I've spent the past year of my life trying to classify emotion and feelings. It seems like such a simple concept. You feel happy, you're happy. Something like that. Lately though, I see a futility in my classifications.

It's like trying to classify each and every band under the 'emo' label or the 'punk' or 'screamo' or whatever. I don't know about you guys, but I think that you just cant classify music. Every band is unique, and to classify them is practically racism, definitely prejudice.

When I try to say that all feelings are different levels of pain, as my fundamental belief goes, I never cease to amaze myself in the ways I can.. contradict myself.

I might say, for example, 'love is war' meaning that it's a competition between two people. Who can express the most compassion while holding the interest of the partner. But what about the love for the kid who just came out of your wifes womb? Certainly that's unconditional. It doesn't really matter if the kid hates you or not, you're gonna end up loving him/her.

I think contemplation is futile. Trying to explain the world, life, and emotion in English is impossible.

Think about life. Lets just focus on the nervous system. How in the hell did cells form that had the ability to work with muscle cells FLAWLESSLY so that they could command those muscle cells with small electrical shocks? How did the human brain gain its ability to store electron states?

Think about out mind as we speak. Unlike computers, the mind is a multitasking system. There is no processor in the mind, because every cell can process information in itself. This essentially means that aside from what you are immediately aware of, you are processing thousands, maybe millions of other things all at once. You are processing and reprocessing memories so that they may be biased and favorable towards you. You are processing body conditions and the secretion of hormones that do both wonderful and terrible things to your body. You are processing the movements it takes to walk, to type, to translate your thoughts into English.

Translation alone. My fundamental belief in terms of 'smart people' are people that can transform their thoughts into words. By that belief, I am an idiot.

Think about emotion. For me, it mostly involves my heart. It beats faster and slower and hurts and burns and my mind interprets the stress that it receives as either good or bad emotions. To be perfectly clear, hugging your true love in the first embrace feels just the same as being dumped the first time. Physically that is. The mind in itself translates the horrendously fast beating of the heart into feelings of pleasure and hope or feelings of pain and regret.

Sometimes I wonder if a person that lived in a tube all his life could feel. If he would feel any different hugging a man or a woman. If having sex would have any more than a reproductive appeal to him. In other words, I wonder if emotions are something society places upon us. I obviously regret the awkward things I do, but what exactly is awkward? Awkward is something designed by society to shun certain activities.

Anyhow, if I'm right. If society has created emotion. What then? I wonder if non-conformists can truly not feel. I wonder if people in general can just not feel. It would be quite useful if it was possible. Personally, I can get close to it. But not feeling, oddly enough, feels like something: emptiness. If I could somehow not feel and not care that I didn't feel, it would be really cool.

Caring. There's a brainbuster. Why do we care at all? All caring has ever done to any of us is hurt ourselves. Think about it. I dare you to find one instance of caring that hasn't hurt. Maybe that's why a lot of us stop caring. Maybe that's why I've just stopped caring about things like school. Why do I still care about popularity and girls then? Its hurt me before, and it keeps on hurting me. Maybe I'll stop caring after I'm done hurting. I don't know.

The human mind has trained us all to do everything in the shortest most quick way. In that way, we are all procrastinating, half-ass job people. We do as much as is required of us and nothing more. Some people have trained themselves beyond this, though. They've trained themselves to work outside of their confort zones yet they retain their comfort. I envy them. I envy them like mad.

I cant honestly say how badly I think of people that are good memorizers. Well, people that are good at it and that is what they use to get through school. Memorization has never and will never be the point of school. One of the best things about Troy is the enormous number of conceptual questions that we get. I love those, they make you think.

Come on, guys. When you memorize things, you arnt memorizing anything. You're gonna forget them in two days. The reason I barely have to study is because I don't memorize things. My brain doesn't work that way. In fact, when I try to memorize, I fail (look at my Spanish grade). Knowledge is gained through understanding. Its not knowing that the square of 2 is 4, its knowing that the square of 2 is the same thing as 2 x 2 which is in itself the same thing as 2 + 2.

I might suck at memorizing things, and I might not get into the best college California has to offer, but when I become a dentist or business executive or whatever, I'll be able to APPLY the skills I KNOW. I'll get ahead in life because I understand things, understand people whereas the memorizers will never move anywhere because they arnt dynamic, they arnt built to move and learn new things.

Us troy students, for the most part. We have a gift. The gift of understanding. Don't let it go to waste.