Emo Alert!

I haven’t tweeted in about 2 weeks.  My last tweet was probably when I talked about Cairo getting sick (thank the good Lord he’s doing much better).  The main reason is that, try as I might, I couldn’t seem to get out of this emo rut I’ve been in, for the past, I don’t even care to know how long.  And people in general don’t really care much to read endless whining on Twitter.  Everyone’s got problems of their own, so they don’t really need the extra burden of other people’s pitiful tales of woe.  I should know, because I feel weighed down whenever I read endless complaints from people who can’t seem to get enough of carping about their lot in life.  So why flood the Twitterverse with the very same thing I rail against?  Sometimes I try, but whenever I open up my mind to find something to share, I find nothing but a tomb of a room of doom and gloom.  So I close the shutters once again, and say nothing, rather than be a drippy dark cloud and be avoided by happy campers.  I can’t even come up with quirky ways to be emo.  It’s just heavy, earnest, naked emo.  The type you turn your head away from, like a bloody train wreck.

I’m sure it’s all a matter of perspective, but situations seem more aggravating, people seem more frustrating, and my mood seems to be ever down-spiraling.  Even when I find pockets of happiness, little oases of glee, I quickly slide back into my wintry weariness.  It’s very, “Hahaha…huhuhu…” kind of melodramatic madness.  My days are playing out like a badly-acted soap.

But what do you do when you work in the entertainment industry?  You’re supposed to entertain.  So I switch to Pagliacci mode.  Canio is the lead character in the Leoncavallo opera Pagliacci.  He works as a circus clown who found out that his wife was cheating on him.  In the most famous track, “Vesti La Giubba”, which translates to “put on your costume”, he prepares for his performance by dressing up, putting on his happy face make-up, because the show must go on, even if his heart was breaking into a million pieces.  The character embodies the “laughing on the outside, crying on the inside” archetype.  In Tagalog, “payasong plastic“.

Sometimes I tell myself, “get over yourself.”  There are more people who are probably much worse off, and what I actually have a glut of, is not so much problems, but double servings of drama.  I know, during moments of emotional lucidity, I realize the luxury of sweating the small stuff, when other people are bearing mountains compared to my molehills.  Don’t worry I get it.  We dispense similar adages in our advice column.  It’s just that sometimes, it’s hard to reconcile what you say and what you feel.  So even if your mouth says: “I’ll be okay,” but if your heart insists: “Shut up, bitch”, then the conviction echoes hollow.

Humor the stream of consciousness, this is writing without a purposeful point.  It’s just venting emotional magma, so I don’t blow (up, I mean).  Just think of it as an, “apologetically self-indulgent” post.

Anyway, that said, what got me writing was this animated short that I watched courtesy of @johnluarca over Twitter.  He blogged about his 10 most favorite animated shorts and this one spoke to me the most.  It’s the perfect visual interpretation of what’s eddying about in my head.  And at my age, it doesn’t even count as “emo” anymore.  It’s more like…shudder…mid-life crisis.