Monday

The class discussion today made me think about the emotions that people experience and how people experience them differently. What I gathered from today’s reading was that the author is truthfully uncomfortable with feeling any positive emotions. He has become accustomed to feeling worthless and miserable and thus, these emotions have become a sort of baseline for him. Anything above this behavior, like pride or happiness, is not a pleasant feeling for him. I think that this helps to uncover a more sensitive side to the speaker than he tries to portray. He seems to be trying to disguise the fact that he is, deep-down, a fragile creature. Being mean to people almost certainly acts as a way for him to gain some false sense of power allowing him to, for a small period of time, feel like a legitimate human being.