So, I’ve had quite a bit of anticipation leading up to the San Diego Comic-Con this year. To some degree it has been like excitement; it has quickened my pulse in a good way as I look forward to the good things. To a much greater degree it has been like overwhelming stress, increasing the pressure on my heart and making every beat a little more intense. Also, because the future is unknowable, any level of anticipation seems directly related to a degree of expectation, and expectations are the sort of thing that can lead to disappointment, so this anticipation may be setting me up for disappointment by the actuality of the convention.
On one hand, the anticipation of the event extends the event backwards in time to me, allowing my emotional and mental reactions to the convention to exist along a longer timeline than the few days of the con. This extension through time would seem a positive thing, since I believe the bulk of my reactions at the con itself will be positive ones. Unfortunately it seems that as long as the actual events of the convention, such as how I will arrive in San Diego and whether I will have enough cash on hand to do things like eat, are indeterminate the anticipation is simply extending a bad feeling as that of not finding myself with a way there or enough money right back into the past.
I am, at this point, certain that I have a reliable and firm transportation to and from the convention, and that I will have plenty of cash available not only to eat, but to buy a few things beyond food and incidentals. Yet the anticipatory bad feelings that I’ve been having for so long linger in me like echos of a future that will never come to be. Like my anticipation doesn’t want to give up on any of the unknowable futures, even the ones with virtually zero chance of coming to fruition, and is trying to extend my emotional responses to those possible futures back to me.
So, although Anticipation seems to have the ability to move emotions through time, backwards from the future (an extraordinary feat), its arbitrariness in which emotions it extends, and from which possible futures, is a major negative mark against it. I give Anticipation one thumb up and two thumbs down.
