Fw: fw: fw: How Well Do You Know Your Friends? (This is Fun!)

It's an ordinary workday, and it finds you sitting in your office - perhaps with atmospheric accoutrement provided by Canadian/Irish songstress Loreena McKennitt - minding your own business, your thoughts briefly touching on the work growing like a cadaverous fungus on your desk, when - from your email inbox comes

The really incredibly retar- uh, I mean, developmentally delayed - forwarded survey sent to you by a friend or loved one

You all have been there. You know the one. Woven into this hellish - and, let me stress, So Very Important - document are fascinating questions like:

1) Have you ever loved someone so much that it made you cry?
2) Have you ever been to Africa?
3) Pizza or spaghetti?
4) Vanilla or chocolate?
5) Revolver or lead pipe?

I am as guilty as anyone else for having actually filled one or two of these out in my time; consumed from within by a nearly fatal bout of ennui, I found dry succor in providing meaningless information about myself to a list of people who, most likely, had never met me and who would, after having read my comments, hastily hide livestock and small children from me on approach if they ever did.

Several questions about this phenomenon rise like a yeast-roll from the non-stick baking sheet of my consciousness.

1) Why is it always the people who know you the best who send you these things? It would be one thing if people you were only casually acquainted with sent these to you, but generally speaking, you get them from your ma. Or your college roommate, who knows intimately what happens to you when you eat Chicken con Broccoli from the Olive Garden. These are people who know the answers to these questions; did you get this forward from him/her because of our next item, #2?

2) How's about a fun curse that gets placed on you if you don't respond and forward your response to ten people in an hour? Sometimes the thinly-veiled threat is of frowny-faced friend/family disapproval and sadness that their request for information about you went carelessly unheeded, but more often than not it's something like:

A promising young CPA named Tim from Muskrat Uterus, Alabama, read this message and chose not to respond. Within five days cataracts had completely blinded him, his shiny black hair fell out at the roots, his skin erupted forth with weeping chancres, and his home was engulfed by a previously unknown sinkhole that had started under his foundation - bringing to an early grave his wife, three children and his beloved ferret, Gerald. Oh, and his manhood shriveled into something resembling a hunk of black-pepper deer jerky and dropped off his torso. THIS IS REAL!!!!!.

3) Why on earth does anyone give a fig if I, or anyone else on this earth for that matter, has ever loved someone so much that they cried? What soulless haint could say that s/he, in some capacity, hadn't? Damn.

If I were to write these things, my questions would be, oh, like this:

Have you ever loved someone so much that you:

a) Kept a locket of his/her hair (clipped while he/she was sleeping)?
b) Broke into his/her home to scan/smell his/her bedsheets for telltale signs of whoopsie with someone else?
c) Ate one of his/her toenail clippings so that she/he could "always be with you"?
d) Committed a Class "B" felony involving the kidnap and ransom of his/her cat, mailing one of its ears to your "special friend" for the sake of veracity?

Maybe it's for the best, then, that I don't write these- though if there is enough of a public clamor, I shall provide sweet relief.

***

This week: final presentation, final paper, and -oh wait - 3,000 foreigners who want things from me. In other words, don't look for me till you see the whites of my eyes. But I shall return, I promise - and I shall return with the vitality that comes with the completion of my

Final

Class

of my

Master's Degree.

Oh yeah.

Until later, I remain,

Domonic