Yo, Tech Answer Guy,
For the last year and a half, I have had an avatar in Blaisdell's Borneo. Yeah, yeah, I know what they say about cheap knockoffs (I'm subscribed to International They Alerts), but I can't afford the real thing, and, anyway, you get used to people's noses randomly turning into various utensils (okay, I find spatulas sticking out of the middle of people's faces distracting, but that's just because I'll never forget the scraping sound they make on Teflon owing to an incident when I was seven when my father told me that my pet walrus, Warbucks, had died heroically trying to fly a jumbo jet after the pilot and co-pilot had been hypnotized by an insane rodeo clown into believing that they were circus seals while he was making pancakes. My father, not the insane rodeo clown. But, seriously, what do walruses know about flying jets, anyway? Warbucks was only licensed to fly planes with small prop engines!).Uhh, yeah. So. Back to my problem.
I had never been that comfortable with negative emotions. When "Jocko" Frenetic pushed me to the playground in grade seven, I cried in my room for days, even though everybody said she was just being friendly. Friendly my Aunt Patronium's dry roasted blinis! Then, when my parents sat me down and told me about the Kennedy assassination, the murder of John Lennon and Kurt Cobain's suicide (they were you can't tear the bandage off the wound quickly enough people, my parents were), I couldn't process it all and shut down my emotions for several months. Or, possibly years. I really don't remember what life was like before that fateful afternoon...
Here's the thing. In Blaisdell's Borneo, you have sliders that you can use to control your emotions. How cool is that? I immediately turned my rage levels to zero. Sure, the first time I encountered a situation that should have made me angry - my calico pumorse was run over by a stranger's karma - I felt a tingling in my left elbow and smelled burnt toast, but I thought I was just having trouble adjusting.
Wouldn't be the four hundred and fifty-first time that had happened.
Since that seemed to be going well, I turned my irate irkedness slider down to one (I wanted to keep a little in case I ever met a Fox News commentator in person). My II should have gone into overdrive when I attended a gala ball in purple skin with scenes from the film Paul Blart: Mall Hard Alone playing backwards across my chest...and found that 58 per cent of the men and 32 per cent of the women in attendance had had the same idea. Instead, I was mildly bemused and felt awe at the length of the giraffe's neck.
Throwing caution to the wind (it had its arms open and ready to catch my caution), I turned all of my negative emotions down. Sadness. Fear. Unreasoning distrust of electric can openers. The whole gamut of negative emotions - gone! That was three weeks ago. Now, the only emotions I seem able to experience are mild amusement, casual wonder and glittering Schadenfreude. I know that that last one should be disconcerting, but I am only mildly amused by it. Oh, and the burnt toast smell is stronger and much harder to ignore.
What's that all about?
Sincerely,Yo, Glad Mags,
You know how well tampering with your emotions works? NOT!
Hmm...I may have to work on my snarky joke construction a bit...
Still, you get the idea.
I would say that emotions are complicated beasties, but that sounds like something Amritsar would say, and people already have enough trouble telling us apart. (For the record: I'm the one who snorts Coke out of his nose while watching Ren and Stimpy. The liquid kind. Of Coke, I mean. Although, a Ren and Stimpy beverage has its own kind of disgusting fascination...)
As Phil, the mechanic from the shop down the street, once explained it to me: "Human emotions are a chaotic system. Change one variable, and it has unexpected effects on many of the others." I asked him to simplify his explanation. For the benefit of my readers. You know, because I'm all about my readers. He spent three hours connecting everything from kumquat production in Venezuela to Stephen Colbert taking over The Late Show from David Letterman to why I'm paying too much for my Internet connection. Phil, the mechanic from the shop down the street is nothing if not thorough. Scary thorough, really. So, uhh, yeah, I'm going to go with his first explanation.
The Tech Answer GuyOkay. Emotions are complicated. Changing one affects others. So, what should I do?
Sincerely,Yo, Der Magmeister,
You should decide what you really want to know before you submit your question!
The Tech Answer Guy
If you are a dude with a question about the latest technology, ask The Tech Answer Guy by sending it to questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Just remember: I'm not a mind reader, you know.