized: Articulate your sadness. Don’t articulate your happiness. It dulls emotions.

BUT it will strengthen your opinions for utilitarian experiences.

Does this suggest that our emotional snap-judgements are stronger than our cognitive ones? It seems that in order to form strong opinions, we need the help of confirmation bias (basically, we need to rile ourselves up, one way or another, via explaining our experiences to ourselves). But in order to feel strong emotions, we need to not think (that is, we should not analyze or conceptualize).

So, in order to grow up big and strong, our cognition needs cognition, while our emotions need to be left alone? I don’t think so. At least, not necessarily.

Let’s talk about meditation. In my humble experiences with meditation, there is a distinction between conceptualizing and simply being, or the “thinking mind” and the “animal body.” One goal of many meditation sessions is to let go of your thinking mind and to live in your animal body, that is, to free yourself from conceptualizing.

Now, I think that a lot of people reading this psychology study may infer (which I initially stated above) that refraining from thinking about their happy feelings is the best way to preserve them. I think this is a common sentiment, even outside of this study. We’ve all heard the phrase “just enjoy it while it lasts” or seen sitcom scenes where the love-struck teenagers get frustrated while trying to explain why they feel so great. So emerges a wariness about over-conceptualizing one’s happiness.

So the dangers that this study demonstrates, that is, the dangers that the cognitive mind poses to happiness, are not foreign ideas to us. I’d even venture to say that most of us get nervous when we start dissecting why we feel happy. I know that I do. Maybe we are distrustful of our cognitive brain, wary that it could shed a pessimistic light on what makes us feel “good.” So many of us shove our “good” feelings out of our mind. Keep them out of conscious acknowledgement; surely they will still affect our moods positively, just so long as we don’t ruin them.

Need I bring up the Orpheus myth? Where he loses his love, Eurydice, because he goes against orders and looks at her? Or that Bible parable where the people turn into rice? (Sorry for lack of details; it goes against my mental health philosophy to read any of The Bible for a blog post.)

Our society seems to have a common approach to preserving emotions: ignoring them.

Now is the point where I ask, isn’t there a better way? Ignorance is rarely the best route for preservation. I think I might have an alternative. Think back to that bit of meditation theory I earlier graced you with. One of the reasons for spending time away from the thinking mind is to “sit with” your animal body, and to observe the feelings within it. Now, I’m not crazy advanced, and I haven’t yet mastered this sort of sitting, but I have experienced bouts of simultaneous physical and emotional clarity. Which causes which, I don’t know, but I can testify to the very real sort of clarity that one can achieve by simply locating their awareness in her physical, present self. It takes some learning, but it is absolutely possible to experience the same intensity of awareness that comes with deliberate, cognitive conceptualizations, in a purely emotional and physical way.

So, the concept-free awareness, which can be achieved through meditation, may be the best way to experience happy feelings.

That’s a whole lotta talking out of my ass. Hopefully I’ll soon be able to follow up with some more informed evaluations on the practice of sitting with an emotional state.

Anyways, just go meditate.

Found these little gems at the front of Pittsburgh’s Barnes & Noble’s children’s section. Here’s the first page of each.

I think I speak for all women when I say we are THRILLED that society is finally starting to take floristry seriously!

Some quotes from The Beauty Myth:

The affluent, educated, liberated women of the First World, who can enjoy freedoms unavailable to any women ever before, do not feel as free as they want to… Many are ashamed to admit that such trivial concerns—to do with physical appearance, bodies, faces, hair clothes—matter so much. But in spite of shame, guilt, and denial, more and more women are wondering if it isn’t that they are entirely neurotic and alone but rather that something important is indeed at stake that has to do with the relationship between female liberation and female beauty… there is a secret “underlife” poisoning our freedom; infused with notions of beauty, it is a dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsessions, terror of aging, and dread of lost control. (9-10)

…we deserve the choice to do whatever we want with our faces and bodies without being punished by an ideology that is using attitudes, economic pressure, and even legal judgments regarding women’s appearance to undermine us psychologically and politically. (1)

“Beauty” is a currency system like the gold standard… In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves. (12)

A woman wins by giving herself and other women permission—to eat; to be sexual; to age; to wear overalls, a paste tiara, a Balenciaga gown, a second-hand opera cloak, or conbat boots; to cover up or to go practically naked; to do whatever we choose in following—or ignoring—our own aesthetic. A woman wins when she feels that what each woman does with her own body—unforced, uncoerced—is her own business. (290)

How might women act beyond the myth? Who can say? Maybe we will let our bodies wax and wane, enjoying the variations on a theme, and avoid pain because when something hurts us it begins to look ugly to us… Maybe the less pain women inflict on our bodies, the more beautiful our bodies will look to us. Perhaps we will forget to elicit admiration from strangers, and find that we don’t miss it; perhaps we will await our older faces with anticipation, and be unable to see our bodies as a mass of imperfections… Maybe we won’t want to be the “after” anymore. (291)