Following your gut

I know it's glaringly obvious, but today I finally put into words how I distinguish a crush from a friend -- a crush is someone whom I really want to get to know every single little detail about. I don't really care to do the same for a friend.

I don't understand how feelings work. If I know equally little about two people, I should be equally curious about them. But somewhere along the way, my subconscious decided that one person is more interesting than the other. I'm not a guy so it's not about how hot one person looks compared to the other. You know how it is: you can tell who the best-looking person in a room is and have absolutely no interest in him/her. Instead, the quirky person who may pass for someone decidedly odd is way more interesting.

If anything, this sure explains how some not-so-hot people end up with terrific eye candy on their arms. Unfortunately, I was reading somewhere that a very unequal level of attractiveness often dooms a relationship from the start -- I'm not citing my sources here. I was reading readers' comments on a blog. I think it's popular opinion. As an aside, ScienceDaily has an article on how people often think that an opinion heard repeated from the same person is actually popular opinion. I don't know how reliable popular opinion is really. I mean, your opinion doesn't have to affect what happens to me. But it does, subconsciously. It's all about what you believe, and you can't really control that.

Going back to crushes, I think we know what we are looking for in our partners. It's easy to say that you want a funny, intelligent and nice guy/girl, but those are really subjective labels. What sort of humor? What kind of intelligence? How nice is nice? It's hard to break those down to their little subcategories but we know what we like when we find it.

So maybe it is as they say -- go with your feelings. Don't think about it. Because really, people are having a hard time explaining why humor works. And with all those different intelligent quotients...I think we should just step back and ask ourselves if we're happy. If we are, then we're headed in the right direction.

One of the professors in school is obsessed with how E.coli is capable of directional brownian swimming. Really, it's all about the happiness gradient -- where is the food? Humans aren't that different really -- which way to happiness? Follow your gut instincts.