Emotion: Going Full Retard

Postponing breakup grief is an extremely useful maneuver. Even if it hurts more, you may wait till you can afford to give it more thought.

(Someone said they didn't peg me for being this emo...)

Stuck in a traffic jam, so let me go full-retard on this, just because mental conditioning is like a huge area of study for me. :D

So I think about this on several levels.

1) No matter what I feel or don't feel about things, it's always worthwhile to empathise with other people and their experiences. This is a humanistic study, some might call it (part of) anthropology. If someone feels helpless, you can choose to fully empathise and feel helpless also - but that doesn't really often help. So sometimes partial empathy is worthwhile because you get to help people if you do it right.

2) Emotions are systematic reactions in our bodies, which alter muscle control, rate of thought, processes of memory, etc. they of course, have particular triggers, and we often can expect particular outcomes. If not, there would be no such thing as "emotional intelligence," as a completely chaotic mess would leave us nothing to manage, internally to each of ourselves, or externally in the counterparties we have in social life (including family life) and commerce. I personally find it EXTREMELY ANNOYING when folks aren't up for detailed discussion of this stuff. I've had many relationships with folks like this in the past, and to-date have surmised that it's a real waste of time for me to get close to people who don't appreciate emotion at this level of comprehension.

3) I get emo a lot. It's usually not about people though, except when I let people get close and then they hurt me. The stuff I'm most emo about is how ineffient human language is, particularly in the domains where a few simple changes would have (as far as I can tell) exponential improvements in the efficiency of how we use language. (We each expend energy to manipulate images, which convey information, which helps us get other stuff done. Efficiency is referred to in this context. The "stuff," done could be as simple as "experience pleasure.")

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What Makes Me Sad
What Pisses Me Off

As to how one postpones an emotion...

You need to identify a higher priority. In my recent situation, work i.e. studies took precedent. I'm a work-first kind of person - I don't mess up ops. :P

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At a morning meeting with industry colleagues:

"Before I forget, is the bookworm in love?"
"Er, well, I post a lot of stuff because I have nothing to do... and I haven't really read books in like ten years."
"Yeah, I learnt not to take his posts too literally."
"Sometimes he's just messing with your mind"
"Haha."

I'll say though, I am tired of having been out of a decent relationship for this long. But the cost of trying to stay in one, on someone else's terms is just too scary. So until I get a huge chunk of work done, or find other resource inputs, I guess I'm going to have to draw lots of lines, i.e. stay on my turf, for the time being.