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23 February 2010
True Confessions→[More:]Not long ago I watched the film "Marley and Me." At the end I bawled like a little baby.
Oh, I do have a non-dog one. I always said I was gonna go gray with dignity, but I have way too many gray hairs for a 30 year old and it looks terrible w/ my now-long hair. So I'm gonna dye it for a while, till I feel like cutting my hair short again and it won't look so silly.
Shortly after the Best Dog of My Life died, a friend gave me a copy of Marley & Me. It had just come out in hardback and she hadn't read it. I cried and cried through the whole damn thing and although I finished it I can't bring myself to reread it or watch the movie. In retrospect, it wasn't all that great of a book but it got me at a tender time.
Then we got a labrador puppy and realized Marley was an amateur.
Once when I was five I took my brother's hockey card collection to school and gave them away to all the little boys. This may or may not have had something to do with the two marriage proposals I received my kindergarten year.
I bawled (absolutely sobbed) at the ending of Fried Green Tomatoes, the book. I had seen the movie dozens of times and didn't think the book could affect me so much.
(The real confession: After I spent a whole afternoon sobbing over the ending, I went back and read the last couple chapters again! Because it's such a good-feeling sort of sadness!)
I dance around the kitchen, without pants, singing at the cats, even though the neighbors' front walk passes within inches of my floor to ceiling kitchen window.
(Mom lent me her copy of Marley and Me with the instruction that I not read it to the end. She needn't have warned me and though I laughed at much of the beginning, I stopped well before the end).
In 5th grade, during recess, I threw the rock that (inadvertently) landed on my friend's head and caused him to be rushed the nurse's office for stitches. Never fessed up, neither.
If you want your movie to make me cry - and a dog isn't available - just toss in a father-and-son reconciliation scene. It doesn't even matter if your movie is Lost in Space. I'll still deliver the tears on schedule.
ER used to make me cry, back in the days when I watched it regularly and the cast was still awesome. Every Thursday night I would be sitting on the couch with a lump in my throat, face streaming with tears as some character faced death or grieved over a lost child or bravely accepted an amputation or gave up a kidney or whatever it was that week, and ask myself "Why am I putting myself through this? This is what I do for entertainment?"
I was nearing the end of a luke-warm relationship when I happened to catch Wedding Singer on TV. The scene on the airplane just. tore. me. up. I wanted to be in love like that! I bawled at the end of a stupid freakin' Adam Sandler movie. That was sign enough that I needed to break up with P., which I did right after. The next day, the very next day, I was reading online personal ads, and, in a fit of pique, took out a bizarre one.
It didn't make me cry, though honestly I'd have welcomed it, but Grave of the Fireflies absolutely destroyed me. I stumbled outside after watching it and just sat on the lawn for hours. I was wracked by despair for days afterward. I don't think I've ever been as emotionally affected by a non real event quite like that. Its a beautiful piece of work but I doubt I'll ever watch it again.
Worst: I teared up watching last week's Real World episode. It's such a trashy crappy show but there was a good moment when the mom of the bi guy apologized to him for asking him to hide part of himself.
Before my parents passed away I rarely cried. Since that happened I generally shed tears every day. Sometimes it's just thinking about stuff, sometimes it's things I read or see that might not even be connected to me. I think it's worse after EM was born too.
In other confessions - I've never been on a date. Never been asked for my phone number and done the whole get ready and go out for dinner thing. Pretty much all of my relationships were from hook ups at parties or clubs.
I am not sure I've ever cried at movies or books. Only two things seem to do it to me, apart from when I get hit in the nose, but I think that's different:
1) Thinking for any length of time about my dad. He died when I was 13, and lately, I guess I'm coming to terms with the fact that his death DID leave a rather large hole. Huh.
2)I'm not even sure HOW to explain this, but when one of my daughter's teachers emailed me some really nice stuff about her (the teacher's contract was coming to an end - she was a mat leave fill in) I wept like crazy. Then had a hard time keeping it together during BOTH kids parent/teacher interviews. They are both great girls, in their individual ways, and it seems to make me cry. Damned if I can figure out WHY that is.
Oh, I did cry during some movie about a cat and a dog once. Milo and Otis maybe?
oh, and gomi, I don't think I've ever dated either. Makes this whole single in my late thirties thing a little scary.
I cry when the winners have their national anthems played at the Olympics and they watch their flag raised.
I also cry at weddings. And, oh yes, Miko, ER back in the day. That Ray Liotta episode ripped me apart. And the one where Dr Kovac nearly got shot in Africa and started praying and the woman told the soldiers he was a priest and he was spared ... *sniff*
I hide candy in certain spots around the house. I don't need to hide it because no one else wants it but it's more fun for me to grab a secret handful and enjoy my private little treat. My hubby is always coming across a box of Lemonheads or a roll of Sweettarts in odd places and he just laughs.
Years ago I found myself on the couch, racked with sobs over an Adam Sandler movie, 50 First Dates, thinking no one would ever love me so much. That's when I'd discovered how astonishingly bad my pms had gotten. I don't think it's been quite as bad since, now it's barely an issue. Adam Sandler movies must do something to people on some lizard brain level.
- Songbird, by Fleetwood Mac.
- the movie What Dreams May Come.
- The Long Road, by Eddie Vedder.
Runner-Up:
- Bridge to Terabithia (I know this is wrong, deeply wrong, but goddam if I can't relate to that poor kid by movie's end.)
- Duncan by Paul Simon.
Marley and Me was playing on the big monitor in the waiting room at the vet hospital when we took our dog there after she become suddenly and seriously ill. I thought that was an odd (and upsetting) choice.
And Miko, I'm with you on the ER thing. I actually had to stop watching it because it upset me so much.
I cry every time I read Where the Red Fern Grows and Bridges of Madison County (shut up). I happened to catch the movie (Bridges) on TV earlier this week and had to grab a handful of Kleenex. There are a couple more movies that make me tear up no matter how often I've watched them, but I can't remember the titles at the moment.
I don't mind my tendency to cry during emotional scenes in television and film, because I can also use it in order to cry whenever necessary when I'm the one on stage. I do, however, mind my tendency to cry when singing beautiful music, because getting literally choked up does unpleasant things to the quality of tone.
My "romantic" life thus far has been a quiet, unmitigated failure. I don't mean just in the sense that I am not currently in a meaningful and satisfying relationship, but that there has been nothing in it of romance or commitment or support for me, despite my having initiated and given as much of these things as felt right at the time. And I'll leave it at that, because if I let myself continue, I'm not sure where I'd stop, and no one gives that much of a fuck.
There are three songs that are guaranteed to reduce me to tears very quickly.
1. Alanis Morissette: Thank You
2. Pink Floyd: Comfortably Numb
3. The Beatles: She Said She Said
It's pretty much only these three songs. Other songs can make me teary-eyed, but these are the three that, if I'm not prepared for them, will have me, um, "unabashedly bawling my eyes out."
I, uh, cry whenever I hear Elton John's "Daniel". (I cry a lot during movies and sometimes whilst reading books, but I'm not really embarrassed about that. "Daniel" I'm embarrassed about.)
I cry everytime I hear Fairytale of New York.
I have cried over video games. (shut up)
If it is the right (well, wrong) time of the month I will cry at everything from tv commercials to conversations I overhear in the grocery store. I've got issues, I know. But I come from a long line of sobbing hysterical people.
I weep for the future of mankind. Well, not weep so much as chortle grotesquely to myself as I scurry around perfecting my evil plans. Salivate, I guess, is the word I was looking for. I salivate for the future of mankind. Yeah - that's it. Salivate.
... I'll leave it at that, because if I let myself continue, I'm not sure where I'd stop, and no one gives that much of a fuck.
People here do, even if nobody else does.
I grew up watching M*A*S*H every afternoon after school. Now, I'm not one to display emotion, but I cried like a baby at the end of 'Goodbye, Farewell, Amen' when I first watched it and every time since. Which is dumb, I know.
I don't think I have ever been on what would be considered a date, either. I've only ever asked maybe two or three times and got turned down.
You know, dating was such a non-thing when I was in high school and college and for a while thereafter. It was like this retro concept that maybe your older cousins did. In the 80s and 90s you just "talked" and "hung out" and "hooked up" until you were a "thing," until you were "together." Dating, as such, was not widely practiced, at least in my neck of the woods.
It was odd to see dating start to re-happen in the mid- to late-90s. It was like the idea of a formal structure around romantic relationships came back into style along with the Gap swing-dancing khakis. And for those of us who had absolutely no experience with it, it was weird.
It still is. I've had a few periods of being on the dating market in my 30s and it was quite difficult, since we really had no schema to draw from, and it was like all of us were learning dating in just the same way we should have/would have in our early teens, if that had been something that people even did in the years 1984-1996 or so. But they didn't - so we were stuck in this uncomfortable adult version of awkward adolescence.
I cried at the final episode of ER, because I love love love the first eight or so seasons, and it was just so sad to watch it all end (despite the fact that it was practically euthanasia at that point).
I love listening to cheesy, terrible, and/or misogynistic top 40 when I'm driving. Windows down, volume up.
Also, I cried last weekend when I was driving around doing errands and put on the radio and heard there was Garrison Keillor doing parody lyrics to "The Water Is Wide" about, of all things, the first hint of a thaw in Minnesota.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
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