firecat

The other day I was picking on posts that have unhelpful-to-me tips for handling depression. In this post I'll mention a helpful-to-me depression aid, and ask for some advice.

Helpful-to-me thing: http://boggletheowl.tumblr.com/
This is a depression support blog where a cartoon owl offers a lot of encouragement and a little bit of advice. Some of the people writing in say upsetting things and sometimes Boggle is a bit too sweet. But I find the high encouragement to advice ratio helpful. (When you're depressed, what are some helpful things for you?)

Advice request:
I used to e-socialize a lot via mailing lists. These days it seems all the topical activity that used to occur in mailing lists has moved to Facebook. I check Facebook once or twice a day. But I've noticed that I usually end up feeling worse afterward. Part of it is that people post so much bad news. And OK, I do belong to some groups there where the whole purpose is to post bad news. But it's not just those groups that make me feel bad. I guess I could just quit reading FB, or limit myself to reading only a few people I have no other way to connect with. But it would be nice if there were a less drastic option or some way to approach FB that doesn't get me all riled up. (Does this happen to you?)

via jae

Artist Pei-Ying Lin, Master of Art in Design Interactions, is doing a project called "Unspeakableness." Part of the project is this infographic that takes an emotion classification map designed by W. Gerrod Parrott and overlays "untranslatable emotions in languages other than English."

http://uniquelang.peiyinglin.net/visualization/Other_Languages_b.png

I looked at the overlay and found several words that were supposedly untranslateable but I know words in English that seem to mean the same thing. For example, there's a Chinese word that is supposed to mean "A rather relaxed emotion and attitude towards everything, accept all the facts instead of worrying about it." I think a word for that in English is "equanimity." (This is a word commonly used in Buddhist studies, and it is an emotion, although some people probably don't think of it that way.) "Equanimity" doesn't appear on Parrott's map.

Other words or phrases I think translate into English well enough:
"(Hebrew) Literally means 'I'm sick on you.' It describes the feeling of obsession with someone or something." Crush? (Not on Parrott's chart) Obsession? (Not on the chart.) Infatuation? (On the chart...although it's connected to "lust" and not to "longing," which I disagree with.
"(Chinese) The feeling somewhere between sympathy and empathy, to feel the suffering of loved ones." I would call this "compassion." But Parrott has "compassion" connected to "affection" with no connection at all to "sadness" or "sympathy."
"(Japanese) The bubbly feeling of the moment of falling in love." The poly community calls something like this "new relationship energy," although that means more the first several months of falling in love, not the first instant. I'm not sure why it's different from "infatuation."

What do you think?