I spent Monday evening aggressively weeping through the videos of the Israeli hostages reuniting with their families.  My ten-year-old came to ask me something while I was aggressively weeping over one in which a father is lifted out of his wheelchair and placed into the arms of his son.  I was lying on the couch, feet up on the arm; Ten put his hand on my foot, opened his mouth to say something, realized what was happening, and slowly and silently lifted his hand and backed out of the living room, dining room, and down the hall without turning around.

I’d like to say that Ten behaved in such a way because he was SHOCKED to find his mother aggressively weeping over something; however, in addition to keeping the subtitles permanently turned on the TV and not being able to read menus in low lighting without my glasses, aggressive weeping has kind of become my thing.  It’s genetic.  I got it from my mother, who isn’t as much an aggressive weeper as a consistent weeper; and she got it from her father, my Grandpa Mel, who was both an aggressive and consistent weeper.

Dinner with my Grandpa Mel was always out at a restaurant, and he would sit relatively quietly at the head of the table until drinks arrived.  Once the glass – usually vodka – was set in front of him, he would lift the glass, signaling for all of us to stop talking.

“Don’t ask me what I ate, don’t ask me where I ate, ask me who I ate with,” he would say.  “You are a wonderful family and I love you all and am very happy to be here.”  Like clockwork, he would be choking back tears by the word “love.”

“Aww, Grandpa,” one of us – usually my sister, always my grandma – would say, putting their hands on his arms.  “We love you, too.”  Then we’d drink and everyone but Grandpa and whomever was sitting closest to him would resume our conversations while Grandpa shed a few more tears and said a few more things about how wonderful we were to the person sitting next to him.  Then we’d order our food.

My mother is a consistent weeper in that she only cries during TV shows, movies, and when she’s sitting in the audience of something.  One of my core childhood memories was sitting next to her in the theater during The Little Mermaid.  Ariel was looking longingly onto Eric (an evergreen situation through the whole movie), and King Triton sighed, lamented to Sebastian about how much he would miss her, and used his triton to turn her back into a human.  As expected, my mother’s eyes welled up with tears.

“All parents want is for their kids to be happy,” she whispered to me, sniffling.

“OHMYGOSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHMOM,” I said, mortally embarrassed not because we were in public, but because she express an emotion.

Fourteen recently introduced me to an animated superhero series called Invincible based on a graphic novel by the same name.  As is the case with most superhero graphic novels nowadays, Invincible is very, very violent.  There are a series of scenes in which Invincible, a teen superhero, gets into a very, very violent fight with his dad, a man superhero, causing the deaths of a ton of people.  Heads are crushed and humans are exploded (an evergreen situation throughout the whole series), with the fight culminating on top of a mountain where his dad asks him something to the effect of, “Who are you going to have left when everyone around you is gone?”

“You, Dad,” Invincible responds.

Expectedly, I burst into tears.

“Are you crying?”  Fourteen asked, incredulous, probably because head smushing and people exploding weren’t normally my triggers.

“You will always have me and Dad, forever,” I told him, sobbing into a sock Ten left on the ottoman (unrelated: not where socks belong).

Fourteen looked back at the TV.

“Okay,” he said in a back-slowly-out-of-the-room way.

While some people are attractive criers – I went to school with a girl who actually looked BETTER with a tear in her eye – I am gross.  If I just think about crying, my nose turns a splotchy red and my eyes and cheeks puff up and then stay that way for exponentially longer than the actual length and breadth of the crying.  I was sent a video which started with a shirtless sports fan standing completely alone in an entirely empty upper deck section of a stadium waving his shirt.  In the next clip, he had been joined by another shirtless guy doing the same, and then another.  By the end of the video, the man was surrounded by dozens of his fellow bros, united in fandom and their own bare chests.

“That’s so nice, now he has friends,” I thought to myself.  I sniffed, which was the entirety of my emotional response.  Then I set my phone down and went back to making dinner.  Twenty minutes later, Kyle came into the kitchen.

“What’s the matter?”  He asked.

“Nothing?” I said, confused.

“Then why were you crying?”  He asked.

Here are some other things that have made me cry in the past week: Ten practicing a song for an audition; Ten telling me I don’t have to wait for him at said audition; Ten changing his mind and asking me to wait during the audition; Ten actually auditioning; and watching a video (I really need to chill out on the videos) where a cat “adopted” a duckling.  After years of pretending like it wouldn’t happen to me, I finally put a small package of tissues in my purse – a la my mother; Grandpa Mel carried a handkerchief.  Sniff.

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Kyle took the photo of me, above, laughing so hard that I cried (and using my sweatshirt as a tissue to wipe away the tears).

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This week on North Dakota Today we talked about Rory Hoffmann and CAP Weatherization Assistance Program, my Nice Person (and Program) of the Week, as well as a free book club/arts and crafts/social evening for people who love spooky reads. (Valley News Live)

In self-serving news, my little sister is a casting director, and I’d like to plug her two most recent shows: Chad Powers (football; SO FUNNY) and Murdaugh: Death in the Family (murder; NOT FUNNY).

What a world. (Valley News Live)

Fargo’s Jerry Solem retired in STYLE last week. (Fargo Forum, found via Oops Only Good News)

Pizzas?  Good.  Smoke Alarms?  Also good. (Facebook)

Mandan’s Sheridan Ellingson was named world champion at the World Dairy Expo. (KFYR)

Wishek has been sauerkrauting for 100 years. (KFYR)

Kids Scoop News, by kids and for kids, is expanding to 95% of all of the schools in Western North Dakota. (KFYR, found via Oops Only Good News)

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