What kind of random things make you feel overly emotional? Something that other people would say…“what, seriously?”
This last weekend an air show was in town. The headliners were the Navy Blue Angels. I didn’t go to the show, but living close to the airport some of the maneuvers by the fighter jets were done practically in our back yard. They shot over our house so low that I could read the numbers, etc off the bottoms of the jets! When I watch these jets or even when the local Air National Guard jets are doing their practice maneuvers, I get very emotional. I can feel it in my chest, they bring tears to my eyes. We aren’t a military family. My grandpa fought in the army in WWII, but he’s the only one. Not sure why jets affect me this way.
Also, completely different subjects…
Bambi, the Disney movie!! And it’s not when Bambi’s mom is killed. It’s when Bambi, Flower and Thumper are conversing. Their voices just about make me cry. I have to fight to hold back tears even when I talk about it!
Watching horses show jumping or doing dressage will get me every time too.
One of my kitties has had inoperable cancer since October. The chemo he gets will not get rid of it, but it keeps him alive, way beyond the oncologist’s most optimistic predictions. He suffers no ill effects from the chemo. He’s still as playful and affectionate as ever, and he seems to have no idea that he’s sick. A while ago, he was doing his “happy dance” for no apparent reason. He’s just happy to be alive. When I saw him, tears started streaming down my cheeks.
Didn’t Itchy Junior look happy playing with his father? And didn’t Scratchy Junior look happy playing with his Dad until they got run over by the thresher? Wasn’t that a beautiful cartoon? sobbing
Elderly people, especially combat veterans. Old age invariably brings physical decline/suffering and loss, and those who have seen combat have often already been quietly carrying horrifying emotional baggage for decades. There’s an essay titled “What is a Vet?” that includes this segment:
It is difficult not to cry out loud when I read that.
Similarly, the beginning and ending of Saving Private Ryan - when he’s visiting Miller’s grave in Normandy - are by far the most gut-wrenching parts of the movie for me.
Unrelated:
Several years ago I visited Fort McHenry. It’s a national monument now, but about 200 years ago it played a pivotal role in defending the US from British attack, and inspired the poem that became our national anthem. There is a small theater there that shows a movie depicting scenes from the Battle of Baltimore. I imagine most people found it to be a hammy re-enactment, but I got swept up in it and enamored of the knowledge that this was real history: these people were being attacked by the world’s most powerful navy, and everything was at stake. The Americans of course ultimately succeeded, Key wrote his poem - and the movie ended with the most amazing choral rendition of the Star-Spangled banner that I’d ever heard. I started sobbing uncontrollably; had you seen me you might have thought that my dog had just been killed by a car.
We saw this story on the news last night, and I wanted to make a comment to my husband but I knew I couldn’t speak without totally bawling. Strangers doing kind acts always gets me.
Most any Broadway show we’ve seen, someone will be singing and hit some beautiful note and it’s just so perfect and awesome tears come pouring out of my eyes.
Desperation or despair in fiction or movies makes me emotional.
Like the scene in Saving Private Ryan where Captain Miller is lying immobile, and the German tank is coming at him, and will crush him under the treads like an ant, and there is nothing he can do to stop it…and he pulls out his pistol and shoots futilely, feebly at it.
(A P-51 destroyed the tank moments later, of course, but there was no way Miller could have known that at the time.)
A similar scene is the last closing scene in the game Battlefield 2: Modern Warfare, where the SAS special forces character “Soap” McTavish gets a pistol pushed to him by his dying commander and McTavish uses it to shoot the bad guys before he himself dies moments later.
Or Jack London’s *To Build a Fire, *where the man is desperately trying to avoid hypothermia, but all of his attempts at starting a fire fail - and finally, his very last attempt at starting a fire fails when the snow from the tree snuffs out his last hope for survival, and the man lies down and dies. Tears me up like almost no other story I’ve read, when I imagine it as a visual scene.
Too late for edit: Also one of the last scenes in the book Wings of Fire by Dale Brown, where the American wife of the main character is severely wounded, but feebly tries to lift a gun and shoot it at the Russian female villain while the Russian’s back is turned. She misses, and the Russian woman responds by simply throwing a knife at her and kills her.
I’m same way - animals suffering hits me harder than humans suffering. Not that I don’t feel anything toward the human, but I don’t have the same over-emotional feeling that I do when it’s an animal. I had a great childhood, so it doesn’t come from that.
The third verse of America The Beautiful (especially if I am trying to sing it). When I attempt to sing the words “Who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life,” I get a big lump in my throat and tears in my eyes, and can’t sing. Typing those words just now I started to tear up.
Also, the Budweiser Clydesdales commercial in which the horses stop to kneel in reverence as they come to a place where the site of the missing Twin Towers can be seen (before new towers were built). Other posters have mentioned the Clydesdale commercials, but this particular one gets me literally sobbing with emotion.
The usual stuff: the national anthem being sung; commercials for childrens’ hospitals; those befucked commercials for the ASPCA. Around here there are a lot of elderly folks and for every rich retiree there’s a little old man trying to make his way across the street. At the grocery store I frequent, I don’t think I’ve gone two weeks in a row without seeing some poor old dear being carted away on a stretcher:(
I also blub when I go to PetSmart and see the rescue cats just lying there waiting for someone to take them home.
My son has seizures and we’re still working on the cause. I’ve seen him have a seizure about a half dozen times, but I feel just devastated every time he does. He’s an adult and it still kills me every time.
Just thought of another one. Is there anyone besides *Hootie and me who cry at the sight of dolphins?
I Only Wanna Be With You by Hootie and the Blowfish has the line " . . .I’m such a baby 'cause the dolphins make me cry". Is this a common thing? I couldn’t believe it the first time I heard the song, that someone else cried when they looked at dolphins. What the hell is up with that?
Characters dying in kids’ books. Beth in Little Women started it, but she’s not the only one. (And don’t warn me about Where the Red Fern Grows. Too late.)
Also, a number of scenes in 1776, including “Does anybody see what I see?”
“Yes, Mr. Adams. I do.”