I'm currently playing Final Fantasy X on my PlayStation 2. I won't bother giving you the plot line, because it's Japanese and you won't understand it. I don't understand it. I have the feeling that the Japanese should stop sending games and technology west and just start exporting whatever drugs they take. Don't tell me the idea for putting (used) schoolgirls' underpants in vending machines for businessmen to buy came from a sober mind. But I digress. One of the (understandable) plot points is about Our Hero, Tidus, who is being haunted with memories of his dead father. A big deal in his childhood was that he was a crybaby. It's brought up several times in flashbacks, and occasionally in present day as Tidus talks to his father's old comrade, Auron. What I don't get is why it's bad for a six year old kid to cry when his father is a right bastard to him. I'd cry too. Then I started thinking back to my childhood and got very still. I was a crybaby. I didn't realize it until just now. Why should I realize it? I cry so rarely these days. I don't cry when I have a fight with my husband, I didn't cry when my grandmother and aunt died last year, I don't cry when I get hurt. I rarely cry at movies. When I was a teenager, I surprised myself by crying at the end of Some Kind of Wonderful, simply because I was in the pining best female friend role in real life, although my crush never figured it out in that adorable Eric Stoltz kinda way. Each year I cry at the end of Scrooged when the little boy speaks for the first time in years. I mean, hell, Tiny Tim said "God bless us, every one," but his handicap was his legs, so he could recite all the words to "Bizarre Love Triangle" and he'd still be crippled (and it's ok to say crippled, cause that's what Dickens called him) but Calvin takes the magic of Christmas and speaks. Sniffle. Still, while these movies make me cry, it's a tear-up and sniffle once or twice, perhaps a tear escapes, kind of cry. It's not blowing nose, sobbing, crying. It's not needing a moment to yourself to calm down crying. This probably stems from my childhood, where I would cry at the drop of a hat. Now, I didn't use the tears as a tool of manipulation; I never understood why people thought that would work. My crying was usually met with annoyance or derision, even by my friends' parents. And who could blame them? I was a crybaby. I cried when I thought I couldn't go on a canoeing trip with my best friend, and then cried when we arrived at the river because I thought we were all going to be in kayaks that rolled over. I cried when I tried to show a karate move to my (other) best friend, and she grabbed my foot and made me fall down. Humiliation always made me cry more than physical pain. I cried one Christmas Eve when my family laughed at me for misspelling "towards." That was the night I learned the terrific Christmas Truth that you really shouldn't learn on Christmas Eve when you're young. When I was 10 or so, my parents got a letter that I had scoliosis (curvature of the spine). When they told me, I cried and cried and cried; I remember my mom's robe was wet from where I had hugged her and cried so much. You know what happened after that? Nothing. No bulky brace, no drugs, no surgery. I just grew out of it. I remember one night after the 8th grade dance when my crush walked past me and asked my best friend to dance. (Incidentally, this was the karate-disdainful best friend, not the canoe-trip best friend -- I was a girl; each girl is required to have at least 5 best friends at once or they revoke your license.) I cried all night and annoyed my sister, who had bigger and better things to think about than the broken heart of a 13-year-old. The crybaby phase passed eventually, but remembering it causes great swells of humiliation, and I now hate crying with a passion. If I can avoid it and fight it back, I will. I never understood what "I just needed a good long cry," meant. Crying makes your face blotchy and your nose run and your eyes swell and when it gets into the hiccupy stage you can't even speak. If you cry into your pillow you have a wet pillow. There is nothing good about that. Sometimes I wonder if I'm too cynical to cry anymore. I was very close to the other members of my department at a previous job. When my beloved boss told me she was leaving the company, I laughed. This was just one more sign I had that our department was dying under the weight of new management. I think I shocked her, but it was the "Wheee! The ship is sinking!" feeling I was laughing at, not her leaving. I never seem to know what to do when other people cry, either. Knowing how it's kind of an involuntary reaction, telling them to stop seems like unlikely advice. But then "let it all out" is a way of saying, "be totally vulnerable in front of me no matter how deep or shallow our relationship is." I always liked the patting on the knee and saying, "there there," although I have no idea what "there there," means. Besides, I think it may be archaic. I always feel uncomfortable in the movies when people are crying around me. At the end of Lord of the Rings, I was very aware of sniffles everywhere in the theater around me, and figured they needed to install tissue boxes in the armrest cupholders. I was very moved at the end, but I didn't cry. Probably because it didn't have a little mute boy speaking at the end, or a teenaged mechanic giving way too expensive diamond earrings to his best friend. Sniffle.