“Feelings are not supposed to be logical. Dangerous is the man who has rationalized his emotions.”

quoted: David Borenstein

Tonight I posted a Facebook status: Like for a poem on your wall. It got a fair amount of likes (fair meaning more than thirty), and I was (am) pleased. I found poems by famous and not-so-famous (but mostly famous) American poets online, and I copied and pasted them to my friends' Facebook walls. I even typed out some original poetry on a few people's walls, nervously and reluctantly, for it felt like giving away a little bit of my soul, and I feared rejection and retort. Almost every poem I posted, original or otherwise, got at least a like, if not a comment in response. A few of the likes, I felt, were simply out of etiquitte--after all, not everyone is a big fan of metaphoric, some-thought-assembly-required poetry, and that's what I was posting--but most of the likes and comments felt genuine. I think I reached some people tonight in posting the great words of Walt Whitman, e. e. cummings, Marvin Bell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Robert Creeley on their Facebook walls. I think I urged them to think and, more importantly, to feel.

And speaking of feeling: lately, I've felt hollow, shallow, and empty. Mostly because I have no answers to the questions I desire the answers to regarding life in general. But I've also felt very teenagerish, ordinary, and human lately. More than ever before. My good friend Torrey told me, though, that emotion is the effect of knowledge and lack of knowledge, and there must be lack of knowledge if there is to be knowledge. This consoled me--perhaps the reason I feel so real is because I feel detached. Because confusing emotions are normal, and I am more ordinary than I think.

-Pauline