Crying

I've always had a problem with crying. Even as a nervous teenager, I cried at the drop of a hat and was very ashamed. I always assumed I would somehow grow out of it. In fact, as I get older, I get weepier. Forrest Gump for example, and not that great a movie, has reduced me to a soggy useless gasping mess every single time I have seen it, even though I have seen it before and know every single cheap manipulative twist that is coming.

I get wet-eyed at almost anything these days, music, movies, stories, and most embarrassingly, in real life when I convey good news to an employee. I really hate it that I get all misty and choked when I promote someone or give them a raise, but I do. I also get all choked up when their spouses die, or otherwise leave them, or when their kids end up on the honour roll. Even if I don't particularly like them. And people wonder why I tend to be a little standoff-ish with my staff. Folks, it is because I don't like crying.

It is part of the same energy I use when I make speeches (and I make a lot of speeches), when a choke in the voice is the sign of success, not failure, but damn, I wish I could turn it off sometimes. Most times, except when I need it. Yes, I know, it is called passion, and it is what has carried me all these years, really what I am all about. At the end of the day, I know and fully accept and expect that I am not rational, and really, never have been.

What really irks me, I think, is that I cry about the smallest most trivial treacly things, and not about the really big things that make me crazy angry, that it turns out, almost by accident, that I have dedicated my life to. I do not shed a tear, for example, for what is currently happening in Somalia or Colombia or Iraq or the Congo/Zaire; that is work (and an outrage to human conscience), those are causes for rage and action, not weeping (yet). I don't even cry (much) about the state of my marriage.

But play some crappy sentimental song about lost love or sudden joy, I'm crying like a baby and fishing for the kleenex. No, not like a baby, like a man, a man distraught. Thinking about it, I am crying right now as I type this, and how stupid is that?