FALSE FEELING OF FELICITY

It's been kinda an emotional day for me.

A very nice kind person sent me one of those critically-ill-child-orphan-dolphin who will get 3 cents-five-dollars-a-lifetime-supply-of-ill-operating-Vista-PCs-directly-from-Bill-Gates if you only forward-this-email-repeat-a-prayer-or-help-the-king-of-Nigeria's-sister's-uncle's-half-grandfather-god brother.

Can you tell I don't like these things?

This one was about and included a photo of a severely-burned young girl in Poland who needed this email forwarded to cover her medical needs etc. etc. etc.

And it hit way too close to home to let me simply hit the delete key.

My older sister and her two girls were horribly burned in an auto explosion when I was eight or nine. My sister was in the burn unit for six months; my nieces, both over a year. They have all had extensive plastic surgery, and although both girls are happily married and have children themselves, they will always be extremely physically scarred.

So I wrote back a very sedate, calm email, ccing everyone whom this lovely person had emailed this particular email to (note: another reason to always put email addresses under bc instead of send) that this was one of those partially true emails, noted the snopes.com site with information about it and other such emails.

To begin with.

I even put "and you do not need to read anything else."

And THEN I imploded about how instead of allowing yourself to feel righteous about forwarding a *^%#&(!@# email, you should go volunteer at a hospital, support your local fire department's fire safety programs, go read at a nursing home, donate your furniture to Habitat for Humanity...

It brought more emotional memories back than I had anticipated.