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Ani Moller: Crybaby I'm going to tell you a secret. I know I appear tough, rugged and thick-skinned, but I'm not. I am, in fact, the biggest wuss I know. Things, like movies and songs, make me cry and cry until mucus runs down my cheeks, I have a pile of tissues around me and I get the after-sobbing choke. Do you know what the after-sobbing choke is? It goes something like this. Waaaaa, hiccup, waaaa, cough, waaaaa, hiccup, hiccup, runny boogies, waaaaaa. People often laugh at me when I tell them I have a soft spot for romantic movies and crying and that I also don't wear waterproof mascara. But it's true, I'm a baby. Let me offer you some examples of my sobbing babyness. Movies: Life Is Beautiful left me in tears for about 20 minutes. I cried during the movie, and then when it finished, I looked at my flatmate, and said, I have to go in the other room now! Then I sat on a chair and cried and cried. All because the little boy said, "We won the tank!" which was, of course, the saddest part of the movie. I cried about 6 times in The Green Mile. I'm just lucky I had a fresh roll of toilet paper, to dry my tears with. Due to this movie, I have now named my cat's play-mouse Mr Jangles so I can be reminded of this movie each time I hear it squeak. I was given a free ticket to a fundraising premiere of The Patriot by a young man in Marketing from work. While I cried and sniffled through this movie, he kept jamming his elbow into my arm, or ribs, and then he'd laugh at me. That could have possibly made me cry in itself. When the cat in Stuart Little said to Stuart that his family didn't want him and that they were celebrating the fact that he had left, I weeped a little. Yes, I know none of it was in any way realistic, but I'm a little kid, and that scene was enough to make any little kid teary-eyed. Songs: There is a song titled "Now" by a Kiwi band called Before Friday. Everytime I hear this song, and try to sing along, my throat goes tight, and sometimes a drop of salty water wells up in my eye. It isn't the actual lyrics, just the chord structure of the chorus. I don't need words to make me cry. Just hand me a guitar and I'll cry myself into oblivion. The album by Portishead doesn't often play on my stereo any more, soley because it makes me cry. Perhaps I should start trying to listen to it again, because I'm sure the same songs can't possibly leave me in tears 3452 times. TV programmes: I admit, I cried when Rachel and Ross broke up on Friends. Come on! It was sad! A few years ago on Home & Away, an Australian soap, Shane died and his poor lonely wife, Angel, lay on their bed and put on his jean jacket and listened to a particularly sad song by Morrissey. I cried. TV advertisements: One of New Zealand's phone companies, Telecom, often run advertisements that contain a whole lot of animals doing stuff to songs. One year when they were advertising cheap international toll calls, they had a monkey just sitting around, and they playing the song All By Myself. I cried. The poor monkey was all alone, and it looked really sad! Another ad by some phone company, had a young boy from Serbia and a young boy from Bosnia in a room together, and they ended up playing together and having fun with a toy aeroplane. There was a slogan that said something like, "See what happens when you talk." It make my eyes leak a bit. Or a lot. It's quite possibly that I'm the biggest wuss in the history of the television-watching, movie-going era, but I can't possibly be the only one. At any rate, I'm still a big saddo and you will smile when you watch sad monkey advertisements. Especially when you know that I'm probably weeping my ass off. |