CHAIN E-MAIL - THE BANE OF MY HORMONAL EXISTENCE

I have been avoiding this subject for a blog entry for a few days now. Unfortunately, my curiousity has been completely piqued, and I gotta get it off my chest.

Are any of you lucky enough to receive the cheesy, schmaltzy email forwards from your friends? Usually accompanied by the electronic version of chain mail - "Forward to five of your friends and good luck will follow you!" - these stories are becoming sappier and sappier.

Yes, I am a cynic. I have become jaded about the web because I have discovered that you can find virtually anything you want to know there. Example: The "World Trade Center Virus" scam. Did any of you see that one? Google it, discover how false and absurd it is. The interesting thing about that particular email chain is that it has been submerged and then redistributed around two or three separate times.

So my sappy email in receipt yesterday concerned some kid dead from cancer who had God write a letter to his mom after he died. It was written in some special God invisible ink, so that any other reader would dismiss it as a blank page.

By the time I finished that puppy, I was sobbing like a premenstrual valium junkie in need of carbohydrates. (Well, part of that is true. I am no longer a valium junkie.) Even worse, I read that email very early yesterday morning when I got to work. In the midst of my sniffling and eye rubbing, my favorite Human Resources Manager passes by my desk and says hello. I couldn't turn around, couldn't look her in the eye. I know she heard a sob in my voice. So now I am playing the "everything is just fine you just caught me in the midst of reading some crappy sappy email" game.

MY BIG QUESTION IS: Who the fu&k writes these things? What kind of insane, moronic idiot constructs these horrible situation Hallmark TV movie episodes in their head? Let's imagine:

A heavyset, 40-something woman, wearing red sweatpants and a coffee stained t-shirt, smoking a Vagina Slime (Virginia Slim for those of you left utterly clueless) while sitting at her oak country kitchen table in her kitchen. The kitchen still bears the oak cabinets installed in 1979, with the scalloped edges and fake burn-etch engraving on the fronts. Her wallpaper is newer- her brother Hank hung it in 1992, so it is still not at that "cool because it is old enough to be vintage" date. It is yellow, with big crayoned apples between forest green stripes.

"Becky" - as we shall call her - is on a break between Montel and Young and the Restless. She can't stand the 30 minute local news segment that comes on in between her two favorite shows. She has a laptop computer on the other side of the two person oak dinette - she figures that it makes her feel productive - like a "working woman" - and deflects the fact that she has never had an occupant in the second seat of her table.

So there is my portrait of one of these leeches in our global email network 0f friends. I love having the opportunity to communicate en-masse - especially when my friends are scattered across the planet. This insidious invader constructs these dramadies because her life is filled with only ordinary conflict.

Prove me wrong. Find me a "true story" from a credible source that illustrates how these
sape-mails are indeed non-fiction.