Why do things have to have meanings? Why can't they be just things?

We seem to place so much store in the meaning of things. Meaning is assumed to be some essence of which we all have perfect apprehension. What an absurd game. The only thing we have going for us is to be sufficiently awake to ask, "huh?" "what do you mean?" or "what did you say?". The latter two typically evoking a torrent of "explanation" that only adds to the original noise and the only way to stop it is to nod, smile, use whatever acquiescing body language you have to hand and say: "uh huh", "I see" or "really?" The latter being the most honest of the three.

What increasingly amazes me is how far we as a race have progressed with such a noisy, inefficent and downright confusing set of protocols we blithely call communication.

Emotions

We signal how we feel in many ways. Those close to us can usually tell how we are feeling often before the feeling has registered. And if we communicate in a decontextualised way, i.e. email, some of us use emoticons to convey what we could not capture in words. I don't like emoticons. Never have. I figure if you need 'em then maybe we just opt for a little lamp attached to the skull that analyses brain chemical balance and converts that to a word or color to be displayed to the world: fine and sunny, cool change approaching! One can only imagine what such a system would do for male-female communication. He's thinking sex and she's thinking retail therapy. There is probably a good argument about having too much information. And perhaps the mind games we slip into are a necessary part of staying sane, having a laugh and not taking ourselves too seriously.

There is one situation however when some kind of signal or code would be handy. Those days when you are not up or down, not happy or sad, but somewhere in between and it's neither a good or bad thing to be in such a state. These are the days when you are often asked, "How are you?" I am building a store of replies that try to take the enquiry more seriosusly than it was probably intended and also have a bit of fun. Maybe: It's a bit complex, can I draw you a Venn diagram? I have multiple feelings right now and here are my top 10. The non-linear mathematics of my psyche is in one of those irreproducible regions right now. If I was the weather, I'd be cyclonic winds and that is only above the waist. Or perhaps a simple, let me dash off a quick sketch for you.