Words for My Enjoyment

Effective Immediately I Will Be Crying To Make My Own Life Easier

January 11th, 2007

Crying works.

Let’s face it. If you’ve ever gingerly tried to break up with someone (for the first time) and they’ve started bawling — sometimes you’ve backed off on your decision. If you’ve ever been faced with a crying child, you’ve probably desperately done whatever you could to make them feel better. If there’s anything that can get anyone to back down off their high horse and become submissive to your emotional breakdown in the fastest time possible…it’s crying.

That’s why, effective immediately, I will be crying to make my own life easier.

I was once in a corporate conference room and me and my fellow colleagues were being held accountable for the positive and negative results of our recent work projects. A slew of us, on one project collectively, were getting our butts handed to us from the head of the office. Most of us took it without protesting or even trying to explain why our work had failed so egregiously. But one of our co-workers, afraid for his job and his future, began uncontrollably sobbing. Like a schoolgirl whose Dora the Explorer lunchbox was just ripped out of her hands.

Next to Abraham Lincoln, I hold that man in the highest regard.

And it was because our good friend the wailing worker threw common social decency out the window. He let maturity simply fall by the wayside. No reason to stand on ceremony, he thought — “now’s probably the right time to cry like my life depends on it, pushing salty tears out my eyes and saving my job while everyone else sits there like deer in the headlights…” Or at least I imagined that’s what he was thinking while his snotty-sniffly half-hyperventilating cry reverberated throughout the room — and caused our boss to promise him that he wouldn’t personally be held accountable.

It’s a story that seems important to recount today…as I have decided that effective immediately, I will be crying to make my own life easier.

Take for example the next time I go to SUBWAY for that tuna sub. You know what I mean. When they skimp on the tuna, leaving me standing there on the other side of the glass partition, seething because I’m not getting my share. Normally, I’ll make a hand-motion which universally means “more tuna please” but which is never noticed or understood. And I’ll walk out of that SUBWAY feeling so cheated that I feel like I could cry.

Which I’ll do now. Effective immediately.

Or what about the moment where someone reads a script of mine and isn’t fully “buying” the concept. Like the time so-and-so told me that “a talking pygmy marmoset would never try to take over the world.. At the time, I simply tried to explain that it’s the smallest marmosets that would be the ones to do it. They’re the ones with the self-confidence issues and if they had the smarts, they’d totally be the ones to do it. So-and-so didn’t buy it, and I was left feeling so challenged that my tear ducts all but exploded. But they didn’t.

But next time…they will.

When I’m faced with a plate of “All You Can Eat Shrimp” that’s nothing but breading surrounding little dehydrated slivers of smelly stuff — I’m gonna cry and hopefully get more cheese bread. When a friend has to reschedule or postpone our dinner when I’m thirty minutes from the destination…I’m gonna cry. When I jam my knee into the corner of the coffee table and no one seems to think it was a serious enough accident…I’m gonna cry.

Effective immediately.

If crying is the one emotion that causes people to immediately drop their ego, their holier than thou attitude and the big wall they’ve erected around their inner-self…then why not cry? If crying can get me everything I want in life (even though I might be looked upon as an over-emotional opportunist), who cares? If bawling in movies makes people think I’m sweet and thoughtful, then why not do it to get out of a parking ticket as well?

Did I mention I will be crying a lot more now to make my own life easier?

In relationships. At work. In line at Disneyland. Or at a rest stop bathroom. With friends. And co-workers. And family. And tax accountants intent on giving me less of a refund this April. Whenever I find myself coming up against a wall or being threatened in the least…I’ll cause those big old eyes to well up with tears and let the waterworks begin.

Effective immediately.

I’m getting emotional just thinking about it.

Posted under Emotions, Things I Plan On Doing Immediately. | 11 Comments »