New Car Smell

I think I'm a bit lacking in emotion. Well, that is a bit inaccurate. I am lacking in powerful emotion. I never get truly angry, and I am never genuinely happy. I am easily annoyed, but that is like a feather drifting in calm air. I may attempt to bear it aloft by huffing at it, but it will only rise so far, and no further. My temper is never caught by the wind and ripped into the sky. Instead it slips all too easily to the ground.

A similar problem exists with feeling happy. I tend to believe that there is a difference between pleasure and happiness. Pleasure is easily sought and found. A pile of hot, crispy prata would certainly give me pleasure now. Will it make me happy? That's a harder question to answer. If the answer is yes, then it seems a bit sad that my happiness turns on a bit of fried dough.

Happiness implies something beyond mere pleasure. Consider the difference between visiting a prostitute and getting married to someone you genuinely love. I have not experienced the latter, but I imagine that the happiness derived from this most cliched of happiness-generating activities is of a different nature to the pleasure obtained from sexual contact with a prostitute, no matter how intense the pleasure involved.

One way of approaching the problem of what exactly constitutes happiness is to dive into the analytics, to break it down and consider the parts. I don't feel like doing that at the moment, so I shall digress. Severely.

I have discovered that I do not panic very easily either. A couple of nights ago, there was a moment when I smelt something that seemed like it might be a full tank of gas catching fire and the wind was snapped out of me. I tried to take a breath, but found that my lungs were not opening up. No air entered. So I reached for my chest, not to grab at it in hopes of somehow forcing air in, but to probe for parts moving independent of each other. The most obvious sign of a fracture is different areas of connected bone moving in differing directions. So I poked a bit, and found that aside from some pain on contact, nothing seemed to be severely fractured, so my lungs were unlikely to be collapsed. Another breath, again nothing. So I leaned back and tried to extend my torso, to ease up on the internal organs somewhat. Another attempt at breath, while continuing to probe my chest for any obvious injuries. Still nothing. Someone asking if I was alright, but I was a bit annoyed at her, so I reached for the door handle. Unfortunately, without oxygen, I was having some difficulty pushing the door open. Then air started to enter. Gasping would have been painful on abused lungs, so I opted for a more measured approach to refilling them.

Strangely enough, my car still has that new car smell, even on a dusty lot amongst other battered hunks of metal.