Editing 1048: Emotion

{{comic
| number    = 1048
| date      = April 27, 2012
| title     = Emotion
| image     = emotion.png
| titletext = Fortunately, the internet has a virtually inexhaustible supply of code that doesn't work and people who are wrong, which bodes well for a return to normalcy. [Note: Click to read context for the cancer comics. She's doing well.]
}}
{{Quote| In October my fiancée was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer. [...] She’s been in nonstop treatment for the last eight months, which has been an emotional and physical ordeal that’s hard to describe. We both have all the support we could ask for—including an incredible medical team—and we’ve had some really good moments during these months, but it’s still a terrifying and isolating experience. Treatment is ongoing, and there’s no well-defined end point; things are going to continue to be scary and difficult for a while.|[[Randall Munroe]]}}
Here's the [http://blog.xkcd.com/2011/06/30/family-illness/ link] referenced in the image text, which is a blog post from 2011 regarding his fiancée's breast cancer.

==Explanation==
This is a mostly serious comic in which [[Randall]] expresses his thoughts while his fiancée started to suffer from {{w|breast cancer}}. He doesn't care about many things like politics anymore, there is just his fiancée's cancer and his romance with her. This is one of many [[:Category:Cancer|comics about cancer]] he made because of her cancer.

Some of his withdrawn activities are shown here:
*Politics became prominent in 2008 due to the upcoming {{w|United States presidential election, 2008|US presidential elections in November 2008}}.
*"Code not working even though it ''should'' work" is a common frustration in software development, when the developer is convinced to have covered every possible scenario, but their code still does not run as expected, because of some obscure tiny problem which they didn't think of and which often takes much time (and frustration) to find.
*{{w|Joss Whedon}} is best known as the creator and showrunner of the television series ''{{w|Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series)|Buffy the Vampire Slayer}}'' (1997–2003), ''{{w|Angel (1999 TV series)|Angel}}'' (1999–2004) and ''{{w|Firefly (TV series)|Firefly}}'' (2002), so he's the "cause" of emotions for Randall during the time they were aired.
*"People being wrong on the internet" is something that can easily annoy and preoccupy an internet-savvy guy like Randall, who knows the things they're (incorrectly) talking about; this was previously dealt with in the comic [[386: Duty Calls]].

Eventually, Randall's fiancée's cancer, once diagnosed, monopolizes all of his emotions, wiping out everything else as insignificant in comparison. Only the romance can get back a little bit of room as time passes. As the threat posed by the cancer wanes, a space opens up (the question marks) that the cancer concern used to occupy. The ordeal wiped out all the previous, more trivial concerns, pre-occupying him entirely with the disease. Now that there is a little less reason to worry, he's not used to thinking about anything else. His previous preoccupations no longer seem important, so what to fill his time with?

==Transcript==
:[A graph showing the approximate fractional causes of Randall's emotions, with percentages on the Y axis and time on the X axis. "Politics", "Romance", "Code not working even though it *should* work", "people being wrong on the internet", and "other" all vary all throughout the time period from 2006 to midway 2010. There is a wedge of Joss Whedon that tapers out starting from 2006 to around mid 2007. There is a noticeable increase in "Politics" around fall, 2008 that tapers off sharply afterwards and appears again in the second half on 2010, until..

:Around approximately September 2010, everything else is compressed into a tiny fraction of around 2-3%. The rest is filled with cancer. The tiny wedge of everything does begin to slowly expand to be filled half with romance and half with an area filled with question marks.]

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Charts]]
[[Category:Timelines]]
[[Category:Cancer]]
[[Category:Politics]]
[[Category:Programming]]
[[Category:Firefly]]
[[Category:Romance]]