been thinking about the relationship of faith and emotion lately. i started thinking about emotion again after having this slightly unsettling experience last year where my subconscious gut emotional faculties seemed to be much more aware than my supposedly rational thinking faculties.

emotional responses are a kind of sixth sense, a necessary component for navigating the world and society, as useful as vision, hearing, etc. it seems to me that the way devout people describe the central role faith plays in their daily lives is not unlike the effect of emotion as i describe it.

i think on one hand faith itself might be a sort of emotion like fear, passion, anger, jealousy, etc but on the other it describes the very state of acceptance or belief in that which we feel. we don’t question whether the feeling exists or not, or from where it sprung, we believe in it, we experience it, we know that it is real, that it exists, that it represents something honest and true.

our conscious mind will do the followup work and churn away at what this emotion means as far as future action, but comparatively, that’s tedium, fill-in-the-blank kind of work. the truly amazing thing is that some intuitive/instinctual/evolutionarily-honed part of us *felt* something way way before the conscious mind had even an inkling of an iota of a figment of what was coming.

haha. actually not entirely true. i have new semester’s resolutions. usually this means that the start of a new semester or summer (in august, january, and may) is perfect for abandoning old habits and taking new risks.

this semester i will begin looking for a new place to live

i will try to find a couch

i will think about buying a car

i will talk more to more people

i will think more–even when i making the tiniest decisions

i will seek out peers

i will read for inspiration and intellectual curiosity. my list of potentials so far: godel escher bach, w. somerset maugham, a new kind of science

i will program more and better

yesterday was day 1: filled with departing and arriving, lord of the rings part 2, and dinner.

i never feel such thorough exhaustion as i feel when i come home.

today was shopping. it’s kind of like what to get for everyone in your family who has everything? matthew and i drove around calling out the various cool cars we saw and have been talking about for the last few weeks. than nissan 350z starts looking awfully pretty in real life. pretty is an understatement. that car is damn sexy.

seems i’ll be going to cambodia the last week of january. it is not easy getting to cambodia. i will be flying through detroit, tokyo, and bangkok on my way to phnom penh.

back in august, i went to kazakhstan for a week, came back on a sunday and school started on tuesday. before i had left, the town was empty, work was busy and when i returned the town was overflowing and school was busy. it was if i’d come back to a completely different place.

for the past week, north carolina (in particular charlotte and the triangle area) having been trying to recover from an ice storm that knocked out power for over a million people, some for a full week. on the night of the ice storm, i was at strongs till midnight, working, chatting with friends, attending to final projects. and now, school is over, work is fairly busy, winter break approaches.

meanwhile i’m ravenously reading about cars online, thinking maybe picking one up for myself. my favs: vw jetta and the mini cooper. (not sure it’s exactly “me,” but i like that new nissan 350z too)

be traveling to austin for winter break next week, which should be nice. haven’t seen the fam since graduation and haven’t been in austin since last winter break. guess i really am a north carolina resident. should start placing bets now how long i plan to stay through measure phase II.

lastly, there’s a good chance i may be traveling to cambodia in late january. that could be fun… maybe? (where is cambodia you say? oh, south of china, bordering thailand, laos, and vietnam)

the icestorm officially ended for me today when sometime around 7pm my internet service was restored.

i am back online.

time for some serious websurfing and boingboing-ing.

[also, i turned in my last final project of the semester today, so school is over till january]