FWDed Emails

FWDed Emails

from: Mugtoe
9/9/01
11:09:58 PM
63.61.115.103

Why do people who never send me a lick of personal correspondence insist on having me on their mailing list for every FWD joke that passes through their server? I don't care that some of it is funny. To an individual none of them has ever asked me if I wanted to be placed on their mailing list to get junk mail that I already get from about a dozen other people. In response to my complaints I get FWD emails that talk about how grateful I should be that someone is thinking of me enough to send me the crap out of their computer, and it sounds like something I would find in a Dear Abby column. How nice. I already get enough ads for teen pussy on the net and viagra that I don't want for me to spend any additional time sifting through jokes that I get along with dozens of other people on one of these lists. What happens when I complain about this is that I get hurt looks, bitter replies about what a curmudgeon I am to spoil their fun and refuse their unsolicited spillage, or bitter silence as a reproach for my meanness. Never have I had any one of these people (usually women I know for some reason; almost never from a guy) say to me, "Gee, Frank, I'm sorry. I didn't realize what a pain in the ass it was for you to get those. I'll cut it out. By the way, let me tell you what's going on in my life instead of sending you that crap. Let's have a real correspondence from now on." That is an email I will never get. I'll bet you money on it. I came to Texas this weekend to see my Dad. I also saw a very few other people. I wanted to spend the weekend watching videos and just hanging out and eating a lot with the guy who is, essentially, my best friend in the world. Well, the phone has rung off the hook, people have stopped by to see me, and we weren't even able to get through The Six Wives of Henry VIII in an entire weekend. The trip wasn't wasted at all, but it got frustrating after a bit. I could have said nothing to anybody and snuck down here, but that would seem petty. Now it merely seems efficacious in retrospect. It's not that I didn't want to speak to or see every one of those people. For me to say so would have amounted to rudeness on my part. I am a hermit, I suppose, and a misanthrope. Odd that I love Humanity so entirely in the abstract, and yet I am so tormented by it in its specific manifestations. I love to go where I am instantly recognized by many people, yet I want them to leave me be once I am in their company. I either want to monopolize their time and association, or shun them altogether and only see them from a distance. In truth, I see them only from a distance even when in close quarters; they are filtered through the eyes of a heart so utterly absorbed in its own object. In any case, if my attitude is the result of an emotional malady on my part, I would rather go on in that miserable affliction than to find that the chief result of a restorative would be my delight in finding another set of FWDed emails in my inbox. I will remain sick unto death instead. Having written this, it flashed into my consciousness that I regularly fwd the links that I find on this board to everybody in my office without the least solicitation on their part. I should be drawn and quartered and then keel-hauled under a long boat. But then, I think that stuff is funny, and those people should be grateful that I am at least thinking of them.

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