January 13th, 2009 
Seafoodpuncher 
I often cried in front of my father and he would just look away, disgusted at the sight of a bawling kid.
“What,” he would sputter,” are you doing?”
“How is crying going to solve anything?”
He saw tears as a sign of weakness, or he may just have been insulted at my reaction to what he thought was ‘good parenting’, but the fact that I couldn’t control myself just made me cry even harder.
Math was usually the culprit: My dad often reprimanded me for not understanding the math problems that he casually slid in front of my face after school. My muscles tensed up every time I saw a sheet of paper with the deceptively simple looking equations listed on it.
Forced to sit on a chair for hours and staring at what might as well have been gibberish was not how a 10 year old wants to spend their afternoon. That’s when the tears would come and the sniffing started. But how was crying going to help me? What is the DAMN point of turning into a red faced, hyperventilating, drooling mess?
My father had learned foreign languages within 6 months, graduated with honors and had teachers look to him when they were stumped…especially when it came to math or engineering. Math was god in our house. I hated math because of the stress it brought to my life. Obviously my dad took offense to my attitude, but crying probably saved my life.
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Most mammals have tear ducts that squirt liquid onto their eyeballs, but elephants, gorillas and camels are the only species besides us with the ability to cry over something emotional. I’m not sure what would bring a camel to tear up, though. (A saggy hump maybe?)
Emotional tears are a little different from the ones normally excreted. Science tells us that when you cry over something emotional-like over a sappy movie-the tears glazing over your puffy eyes are actually full of ACTH or adrenocorticotrophic hormone. This is a hormone associated with stress. Apparently crying is nature’s way of avoiding a heart attack by forcing out excess stress hormones through your eyes.
You don’t see a lot of men blubber over their kids finally taking their place on the crapper, or wipe away tears while watching baby seals get attacked by killer whales on Animal Planet.
This may be another reason why women live so much longer: Women get to cry freely without any stigma attached, while men force those ACTH rich tears back into their systems, and reaffirm their manliness with a quick fart or nonchalant burp (Just to break the tension).
Some women even get PAID to cry at funerals. (Men provide the flatulence for free.) These strangers ensure that there are enough wailing mourners to make the corpse feel truly missed. Everybody wins with crying!….sort of.
People who cry are usually considered to be weak little pansies, but you couldn’t be farther from the truth. Individuals with something to actually cry about-like burning ulcers and colitis-may suffer from those conditions because they don’t cry enough! Ironic, eh? It’s science!!!
If I hadn’t cried over my dad’s lessons, I’m sure all the bottled up stress would have induced a stroke. So go cry, people!
Sniff…Ah, sweet, sweet relief.
(Math still makes me cry FYI.)
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