Glad to not be Isabella right now...

First of all, I'd like to welcome you to the land of chaos that is my brain. 

I'm basically catatonic on my bed while eating my bowl of cookie dough tonight (Web MD whispering in my ear that I might get salmonella from the raw eggs). There's obviously a big dilemma that Isabella faces in Act 2 of Measure for Measure. It's a pretty heavy question. Do you give up your virtue or your brother? Angelo…gah. I acknowledge his crazy with a short haiku.

Angelo, please chill

You are all over the place

Plus, you are creepy

Honestly for me it would be pretty simple. I have a brother and I'm pretty sure I'd rather prostitute myself out to Angelo (urgh) than let my brother die. But it's easy for me to say that, because it's all hypothetical. I see where Isabella's coming from: she's a nun-in-training after all.  Thus I'm getting in my bi-monthly existential crisis in just past the middle of October, basically right on schedule. Isabella gets too options:

1. Lose something
2. Lose something else.

Great options. (Am I getting botulism from this cookie dough? I should probably hit up the Mayo Clinic website)

But back to my bi-monthly existential crisis: I am struggling with quantifying the worth of things. The value of things. The weight of things. I've recently developed an obsession with American Doctor Duncan MacDougall. He was rather unextraordinary except for one thing: he had this theory that the human soul weighs 21 grams. Basically he did this fairly unethical experiment where he weighed people were dying of tuberculosis on these beds that were actually scales and determined that after they died the average weight lost (not including bodily functions etc) was about 21 grams. Turns out I'm not the only one who is fascinated with this. There was even a movie called 21 grams. So what does this have to do with anything? Despite the fact that Dr. MacDougall's theory has been disproved, people hang on to the idea, because we like to quantify things. Several doctors from Cornell quantified pain on a 1-10 scale using units of "dols". There's also the Holmes and Rahe stress scale which is pasted below:

So…hypothetically:

If I get a mortgage (31)

+ I get pregnant (40)

+ I contract ebola (If you haven't noticed yet, I'm a hypochondriac) (53)

+ I jaywalk across i-40 (11)

_____________________________

My stress level will be exactly 135. According to the website (http://www.stress.org/holmes-rahe-stress-inventory/) having this score means the chances of me having a mental breakdown are unlikely, but you can't trust the internet now can you?

But I digress….how is Isabella going to make this decision? We still haven't come up with some machine for making these decisions for us (thank goodness) so in way-back-when Vienna I guess that leaves going with her gut. Quantification isn't an option here. I feel as if this level of stress this decision would put Isabella under is way more than the 135 score theoretical-me earned. The pain of losing a brother, or of losing her virtue and thus her god, probably cannot be measured on a 1-10 scale. And I don't know how much the souls of this characters weigh, but it's probably more than 21 grams.

Now, knowing how Shakespeare operates these comedies, he'll probably write the problem away somehow and then people will get married at the end without any bloodshed; but I still get some serious pause from this quandary. For some reason it hit me right in the feels. One bowl of cookie dough later though, I feel as if I'm seeing the light a little bit (or maybe that's just an oncoming sugar coma, who knows?)

TGIF fam,

Anne