The Crying Game

I know all there is to know about the crying game. For me, it’s not just a song but a way of life. I am a crier. There, I’ve said it. I admit it. When it comes to blubbering I am just a big old… girl.

It all started when I was born. The first thing I did was cry and I’ve been bawling ever since. When I whack my head really hard on the corner of the kitchen cabinet, a habit that I’m told I’ve inherited through the maternal line - proven by the giant holes both my mother and grandmother have in their craniums from whacking their heads on kitchen cabinets - I cry. When I am angry I cry. When I am sad I cry. When I am tired I cry. Sometimes when I’m happy I cry.

Although I’ve learned how to harness my emotions somewhat over the years, I still have a long way to go, and I give myself a really hard time about it. Let’s face it. When you cry, you lose credibility, especially in an argument or in the work place. It shouldn’t be that way. When men get emotional they tend to get angry and put their fist through a wall. For some reason this is considered strong, stoic, and acceptable if not ideal. Women cry, and that is considered weak. Despite the increased numbers of women in the workplace this opinion has not changed. In fact, women have convinced themselves that it's correct.

At one of my first jobs in New York City everybody cried, but it was sort of okay because we were all women and gay men. As long as you didn’t cry in front of the boss and held it in till you were locked safely in a bathroom stall, it was cool. Since I was the human resources department, Who Is Crying In the Bathroom was often part of the receptionist’s daily report. “You have three interviews today. Invoices are due by Friday. Shelly is crying in the bathroom again.” Sometimes I’d go in and try to cheer them up, and usually ended up crying right along with them. You’d think we were curing cancer, as stressful as that job was, instead of planning parties and representing over-indulged celebrities.

When I saw the movie My Dog Skip I howled until my eyes were red and my face was covered in snot. There wasn’t enough Kleenex in the world to accommodate that sob-fest. I mean, the dog was lying there on the bed, just waiting for the kid to come home from college, and then he – he – he

Oh God, here I go again.

I’ve always admired those seemingly tough, in-control women who rarely cry. Their boyfriend could call them a fat-ass and they’d just look coldly at him while I’d be digging through the knife drawer for the sharpest one to slit my wrists. Luckily my eyes would be no more than swollen slits from crying so I’d miss the knife drawer entirely and be digging through harmless spatulas.

Since leaving New York I’ve cried at work a lot less, but last week I regressed a bit. My boss was nasty to me over the phone, and I slammed the receiver down, brimming with righteous rage, and marched down to her office to tell her off as calmly and professionally as possible, so as to make it clear that her behavior would not be tolerated. “The way you spoke to me just now was extremely inappropriate,” I told her. “Moving forward we need to find a better way for you to communicate constructive criticism.”

Doesn’t that sound great? It did to me, too, in my head. But unfortunately my little speech was delivered while my traitorous lip quivered and then, to my horror, the corners of my mouth turned down so far they connected under my chin and I started to cry.

Damn it damn it damn it.

So I’ve been really irritated with myself, especially since this is a new job and I'm still trying to establish boundaries and make a good first impression. But then this morning I read something that made me feel much better: Helen Gurley Brown is a crier, too.

For those of you unfamiliar, HGB is the woman who launched Cosmopolitan Magazine. While I’ve never been a huge fan of “You are Fine the Way You Are” side by side with “How to Catch a Man” articles, there is no disputing that HGB is one hell of a writer and editor, a one-woman powerhouse who inspired and oversees a magazine with a circulation well over one million. And she cries! According to the article I read, she cries all the time! She is a strong, successful woman AND she cries.

Could it be that the two are not mutually exclusive? Can I be a strong woman AND a crier? Just the thought makes me a little sniffly and – and- and… oh boy, here I go again. I'll just be in the bathroom for a - a- a- bit.

Popularity Breeds Content

Last night I experienced the thrill of meeting one of the world's most famous geeks, the owner/founder of a very well known and extremely successful dotcom. Although "thrill" is probably not the most accurate word to describe what turned out to be a completely unassuming, laid-back and drama-free introduction (unlike that of, say, a certain domestic diva I met a few years ago who shall remain nameless but who scared the bejeezus out of me.) He wore khaki's with his shirt tucked in and a really old saggy belt. He had Dilbert cartoons and Star Wars toys scattered around his office and over the door was a sign with the Star Trek logo that read "Bridge."

My husband was ecstatic when I told him this. The new popular crowd are his People.

The internet has redefined popularity. Popularity no longer has as much to do with looks and fashion as with the clever manipulation of technology and the ability to purchase and figure out a video camera. It is the Time of the Geeks where people like Bill Gates, who was probably dunked in the toilet by bullies when he was a kid, are considered the most popular and desirable.

I have never been popular. In high school, a time I refer to as The Darkness, I was a goth wannabee, only because I couldn't figure out what other group to fit into. I was naturally dark-haired, and naturally depressed, so goth seemed like the best option. I wasn't smart enough to hang with the academic decathalon crowd whose jokes all whizzed over my head as if spoken in Latin (actually some of them probably WERE spoken in Latin). I certainly wasn't pretty enough, perky enough, or blonde enough to be in the then-popular group populated by cheerleaders and prom queens. And I didn't have the bad fashion sense or heinous taste in music to join the cowboy group. So I settled for sort of a lower-tier goth but I didn't do terribly well there either because the idea was only to PRETEND to be melodramatic and depressed, not to actually BE depressed which was, well, depressing.

But times have changed.

Now popularity is defined not by how many friends you have, what kind of car you drive, how big your house is, how many boys like you, how you hold your liquor, or how many IRAs you have.

No, today's popular crowd is defined by one thing and one thing only: google hits.

There is no bigger loser than someone who comes up with NO HITS when you google them. Pathetic! The person I met last night has thousands of google hits and in many different languages. That, my friend, is one popular guy. And he looks and acts like what would have been defined back in high school as a dork.

So now the challenge is not to get a nicer car or figure out how to get the head cheerleader to date you. Now the challenge is to make your mark all over cyberspace so anyone who googles you will think you are a total dork and therefore not a loser. How's that for irony?

I got my first google hit by accident. I was writing for The Valley Planet at the time and they posted the paper online. I didn't really understand the true value of this until later; at the time I was more excited by the old-fashioned thrill of seeing my name in print, rather than on a screen. It wasn't until I discovered an obsession with googling that I started to consider my own somewhat pitiful content presence.

When the Valley Planet changed hands and became more of a gardening rag than the off-beat, left-wing publication it used to be, I left and started this website. But that wasn't enough. One website wouldn't make me popular. That would be like having only one pair of Guess jeans in 1986. It shows you care enough to get one pair but you're not cool enough to have more than that. (Yeah, guess who only had one pair of Guess jeans...?)

My sister-in-law introduced me to the wonders of myspace. I was able to regurgitate all my most useless thoughts and wacky photographs onto that page for the world, should they be so inclined to search for me, to see. I joined online recruiting tools and linked up with friends who wrote for online forums. And all the while I continued to google myself, a pasttime which has become akin to masturbating - everybody does it, but nobody admits it.

I've only recently stepped back from my vainglorious attempts to finally, at this late stage in life, join the popular group, when I discovered the downside to spreading your content for strangers (and, yes, I did mean that to come across as slightly vulgar): cyber-stalking.

Not just other people stalking me, but me stalking other people. It's addictive in a destructive way but, more importantly, it just points out what we already knew: I will never be popular. Because those popular girls managed to affect a complete disinterest in the number of people who admired them, while at the same time being perfectly aware of who did and did not. If they are the ballerinas of social interraction, I am the tasmanian devil. The trick that I have not mastered is to be an attention whore without anybody KNOWING you're an attention whore.

But here it is folks: I am a total attention whore. I can hide it no longer. Not that I ever did a very good job of hiding it to begin with.

In the meantime, I have sneakily managed to obtain one more google hit with this story about google hits. Now I just need to get my hands on some Star Trek memoribilia and I'm in. It's just a matter of time before I make Internet Prom Queen. I can feel it.