I’m going to take a bit of a risk on this one. As always, I’ve been thinking the past few days, and for a while my thoughts have always returned to pain. Things that have hurt me. Not physically, mind you... I’ve taken plenty of that in my lifetime and I’ve basically shrugged it off like it was nothing. Emotional pain. The kind of feeling you get at the end of "Forrest Gump" when he’s talking to Jenny’s grave. I don’t have any explanation for why the muscles in your chest tighten and constrict at certain times, and I’m not sure if anyone else has a satisfactory answer, either. But it happens.

There’s a popular saying among religious teachers at Chaminade that the opposite of Love is Apathy. Nah. That’s just one of those "let’s tone down reality" kind of sayings. I’d like to get one thing straight before I continue: You can’t measure emotions. Love isn’t at one extreme of a one-dimensional measurement, and neither is apathy, or hate, or depression. All these feelings float around in the phantasmal abyss that is the human soul, occasionally bumping into one another, affecting each other. Sometimes, a certain emotion affects another emotion in a stronger manner than it does a third, and so on.

Probably the most painful hurts I have sustained have been received in the pursuit of the wily phenomenon known as "Love". That’s not to say that I consider love to be a bad thing (though there have been times that I have... brief times... very brief times). It just demonstrates my point that emotions are all linked together by threads; when one is pulled in a certain direction, it’ll pull others along with it.

One time, at the height of one of my very powerful infatuations with a particular person who shall remain unnamed, there came a point where I thought that she shared the feelings that I had, as was suggested by a particular E-mail that I received. Upon reading this E-mail (the contents shall remain hidden and the implications will be unspecified, mostly to protect the innocent), I got that good ol’ light-headed "oh-my-Spam-I’m-so-friggin’-happy!!!" feeling. This feeling persisted for well over an hour, and even increased after my attempts at confirming my suspicion brought acknowledgment. In retrospect, I know that I was just seeing what I wanted to see. But at the time, I thought that I may actually have a stab at "Love".

Unfortunately (that word is used a lot in the descriptions of my life, for some odd reason), I was a bit off-base. What I had originally thought to be a round-about love admission was really just part of a big ‘Net game played out amongst dozens of friends who forgot to let me in on the joke. And we all know what happens after being on a high: One crashes.

I didn’t really get a chance to think about why I felt what I felt until long after the fact, but when I did I was able to identify a certain amount of gullibility on my part. No, check that... there’s no need to be harsh on myself. It was Hope. Hope connected to Love connected to Ignorance brought about Pain. Huzzah, ladies and gentlemen, I have just reduced the human spirit to a mathematical formula, though that wasn’t my intention.

Once, while hanging around with some friends, I wanted to tell a joke. Just a simple lil’ joke. It wasn’t even very dirty or inappropriate. But a particular friend (who shall also remain nameless), made a comment, which I normally would have considered humorous, to the effect that all my jokes kinda bite. Admittedly, I wasn’t in the greatest mood at the time, and took this personally... and I it bugged me heavily for several days. I’m thinking right now, "What brought this on? Why was I so deeply affected by this when I normally wouldn’t have been?" Well, let’s see... I was in a slightly depressed mood (only slightly depressed), I wanted to get out of the depression with humor, and I was anticipating the chance to present my humor when the comment was made. So, looking at my formula: Depression connected to Humor connected to Anticipation brought about Pain.

Human emotions aren’t linear. They’re too complex to be linear. They’re too complex even for my "formula" (which I really don’t consider to be any sort of formula, it just happened to look like it). Don’t let anyone tell you what your emotions are, or why they are, or how they are, or when they are, or... you get the picture. Everyone is stringed up differently; something that could make one person laugh can make another cry and can make a third fall asleep. Now, that’s a rather extreme way of putting it, but I hope it gets the point across.