I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed.  She will be thus from now on. The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had cut the little nerve.

Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry-mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily?  The young woman speaks.

“Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say “it will. It is because the nerve was cut.” 

She nods, and is silent. But the young man smiles.

“I like it,” he says. “It is kind of cute.”

All at once, I know who he is. I understand, and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works. I remember that the gods appeared in ancient Greece as mortals, and I hold my breath and let the wonder in.

The piece is obviously and manipulatively moving, a more sincere Titanic. So I cried.

Yauch lived long enough to see his band inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame just last month, although he was too ill to appear onstage with his bandmates at the induction ceremony. [From Weeping Elvis.]

I'm going to be a father. It seems knowledge of that fact was sufficient to ratchet up my empathy for other parents to a degree that robs me, at least temporarily, of my sense of humor.

In this scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David runs into notorious ball-mishandler Bill Buckner, whose failings have of course been a central plotline of the episode.

[A spoiler follows, but it's a predictable ending given the rest of the episode. Anyway, you might watch the scene now to be able to follow along with my emotional play-by-play below.]

The point of the scene is to show Buckner comically redeeming himself by miraculously catching a baby falling from a burning building. And he does. But here's what happened as I watched:

When the mother stood in her window, freaking out about having to drop the baby into the firemen's blanket-catch below, my heart rate quickened so much and so suddenly that it felt uncomfortable in my chest.

When the clearly fake baby fell in slow motion, I cried. The helpless fragility of the thing was just too much to bear. I wasn't even thinking, like, What if that were my baby? It was just, Oh no! There's a baby falling! Which of course there was not.

When the fake baby's head started to turn towards the ground mid-fall, I started to panic, since obviously there's no way that baby is going to live at this point.

When Buckner made the catch, I lost it. Just completely broke down.

To recap, a wholly comedic scene involving a fake baby falling from a fake building in a fake fire completely tore me apart.

It's probably worth noting that I felt I had to be out of sight of the construction workers I'd been speaking to before I let it loose. Usually, I'm content to cry in front of, just, whomever, but I suppose there are a few scenarios that still push me into more classical modes of masculine operation.

So yeah, I teared up. Maybe it was inspiring to see a firm conducting business in this way, because so few firms do so. Maybe I care about my aunt and feel like I'm taking her shopping for a used car and she's counting on me to help her make her decisions.

Very nearly cried at the "Inbox" tutorial video for OmniFocus, a task manager for the Mac. There's one part where the guy says, "The important thing is to get [everything you have to do] out of your head—so you can get on with your life."