Inadvertent Tears in Recent History.

I won't even try to make excuses for my lack of postings. There are no excuses. Sorry.

So much has happened since my last sign of life appeared in the blogosphere (ew, I hate that word and I hate people who use it. They're just like people that say "twenty-something". So I say blogosphere with a touch of irony). To be honest, I've neglected posting simply because I haven't thought of a way to coherently outline everything in one post. But then last night, on my way home from work, in the middle of a spontaneous outburst of tears, I realized that was the best structure with which to explain my last few months: the frequency of my recent accidental crying.

While watching Jean Michel Cousteau's "Oceans" on PBS

I didn't really think too much about this TV special but I happened to (accidentally) see Jean Michel Cousteau being interviewed about it the same day it was meant to air. This made me think to record the program on my TiVo, just in case I was ever bored enough to watch it. I got around to watching the show one night after work, probably two weeks later. I was close to deleting it from the TiVo, but my childhood love of orca whales persuaded me to at least watch a few minutes. Well, lo and behold, I watch the whole damn two hour program, crying through most of it. Yes, crying. Because of whales. And you know what tipped me over the edge? They were talking about whales in captivity and about Keiko, the orca from "Free Willy" that was trained to be released into the wild. Well, when they went to release Keiko into the wild after decades of captivity, the other whales basically ignored him. After a few months, some whales went from ignoring him to picking on him, in a whale sort of way. And this struck me as awfully, terribly sad. We had taken this whale from his family, put him in captivity, and made him so dependent on humans that he was literally no longer an orca whale. He had done everything we had asked him to do, been everything we asked him to be, but when we asked him to be a whale again, he couldn't do it. I could only think that he must have felt like the humans who were once his "family" had abandoned him into a world he knew nothing about, left him to be ostracised and ridiculed by his own kind, and then refused to take him back. Keiko was released near Iceland and swam all the way to Norway, where he moved into a fjord. He swam up to fishing boats and swimming children, but the people had no idea how to take care of him or who he was or what he needed. He died just a year after he was released. And I would swear he died of a broken heart. Now, of course it's all a whole lot deeper than that and I wasn't just crying for one single whale. But you can infer the meaning of my empathy. The point is, it caught me entirely by surprise. It was accidental crying.

While sleeping next to you

Since I last wrote, I have been to Paris and back. When I first arrived, I was horribly, disgustingly ill. Emphasis on disgusting. I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep, and could hardly breathe. Everyone and their mothers asked me if I had swine flu, people on the airplane gave me dirty looks as I sweat out a fever, and I felt like a pathetically ugly duckling walking the streets of the most beautiful city I know. Then, after a surprisingly nice visit to a French doctor and heavy doses of morphine-laced French prescriptions (no, I'm not kidding. Medicine in that country is great), I began to feel better. This was also in no small part to Marc's taking care of me through all the grossness, and even acting like he didn't mind it. We did a million things in Paris and I had the most wonderful time. But lying there every night, I wanted to cry and sometimes did, for no concrete reason. I kept thinking of the person who had said they were sincerely sorry for me when they found out about my long distance relationship. "Sincerely sorry". The words struck me as profoundly sad. She wasn't impressed, she didn't wish me luck, she didn't say she was amazed. She didn't have the normal reaction. Instead, she chose to say she was sorry about it. like it was a disease or a disability. And every night, laying there in a too-small bed, I felt kind of sorry for us. Just vaguely sympathetic, as if I were an objective third party floating over the room, watching the two of us sleep through precious moments together, holding onto each other unconsciously as though we could be separated at any moment. Those nights account for yet another bout of accidental crying.

While reading a book on the origins of Islam

This one I won't go into too much detail about because it would be cruel to make you read all the thoughts and opinions I've developed on the topic of Islam. In very brief summary, I read a wonderful book about the evolution of Islam. "No god but God" by Reza Aslan. I cannot urge you to read it enough, whether you are Muslim or Christian or an atheist or you don't give a shit about religion. It doesn't matter. Read this book. In summary, it made me cry not because it was sad in and of itself, but because what I thought I knew about Islam was pathetically ignorant, because human beings have destroyed yet another beautiful thing through hunger for power and control, and because it is so teeth-grindingly frustrating to to see what Islam has become today, perverted by the perceptions of people who don't understand and by some who practice it. And yes, you can say the same things about Christianity. You can say the same things about the government of the United States, about baseball, or about socialism, or anything else. But this book on Islam seemed especially poignant to me, causing me to accidentally cry yet again.

While at my sister's graduation

This might seem like an obvious one. But I didn't find myself crying because I was so proud of my sister for graduating (not that I'm not proud of her) or because I saw us all growing up and moving on with our lives and boo hoo how sad. No. What made me cry was when they played "Pomp and Circumstance". And I cried because no one played that song at my graduation. I cried because in some ways, graduation for me was all right but in others, all wrong. Selfish of me to think like that, maybe. But really, if I could have a do-over, I would make sure that song was played at some point in the ceremony. (I would also have never even mentioned the possibility of having a seating chart but hey, live and learn, right?)

And while on the subject of graduation...the best I can tell you at this point is just breathe and keep yourself in the moment. Don't think about what will happen during the next hour or next day or next year. Just keep yourself in the moment, force yourself to live it, no matter how hard it may be or how tempting it might be to do your best to ignore the full weight of it. Hold on. Smoke your last cigarette in Smoker's Corner, even though it will likely be the most awkward cigarette you've had in two years. Stick around to take a lot of pictures, even if you just feel like going and being alone or packing up the rest of your things. Stop in front of the fjord one last time and silently hold each other's hands because really, there's nothing else you can do. Look out the window of the bus because even though it is painful, it is better than looking down at that dirty floor during your last moments on campus and on those winding roads. And let yourself cry, whether you expect to or not. Accidental crying's not so bad.

While driving home last night from work

For some reason, the drive home from my new place of employment (an adorably hidden German biergarten) was empty. No one on the roads. Just me and my hundreds of thoughts on normally packed thoroughfares. And yeah, I turned to the cliched "driving down a long and dark road is like my life" metaphor. I started thinking about where I'd come from during the last 3 years in comparison to where I am now. I started thinking about how I am doubly relieved and nauseated by the thought of knowing what I want to study for the next 6-8 years (it's going to be international law, ideally with a Latin American and European Union focus). I mentally calculated the possibilities that this summer represents. I tried to project what next year means for us, for all of us. I listened to Spoon's "Black Like Me" and thought about how none of you were there, how quickly time is passing, how scared I am of failure in the next chapter of my life, how far away it all seems. I was sideswiped by the notion that everything is just always so damn frightening. And this, more than anything, made me cry the strangest tears of all, tears of nostalgia and frustration and fear but also of realization and satisfaction and hope. Mostly, they were inadvertent tears consequential of too much of emotion of any kind, not just sadness. Which is a good explanation of the cause of all of my recent accidental crying. Too much of everything.


Edit// Alright, now it is six incidents of accidental crying. The last 5 minutes of Season 2, Episode 1 of The Office just happened. And it's only halfway pathetic that The Office made me cry. Sort of pathetic, but not entirely.