Holiday Tears

I'm down to the final week of holiday madness at work, and my loft looks like . . . well, it sort of looks like it usually does, only now it's to the power of 10. I have also exponentially increased my instances of both public and private crying during this most stressful of seasons, which I'm sure surprises none of you. Or- at least my brother is not exactly picking his jaw up off the floor. I can't be sure about the rest of you.

I actually still get embarrassed about crying in public, even though I established myself as huge crybaby pretty early on (I think I cried every day in 6th grade). I am not really bothered by the crying part specifically; I wear my heart on my sleeve, so people generally know how I feel about things anyway. The embarrassment stems instead from the "this is a totally inappropriate time and place to cry" feeling that pretty much always surfaces when I'm crying and other people are around. Also, public crying just really makes me feel like such a chick. Gah!

Most recently, I took the opportunity to get all weepy in front of two people, one of whom I don't know that well, when the other started talking to me about an old ex-boyfriend. Before that, I was crying on stage with the ASC in front of 500 people during our annual Christmas concert. Earlier in the week, I had the opportunity to go see Thomas Dolby and BT (which was amazing, by the way) and cried not once but twice during the show (one bout per set, of course!). Oh! And I kicked the week off by crying at the office (my parents are so proud of me right now) when an order I had promised to a partner didn't get shipped out on time.

(For the record, in the privacy of my own home, I have also cried at 3 different episodes of Alias (season 1), the episode of Buffy where Joyce dies (every time), a post on rec.sport.disc about a college kid who had a heart attack, a Christmas card I got, my cat looking at me funny one time, and that craptacular ABC Primetime thingie on "Basic Instincts" (blaaaargh!) that I didn't even mean to record where some guy dressed like a nurse verbally abused a 90 year old man in a wheelchair. Sniffle . . .)

The worst is actually yet to come, though. As it turns out, I become the emotional double of my mother- who has advanced degrees in crying- when we are together. I will go home for the holidays on Friday, and we will, no doubt, find ourselves at church, at a movie, in the car, or possibly strolling through a shopping mall together, crying. She will probably cry first- it really doesn't matter at what- and then I will try to look surprised and say "Mom? Are you OK?" and she'll try to smile, but that will just make her cry more. She'll say "I . . . just . . . [fill in stimulus] reminded me of [fill in actual reason for crying, not necessarily logically connected to stimulus] and it just . . . it just makes me sad." The word "sad" will be mostly eaten up by squeaky crying voice, at which point I will say "Well, I'm sure [who or whatever] will be fine." Nonetheless, I will then begin to cry even though I really don't have any idea for whom or what we are crying. This will last for roughly 3 minutes. 5-10 if we see the movie where Will Smith's kid has that ridiculously cute afro. Just so you know.

In less lachrymose news, I finally had a beautiful afternoon of Ultimate up in Chattanooga after spending the last two trips up there as a Thleensicle. Playing in shorts and a t-shirt was both novel and enjoyable, even though my team got somewhat spanked. I sort of tried to lay out and ended up landing on exactly the same spots that I always land on when I try to layout (left calf, right kneecap, left forearm), so all those spots hurt again. I made the offhand comment that "I really need to learn to layout properly," so when one of my more whippersnapper-y college-aged teammates had a sweet layout grab in the endzone, he turned to me boisterously and said "Hey, KQ! That's how you layout!" Smartass . . .

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the band at my church for playing a hard rock version of "Hark, The Herald Angels Sing" tonight. It rocked so hard that I had to leave the room to keep from having a Scanners moment and also in order to sit with most of my friends who had already been blasted into the back hall. And man- what a drag it was to actually be able to hear each other singing once we were outside of the room. Singing Christmas carols isn't cool unless you're rockin'! And that's why I go to church- to be cool and to ROCK WITH JESUS!


"GLOOOO-OOOOO-OOOOOO-OOOOO-RIA!!!!"