We Feel Fine?

• We Feel Fine is a fascinating polyamorous relationship between programming, psychology, and art. A bot searches public blogs for the phrases "I feel" or "I am feeling", and harvests the complete sentence surrounding said phrase, e.g., "I feel sheepish for willingly allowing him to use me to replenish his narcissistic reserves," or "I am feeling excited to watch my dissertation co-chair on Oprah today" or "I feel guilty for using him to replenish my narcissistic reserves." Available identifying information about the writer is also harvested, and linked with the feeling statement when it is published, database-style. What results is an ability to search for feelings by age, date, geographic location, gender, even weather. The authors have created six "Movements" from which to experience the messiness, some messier than others (if you are going for messy, try "Madness". Less messy? Try "Metrics").


• Emotion dysregulation or vocational saturation? Sometimes I am so consumed by emotion (mine and others) that I would like to subtract it from my experience, if only for a couple of hours (much longer than that and I'd feel frightened, though then I'd be feeling, which would take care of it, no?). I don't want to feel numb, per se, as numbness feels like, well, a not-nice feeing. Being in a state of "flow" (which is not really considered an emotion, rather a state of operations - pardon the imprecise language here) seems like a good alternative (though sustaining it seems not only impossible, but perhaps also ill-advised).


• One coping method I've used for those annoying periods of emotional saturation is to read about winners of The Fields Medal (sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize for mathematics). Though I try to limit my focus to their work, I nonetheless usually end up wondering about their inter- and intrapersonal lives, which inevitably elicits a stirring of The Feelings. So, partially to my chagrin, it's only partially effective.


• Emotional State 3A: It has recently been brought to our attention that some of you are stuck in emotional state 3A, Consumed by Fear. Though we have made a number of announcements recently about the need for an emotional-state change, and had hoped that this would be a relatively smooth and uniform process, we understand that 3A is a particularly robust state and that many of you may need further guidance on how to proceed...