Those are adjectives and not verbs, in your cases. Many -ed past participles can also be used as adjectives.
married, severed, disembodied, averted, worried, shocked, injured, vandalized, greyed out, redacted, censored, pampered, allied, contrived,
and so on.
The [finite form of to be] + present participle is used not only to denote continuous states or progressive actions but also informally, I submit, the ingressive or inceptive aspect, i.e., that an action or state has begun. Neither statal nor copulative/pseudo-copulative verbs are always exempted, especially in informal speech. There are other uses which have nothing to do with aspect but are used as intensifiers and polite hedges.
Some forty minutes into an hour baking time for fresh bread, the Malliard reaction is doing its magic:
That bread is smelling good.
I am not suggesting that the bread is in a continuous state of smelling good, but that the bread has begun to smell good (ingressive aspect) and it's time to get the butter out of the fridge, because I'm fixing to have a big slice of homemade bread (prospective aspect, but only for some speakers of Southern American English).
In a more formal register, I would say:
The bread is beginning to smell good and I'm about to have a slice of homemade bread.
Think of any food that looks unappetizing before cooking — steaks on the grill, a stew simmering for hours, dried beans — and wait for The Moment.
By like token, I could be mixing the hot and cold water to get just the right temperature for a bath or shower:
The water is feeling nice and warm now.
The water has begun to feel nice and warm now.
This apparently meme-worthy citation describes an emergent feeling of loneliness or contingency upon contemplating the vastness of the universe (ingressive aspect) using the meaning of seem as "seem to feel" and in the continuous form, accentuating a moment of intense emotion right now. It invites the reader to identify with the author in a way which to her apparently wouldn't be as rhetorically powerful as simply saying the universe seems huge. The universe, of course, has been huge since the Big Bang and it always is, but in this moment, she has begun to feel it.
At work he's a total jerk.
He is being a total jerk [today at work].
This usage is best solved by acknowledging a lexical difference: in the present tense one is making a judgment about his personality; in the continuous, instances of behavior, in this case, today.
Permanet states or non-animates without agency can never be used with the continuous:
*She is being Australian. (nationality, not in some odd scenario behavior)
*He is being short.
*My shirt is being green.
You are looking pale today.
You are looking fabulous today.
While the first sentence could be parsed as ingressive, this usage seems more like a polite hedge, while the second is best viewed as an intensifier which, like the meme, suggests a heightened level of personal involvement.
Best Answer
You mustn't believe all you read, especially about grammar. Why do people sometimes say that "be" can be either an auxiliary or a "lexical" verb? I don't know what "lexical" is supposed to mean here, but that's what they say. But why?
Well, here's my theory. "Auxiliary" in this context means "helping verb", and sometimes there is a following verb that you can imagine that "be" helps, like the present participle of a verb in the progressive aspect. But sometimes there is no following verb for the "be" to help, in which case it can't be an auxiliary and so it must be a "lexical" verb itself (since as we all know, every complete declarative sentence must have a verb).
Does that make sense? Alas, no, because it's not based on any facts of language, but instead, solely on terminology. Maybe we call the "be" that goes with an accompanying verb an "auxiliary verb", but that doesn't prove anything about that "be". Maybe "auxiliary" is an appropriate term, but maybe it isn't.
I could declare that all nouns beginning with the letter "k" are a special part of speech called "kymniad". Would you believe me?
According to the only syntactic tests I know of for what is an auxiliary, the "be" that accompanies another verb works just like the "be" that doesn't. For instance, auxiliaries are inverted in order with a sentence subject in questions, unlike ordinary non-auxiliary verbs:
Ordinary verbs don't work this way in contemporary English:
So, we might expect the "lexical" verb "be' to work like the ordinary verb "eat", right? But it doesn't -- not at all.
So where is the language evidence that there is a grammatical difference between "auxiliary be" and "lexical be"? Nowhere.