Do you need someone to cry with you? I'm your gal.

Maybe you think I'm exaggerating when I talk about how I'm a sympathetic crier.  How when I see someone crying I almost always start crying along with them.

I am not. 

An example:

We have a Spanish branch in our stake and they were fresh out of pianists so I was asked to help out for the primary sacrament meeting program, which was today.  With the exception of a few phrases and things I've pick up spending a lifetime in a southern border state (plus my love for Latin root words), I neither speak nor understand Spanish.  Like a genius, I took German in high school and the only good it has done me was that one time in Tunisia when I was mistaken for a German tourist by a local shrimper.  Anyway, after the program was completed the branch president got up to say a few words, very little of which I understood.  A few minutes into it he got a little weepy - over what I can only guess.  But those types of details do not matter to a sympathetic crier.  Oh no, because there I was getting weepy right along with him.  He could have been talking about that one time he lost his lucky socks.  It matters not.  When you are with me you do not cry alone.

Movies to cry along to.

I went to see Harry Potter 7.2 tonight and to say that I cried a lot of tears is to say that Niagara Falls drops a lot of water.  It was a wet-land preserve in that theater.  Algae started to form in the pools around my feet.  A loon swooped down and snagged a fish.  Some guy was offering air-boat tours.  You get the picture.  There was a point in it when I was nearly in convulsions attempting to contain the sobbing and howling and renting of clothes.  At the end of it Lindsay, Katie and I all agreed that we can't remember a time of such sustained crying. 

What I'm saying is:  I loved every bit of the movie and can't wait to put myself through all of that again.

After we had taken several very deep breaths and began the discussion part of the evening we tried to think of where this would fall in the Pantheon of Movies That Make Us Weep. For me it is pretty high up there.  Most movies just contain a scene or two:  when Shelby dies in Steel Magnolias, when Matthew dies in Anne of Green Gables, the attic scene in Shadowlands, the end of Million Dollar Baby.  But I could basically add the entire last hour of this movie to the list.  Naturally my sentiment for the entire series and my inclination to cry at everything makes me more weepy than the average girl but I was not exaggerating about those convulsions.  (It was Snape, by the way.  Sweet Land of Liberty!  That part did me in.)  Incidentally, we were shocked at the lack of sniffling we heard.  Were we the only ones losing it?  Can people really make it through this film and not shed a single tear? 

Questions:  Do you cry at movies or do you not have a soul?  And also, what movie would you add to the list.  Do not say Twilight.

My Awesome Willpower

So, you know that I'm a crier, right? That I'm a sensitive soul with overactive tear ducts. How if there is an opportunity to cry I will take it. How all it takes sometimes is to see just one person weeping and I'll lose it because apparently no one can cry alone when they're with me. What I'm saying is that I'm mostly an emotional mess. It could be glandular, I don't know.

So you'll appreciate this when I say that despite 1.) it being my last Sunday in my ward before leaving on Tuesday night (!) which means 2.) my last Sunday with my Primary kids and 3.) my last popcorn and hamburger Sunday dinner with my family that was cut short because 4.) there was a special church meeting to realign the ward boundaries I TOTALLY KEPT IT TOGETHER!!!! You want to know how many times I cried today? Two. And they were very brief. I mean, I basically welled up for like a minute each time and that was it! There was no sobbing. There was no weeping. Not once did I collapse in a pool of tears. I only used one tissue. There were people crying all around me and I was a rock! I wanted to run around high-fiving everyone and saying, "Do you see this! No tears! Who's awesome?!"

I have no idea what my state will be like for the next two days and I have made Bronwyn promise to bring tissue to the airport when she picks me up because I've never been able to sleep on airplanes so 2 missed nights of sleep plus the stress of travel will probably make me a blubbering wreck. But right now I'm riding high on this brief but super awesome victory over tears.

PS. It could be that it was because I was all cried out after Mockingjay. But let's just say it's because of my awesome willpower.

Pass the Tissue

Things I watched this weekend that made me cry:

1.) General Conference. Several times.

2.) To Kill a Mockingbird. Oh, how I weep through this movie. When Walter Cunningham comes for dinner; when the reverend says, "Miss Jean Louise, stand up. You're father's passing," as Atticus leaves the courtroom; when Scout sees Boo Radley behind the door. I curl into the fetal position and sob.

3.) The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra. This is slightly embarrassing but it should give you a greater understanding of what makes me cry - that is, everything. Including great music. There was a concert on Ovations TV and at one point I was just so entranced by how excited they were when they played that I welled up. Because I'm an enormous baby. Here's their finale.

4.) The Dodgers winning their division. Finally. Okay, I didn't actually cry over this, but I did jump up and down a bit. Let's all do a collective "hands-in" for them on three. One, Two, Three, GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO DODGERS!

Cry Baby

I cry a lot. Amanda, testify! (Amanda has seen me at my most tearful moment, that being the end of Million Dollar Baby. Sweet Tuna, that was a sad movie. We weren't just crying silently to ourselves. Oh no. We were sobbing openly, weeping as if all the bunnies in the world had died. The government came over and declared our apartment a wetland preserve after we finished watching it because loons started migrating in.) You would be amazed and probably concerned over how much I can cry. I like to think of it as a medical condition because most of the time I physically cannot stop myself from crying and I'm looking forward to the day when I can no longer function in society and I can start collecting disability and live off of your tax dollars.

But that's where the benefits of being a chronic crier end. Because have you seen me cry? It is not pretty. My chin quivers, my face squinches up and my eyes, which already have a bit of the Orient* in them, turn into puffy red slits. It does not help that I lose all ability to speak when I cry and I can't explain to people that it's a condition and I'm pathetic and please stop looking at me with sympathetic eyes because it makes me cry even more.

I've spent years trying to look less frightening when I cry. I have perfected the art of the gentle swipe. Amateurs make the mistake of wiping the tears away at the eye, which makes you look worse because it only irritates them more. The best way is to let the tear fall down your cheek and then gently swipe it away with your fingers. This also makes you seem delicate and makes people feel sorry for you rather than embarrassed to be around you. It's possible I'm deluding myself into thinking this.

Either way, here is a mostly general and in no way complete list of things that make me cry:

1.) Sad things
2.) Happy things
3.) Other people crying
4.) Kindness
5.) Crippled homeless people
6.) Good-byes
7.) The elderly
8.) Most stories on NPR
9.) St. Jude commercials
10.) The Olympics
11.) James Blake winning his very first career five-setter last night
12.) Remembering times when I cried
13.) Sam, Stacy and Ben moving to Idaho



Because that last one encompasses numbers 1, 3, and 6 (with a little bit of 2 because it's an adventure for them) you can imagine that I'm a little teary today.

Quick, tell me a joke.

*Sam, also blessed with a bit of the Orient, has a theory: Genghis Khan and his men plundered as far west as Bulgaria, which, as we all know, is pretty close to Switzerland, which is where our very neutral and chocolate loving people are from. I could be the heir to the Mongolian Empire for all you know. Bow! Bow to the Empress!