I just watched The Notebook. I don't know why I do these things to myself. I'm an emotional cutter. When feeling overwhelmed with emotion I can't process it like a normal person, oh no, I have to go watch something horrible and sappy so that I can process all my emotions vicariously through the storyline.

In honor of this I think it's time for another top ten list. I give you:

Top Ten Movies For The Emotional Cutter:

10. Buffy Season 2

Buffy and Angel fall in love. Angel has to go save the world and so their love can never be. Angel comes back to Buffy for a glorious reunion and they make sweet, sweet love. Angel turns into Angelus and tries to kill Buffy and destroy the world. Buffy must fight Angelus over and over again only to have to kill him to save the world. Right after he becomes Angel again. This isn't technically a movie, but the episodes are like a 24 hour movie. Imagine the sort of emotional purge that comes out of that.

9. Phantom of the Opera

You spend the whole storyline falling in love with a psychopathic killer that ends up lonely and alone because, well, he's a psychopathic killer. What's healthy about that?

8. Ghost

The male lead dies ten minutes into the movie and you spend the rest of the movie watching them be in love. Except he's DEAD. Who watches this for fun?

7. Moulin Rouge

They tell you at the very beginning of the movie that this story is about love and loss. There's no misdirection here, nobody lies to you. And yet still, at the end, following the triumphant last song and their ecstatic proclamations of love you manage to forget that loss doesn't come with a happy ending. So she dies. This movie is evil. Pure, unadulterated, evil. And yet I watch it again and again and again...

6. The Notebook

Come on, only Nicholas Sparks could make this story sad. The couple falls in love and live a full happy lifetime together. Oh yeah, but then she can't remember him so he finishes out his years in the emotional equivalent of the Rack and just when you get your miracle, your this-is-what-it's-all-about moment you see how absolutely heart-rending it is when the one person you love more than anything can't remember who you are. Gee, that's a happy story.

5. P.S. I Love You

Girl falls in love with hot Irish guy. Guy dies of brain cancer ten years later. Girl is left widowed and mourning. Girl might find love again, but does that really ease the pain of losing the love of your life to brain cancer? I think not.

4. Gone With The Wind

We all know how I feel about this movie. Rhett loves Scarlett. Scarlett loves Ashley. Ashley loves his cousin. No, I don't think it's right either.

3. Finding Neverland

Nobody warned me before I watched this movie. I thought, "oh, Peter Pan. There's nothing sad in Peter Pan." Yeah, nothing sad at all until you watch children forced to grow up too soon and ball your eyes out. I still maintain it was an allergy attack.

2. Casablanca

I love you. I love you too. Oh goody we can be together. Actually no, you need to go off with the man you don't actually love, and I'll be the man you always wanted me to be while your gone. Huh.

1. Life As A House

If you haven't seen this movie you won't understand why I placed it above the last two. If you have seen this movie I hope you understand. This is the five bladed razor of emotional cutting. It hurts, there's lots of blood, you feel renewed. It's very medieval in a leeches sort of way.

In my defense I rarely watch most of these movies, but still many of them pull me back time after time. Except Ghost--that one's just sick. I would also have you know I totally shut most of them off before the end so I get the happy climax with none of the tears and sadness at the end.

Is it wrong to pretend that tragedy doesn't exist? To quote an apropos line from t.v. "I reject your reality and substitute my own." Indeed. If only life responded to a remote control.