Life is good. I’m happy to be 26. I recently hired my first employee, and I’m close to hiring a web designer for DepartureWorld. I’m very busy with work, with social life, with projects, and falling behind on everything– as it should be.

Briefs:

	There have been some *great* parties recently! Thank you and for your hospitality and good times, and thank you everyone who came to my gatherings!
	My parents helped me move Api, my turtle of 15 years, to Cambridge (he might be older than me). After the traumatic move, he’s now contently swimming around my dining room.
	FYI, I’m back to locking my window. Some couch surfers stayed at my place Friday, and then used my window when they couldn’t get in touch with me Saturday. I’m glad they weren’t stuck outside, but that’s my limit.
	I’m showing Waking Life this Tuesday, at 8 pm, in Random Hall’s Alice in Wonderland theatre (290 Mass Ave., Cambridge). This is an incredible philosophical film, and you should come watch it! I’ll bring popcorn and cookies.

A friend, in honest curiosity and caring, said in all the time we’d known each other, she didn’t understand me as a human (or something similar– I don’t want to put words in her mouth, it just got me thinking). In a way, I can’t disagree, and it hurts to know that all the work I’ve done on myself to have stronger emotions, to want and yearn and hurt more, to wear my heart closer to my wrist, to be my body, have done so little. My teacher in wisdom– an INTJ, like me– described it “a brain wearing a body”. Plato and Nietzsche convinced me that that wasn’t what I wanted to be.

I approach life with such a thrill that I forget about the other emotions. I almost never get angry or scared, and I haven’t cried in a decade. At the last Salon, we talked about Marvin Minsky’s The Emotion Machine, which claims that emotions are different ways of thinking, which give humans their versatility. My subconscious slapped me when I asked about it. “Duh! I put those other emotions there for your benefit, and in their way they’re as important as joy. Despair is as important as love for being fulfilled, staying healthy, and getting girls. Use it!”

In the past, I’ve tried championing emotions as hunches, then functions, then ideas in the cosmic consciousness, then gods. Now I’m letting them be the highest entities of which I can conceive: people. There’s now four of me (Happy, Angry, Sad, Scared) running around my head, jostling for control. We’re letting each have a spin. I saw the world as a sinister cesspool, each of us waiting to join its doom, and the hair rose on my neck. I saw it as a maze of rats, all looking for cheese that only made them sicker, and a knot stuck in my throat. I thought of each of my friends and what I scorned them for, and mentally punched each one, until I got to , who I could find no reason to hurt (the rest of you I punched for stupid, petty reasons, but I’ll tell you if you want). And I thought about the infinite possibility of life, the wonder of love, the beauty of ideas, and how much I adored everyone I know.

I also turned my anger on myself; in my minds eye, I sized myself up, took aim, and hit myself harder than anyone else. It felt good, like the only punch worth taking is a strong one.

In counter-balance, though, I’m pulling out on spending time pursuing lovers. I heard after my after-party that a friend-of-a-friend thought of me as “that cute queen.” Am I crazy for thinking it’s all connected? I hate making people uncomfortable, and as long as I come across as a queen or a robot, I’m better off as a friend. I don’t like the intellectual’s approach of seducing with the mind, and then using the bait to switch in the body. I’d rather find a woman who wants my body for the god that it can be, and leave my mind out of it.