That Familiar Chaos.

I could turn this post into some kind of pseudo- Venus vs. Mars debate, but that's been done countless times on countless blogs (even I touched on it very briefly last year). Instead, I'll keep it short and sweet 'cause it's Friday and you probably have better things to do.

[via]

Your heart versus your brain: everyone I know has probably experienced this battle of epic proportions at least once in their lives. The beauty of this illustration lies in its versatility despite the simplicity of its message; you can apply the concept to almost anything in life. The fact remains, however, that you are presented with a choice.

As usual, the trick is making the right one.

I would say that over the course of my life the balance usually has been tipped towards chaos. Not to say that every minute of my waking hours is filled with intense drama, but I have experienced my share of emotion on either extreme and the consequences of such. At times I have gotten lost inside of those (usually negative) emotions and have needed some help getting out. By the way, "getting lost" is not necessarily a bad thing; I've tried to at least learn from those lessons and take something positive away from it.

So lately I've been trying to establish more order in all the aspects of my life, stepping with a little more caution, taking others into consideration, calculating potential consequences of my actions. Admittedly, it's not easy to do because I feel like I've been living in a tempest for so long. It wouldn't be hard at all to give into that familiar chaos -- someone close to me once remarked that I was addicted to it. Realizing that it was the truth was quite the eye-opener.

It is difficult to temper the heart. But I need that balance.

Heartfelt.

Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas.
- Blaise Pascal

Or, "the heart has its reasons that reason cannot know." This is one of the most personally significant statements I've ever read, so much so that I use it as my "bio" or signature on several of my Web accounts ...

... Which leads me to write just a quick thought about the abrupt shift in tone in the blog with my previous entry. Most of the things I write here on Perpetual Mixtape do little more than scratch the surface of what's really going on deeper inside my head. Sure you'll find the occasional rant about some pressing personal issue or problem in my life, but I haven't really bared my soul like that before.

I don't know -- on one hand, it is a small burden off my shoulders to be free to write what I'm actually feeling (one of my major challenges has been to improve my verbal communication to match the dexterity of my written). Having a journal, public or otherwise, has proven to be therapeutic for me; it helps when I'm able to actually see what I'm trying to get across. On the other hand, I'm not really used to writing so frankly and sincerely -- and from a point of vulnerability -- for however many readers are out there. That said, it's almost uncomfortable for me to re-read "Happily Ever After" but I'm reassured by the fact that I wrote it with a clear mind and purpose.

Let me think on it for a while.

Human Emotion On A Global Scale.

Clicking around the Web as usual, and found We Feel Fine, a creative and ambitious site that searches blogs for instances of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling." Then,

When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices.

Read about the methodology and check out the current database of recorded feelings.

Cool as hell. The abovementioned interface is soft, colorful and aesthetically pleasant without being too busy, and it's addicting (I ended up playing with the options for awhile, and admired the design for awhile longer). I found it really interesting to visualize "feelings" this way, especially when taken out of the context of an entry in a personal blog and thrown into the mix with thousands of other random people -- and then sorted, categorized and processed into quantifiable results.

I wonder if I'm in there somewhere. Are you?