Crybaby or An Exercise in Emotional Hyperbole

I have become the biggest crybaby as I've gotten older. Well, that sounds a bit over the top; what I mean is I am a lot more willing to cry over fictional characters now than I was before. I don't know if it's hormones or what, but I like to think it's because I'm just a more ~*deep and caring person*~ who feels things more acutely. I cried as a kid, don't get me wrong, but within the last year or so it has gotten, by my standards, out of control.

The worst offender is the beginning of Pixar's movie Up. It is not my favorite Pixar movie, or movie period, but I swear to God, that five minute montage at the beginning kicks me in the heart and makes me cry involuntarily every single time. I genuinely dislike watching the beginning with other people because I know I will end up bawling and embarassing myself. And while we're talking about Pixar. oh God, Toy Story 3, oh God. I guess kid movies destroy me, I don't even know. Big Fish can sneak up on me too, if I'm not careful.

Books can be just as bad for my fragile psyche as movies, though. When my mom recommended The Book Thief , I thought Here we go, another Holocaust story, because I'm basically a terrible person. The story even starts out listing the people who die, since the narrator is freaking Death itself, so it shouldn't be a big shocker when it happens, but the ending just destroyed me. Just kicked my heart around the room as I heaved these ridiculous sobs that would be more appropriate at the funeral of a loved one because of this fictional couple that would never be.

Let the Great World Spin is, I think, a collection of short stories all set in pre-9/11 New York City. I just started it a week or so ago and have only finished the first story. It was a fantastic one, but I knew I was in for it when the main characters were Irish brothers. Nothing good can come of Irish brothers in books, they are the main characters in almost every tragedy. The end, which flashes back and forth between the tortured younger brother, who was in a fatal car accident, and the older brother, who was going about his business and unaware of the accident until just before the younger brother's death, made me hold my breath and then burst into tears at the younger brother's last words. Just astonishing.

Anyway, now that I've flaunted my emotional instability, what movies or books make you cry?

A jumbled post about writing

I have this bizarre love/hate relationship with writing that I'm not sure is entirely normal. I wonder if it would be the same if I didn't have an unfortunately strong penchant both for procrastination and perfectionism, at least when it comes to starting things, but as it is most writing I do is like freaking pulling rotten teeth. It's not all that fun or easy, but I have to or my head will explode. That's kind of a dramatic way of putting it, but really, evn my journal entries tend to be a bit sporadic because I don't have the patience to write all I want to write. In the end, it's my main outlet of expression, even if I don't care for it like I should.

The most difficult for me by far is creative writing. I suppose it's because I've kept a journal about my life since I was seven, but writing fiction is ridiculously challenging for me. I remember once in third grade, we had to write and illustrate our own fictional stories and enter them in a creative writing contest at the school. I spent weeks on that thing I think, storming around, frustrated that I couldn't think of where to send my guppy main character on his epic journey through the sea next. At one point I gave him a best friend who was an angelfish, and who was this big tough fighter guy; mainly I remember this because I was thrilled at thinking of this, creating a tough angelfish! Hahaha, what wit! I think it ended with the guppy and angelfish playing checkers? I don't know.

I read once that the mark of a really intelligent and creative person is if they created and imagined living in a little world of their own and I felt slightly bad for myself. Does it count if it was a half-assed world, cobbled together from books I'd read and TV I'd seen? I was too busy exploring other people's fictional worlds to create my own, I guess. I did, and still do, far more reading than writing.

My mom is teaching a creative writing class this next year, and I'm eyeing her cirriculum warily as I help her gather it together. She's gotten a bunch of writing prompt books off Amazon.com that maybe I could try out sometime, when I gather the courage. I think the key is habit? I know that's how exercise became less daunting for me, knowing that at a certain time in the evening I was going over there, because it was that time. Maybe this school year will be the year I become more comfortable with my compulsion.

Derrrrrrp OR Summer for Lazy Nerds

I was hanging out with one of my friends who's returned from working at summer camp since May, and she asked how my summer was. I thought for a bit and then replied that I'd watched the new Doctor Who season and read the Sherlock Holmes stories whilst watching various TV series adaptations of the same. After having told me all these stories about working in the cafeteria at camp and helping supervise the kids and having all these meaningful interactions with people, my friend was like, "Really? That's...all?"

And I said, "YUP."

SUMMERTIME YOU GUYS. IT IS NOT MY MOST PRODUCTIVE TIME PERIOD.