Emotionally stable

There are exceptions to this rule, of course. I can think of a few off-hand.

It was about three days before I moved to Austin for college, in the late summer of 1995. My mom went grocery shopping, and she bought me a big jug of orange juice. I knew it was for me, because I was the only one of us who even drank orange juice, and I drank gallons of it every month. My ex, who was the unfortunate witness to many of my random outbursts, found me -bawling- over the fact that my mom had bought me orange juice, and I wouldn't be there to finish it.

No. Really.

And it was that year, my senior year in high school, when my weeks were filled with award banquets and scholarship interviews, that my mom gave me a card (it was an Easter card, if I remember right), in which she wrote, "You are truly an amazing child." Yeah. Hormones much? Everytime I read that card, I'd burst into tears, a sad fact that my boyfriend sort of capitalized on by reading it to me every couple of weeks.

There was a Toys for Tots commercial that I saw about a year and a half ago on television, where a kid walks up to a Marine in full dress uniform and asks him if he's Santa Claus, because he has a list to give to Santa, and the Marine doesn't move a muscle except to open his hand and accept the list from the kid. You guessed it, that made me bawl, too.

But, I mean, these incidents were all months or years apart. They aren't a representative sample of my emotions -- they're just the highlights. I'm not a weepy girl usually. It makes it ever so much more abundantly clear that there -must- be something out of whack with my hormones right now, because for the last week or so, -everything- makes me emotional.

R.J. got voted off the island on American Idol last night, and I swear to God, my eyes filled up with tears. Anything the least bit sweet or sad makes me say, "Awwwww," as though I'd just seen a cute kitten do something adorable.

"Awwwww," with the upturned grace note at the end that makes me sound a bit like a valley girl or a general ditz.

I watched the DVD of Margaret Cho's "I'm the One That I Want" this evening, and she got a standing ovation, and I cried. Geez, I'm turning into a sap.

Yeah, welcome to my world. There's nothing to see here. Move along.