Desperation

From Desperate Housewives Season Two, Episode 12 "We Will Be All Right":

Lynette: "Hey."
Tom: "Hey."
Lynette:You're not limping. Did everything go okay?"
Tom: "I couldn't do it."
Lynette: "What happened?"
Tom: "I don't know. I got there, I, I put on the paper gown and I, uh, I just couldn't do it."
Lynette: "Why not?"
Tom: "It felt like I was being emasculated."
Lynette: "Oh, please."
Tom: "I'm serious, Lynette. I don't make the money around here anymore. I don't provide for you and the kids. And I wasn't gonna let them snip out the last thing that makes me a man."
Lynette: "Staying home and taking care of the kids doesn't make you less of a man. That's crazy."
Tom: "You expect me to calm your irrational fears. I expect you to calm mine."
Lynette: "Are you saying you're unhappy?"
Tom: "A little bit, yeah."
Lynette: "Well, what we gonna do about that?"
Tom: "I don't know."
Lynette: "Well, can’t we just-?"
Tom: "No, Lynette. I don't know."


The world today is moving fast. Gender roles are being exchanged. Women are more prominent in the workplace. Men are house husbands. These changes among others are creating new complications in once old-fashioned, conventional relationships.

Throw in requiring a vasectomy, or the equivalent for a female, and this makes matters even harder to disentangle. Undergoing a surgery is serious and expensive, thus it is a long term commitment. Square and Circle are making a major decision and it can be quite traumatizing, as seen by Tom Scavo's refusal from Desperate Housewives.

Happiness is an emotion

hap pi·ness n. - state of well-being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy

Look at these pictures. Would you say that these pictures depict the emotion happiness? To me happiness involves a smile, a laugh, and bright open eyes. I would say that these pictures are a good representation of happiness.

Not once in my reading of We did I get the sense that anyone was experiencing the emotion of happiness. Some may say that D-503 was happy when he was obsessively chasing I-330 around. He was definitely feeling the emotions of lust, but I don’t think he was feeling happy. Ana spoke of happiness in her latest blog post. She stated that “The numbers don't know love, or hate, or envy or anything resembling emotion, so how can they know happiness? The numbers are not allowed to experience emotions, so they cannot experience happiness. Happiness is an emotion.

The One State, dominated by rational thought, frowned upon emotions. D-503 was diagnosed with having a “soul” because he was experiencing his emotions. Emotions threatened the Once State and that is why everyone had to get lobotomies. In a lobotomy the frontal lobes are removed. It is believed that this is the part of the brain where creation of emotions is believed to take place. So obviously the One State did not want the inhabitants to experience the emotion called happiness.

Happi

I noticed someone already posted a blog about happiness, but I had my mind set on writing about it, and thus, I will do so anyway.
Perhaps I'm in a philosophical mood today and I don't feel like writing about math this time, but I was thinking about the whole issue of happiness in class on Thursday, and I was trying to pinpoint exactly what it means to be "happy" in the One State. The numbers don't know love, or hate, or envy or anything resembling emotion, so how can they know happiness? And why is happiness not considered evil and bad like its peer emotions? I think the way that we define happiness is precisely through other types of emotions. We measure happiness on a scale that identifies how much of each type of emotion are we feeling, and then according to the results of those numbers, we decide if we're feeling miserable, unhappy, happy, very happy or ecstatic. We think of how loved we are (by our parents, our friends, are partners), some consider their financial security to affect their happiness, are we constantly jealous of what others have or are we satisfied with our own achievements? These are factors that affect what we call happiness. In fact, we define happiness as "good fortune; pleasure; contentment; joy." In the One State, they all have similar fortunes, so there isn't "good fortune." People don't feel joy, or excitement, they just stroll through life in utter neutrality. I think that they epitomize the concept of "ignorance is blissed," and without imagination, they will never wonder or get curious about what is possibly out there that they are missing out on. So they continue on with their lives feeling nothing... no pain... no love... no true happiness. However, they have pure comfort. And that's what I think they define as happiness.