Sappy McSapperson

I don't cry a lot about real things in my life. I may get sad or angry, but I generally don't produce tears much at all in response to personal heartaches. No, I seem to do most of my crying in my sleep (perhaps this is strange, but about once a week I wake up with a wet face and pillow, and not from drooling, neither) and when listening to music and watching or reading fiction. I guess I'm just wired this way. I sobbed bitterly when Mark Green died on ER. I sobbed bitterly when Peter Benton merely left ER. Hell, I even sobbed bitterly when Billy died on Ally McBeal. Television shows, movies, Albertsons commercials -- anything with a moving score and careful cinematography can set me off.

My dear brother Brian thoughtfully taped the latest episode of Lost for me this week (I had to work that night and had forgotten to set the VCR), and I finally watched it tonight. This show has made me cry before (the episode where we learn about Hurley's past springs to mind), and it did again tonight. The reunions were plenty emotional, but I think I'd have escaped tearless had they not shown the sweet little dog bounding toward his human. Yes, that's all it took. Sweet little puddin' didn't know his other human was gone! I spent the remaining minute or so of the show, and several minutes afterward, weeping like a little girl.

My father says crying keeps women pretty -- it flushes out their eyes and stimulates circulation in the skin, he says. If that's true, then the positive effects surely are only evident long past the actual crying episode, at least for me. For at the moment, I'm fairly sure I resemble a bereft pig more than a prettily distressed damsel. Sniff, sniff.