Cloudy with a chance of a cry.

I cried watching Cloudy with a chance of meatballs. It’s an animated comedy film aimed at a family audience much like The Incredibles. To make the context more ridiculous is that the scene was a comical moment when the technophobe father of the protagonist drags his mouse literally across the computer screen trying to drag a file to be an e-mail attachment. The tears weren’t lamenting tears at this attempt humor, but tears of sincere sadness. This is from a guy who smiled saying goodbye to both my parents at the airport earlier, knowing that I won’t be seeing them again in a year. I maintained the smile as they walked off in the opposite direction of each other, most likely to not see each other again in a year. I wasn’t being benevolent hiding my sadness with a smile so that my parents won’t see my grief and be afflicted with it themselves, I really wasn’t sad at that moment in time.

Most of you are familiar with the five stages of grief, it’s become as big a cliche as when a girl says “you’re a really nice guy, but….” really just rephrasing “you’re really a douchebag, so…”. The five stages of grief in sequence are denial -> anger -> bargaining -> depression-> acceptance.  The only thing wrong with this model is it almost NEVER happens like this. I have made a slight model to make a more accurate modified version of this model. Which really brings us back to square one of, people are unpredictable as hell when they are grieving about something and can feel any of these feelings at any point.

I can’t even make a legible model that would be personally correct. But, almost always, there will be a delay or a period of ambivalence. From little things such as failing a test, which at the time of getting the test results I couldn’t care enough to say ‘meh’, it’ll hit suddenly – such as on the way home I’d smell the semen tree (how the fuck does a tree smell like sperm? what a fail of nature) and this faint link to failure will have me beat up my brain at its lapse in concentration (note how it never pops into my head that I’m not smart enough – because that’s just bullshit.) This occurs at a larger scale, such as above or the time someone I dearly love told me they had attempted suicide three times at which moment I was all ‘meh’ and they appropriately looked at me like I was a careless asshole. Then a day later, as I was reading a book there was a word cut off as it had reached the end of the line to be read ’su-’. This set off an emotional outflow as I finally realized that this person was undergoing an indescribable suffering far beyond their ability to cope that I had completely neglected, and that this person had been so close to being dead at their own very hands – out of everyone’s lives. In retrospect, it was a completely inappropriate reminder as the complete word was actually sushi and the sentence leading to the word was something about how the person was salivating at the thought of, or looking to enjoy.