Whoops. Corrected. I just switch those two words in my head all the damn time.
Sweet, I have a friend who was hand-selected by god! (He overslept.) Irreligious-ass motherfucker, too.
God wants us all dead, but at a time and place of his choosing.
An interesting angle on the standard "God has a plan" stuff. It never seems to occur to them to think they're implying "those other fuckers, though, God killed 'em good, just like He wanted." That poor sucker who had a perfect commute on the way in to work on 9/11, made record time and was savoring a fresh cup of coffee at his desk when the first plane hit? God's wrath all up in there. (So I guess the corollary is "always feel a vague sense of dread when things are going well.")
We are all senders to the inbox of an unpredictable God.
heebie, you really need to start ignoring these emails.
8 is true. I do delete most of them without reading them.
The other thing she sends are these sadsack pleas for why her collective email list is not in closer touch with her, with complicated multiple-choice options about which kinds of emails we would like to see from her, but she'll ignore you if you ask for just the personal emails and not the forwards.
People are religious in large part to find comfort regarding the arbitrary nature of life and death, and this e-mail seems like a rather anodyne expression of that impulse. Lots of people really do the thing that DS suggests, and say that people die because a just God wants it that way.
So if you find this e-mail offensive, it seems as though you've got to find offense in pretty much the entire edifice of Christian religion.
Which, come to think of it, I do. So never mind.
Actually, the sender is Jewish.
It seems there are a lot of people in your life, Heebie, that shouldn't be allowed access to email services.
13: This is the same person as on Friday. She sends a lot of forwards.
Oh, my mistake. Pester Heebie relentlessly, then, persons.
with complicated multiple-choice options about which kinds of emails we would like to see from her, but she'll ignore you if you ask for just the personal emails and not the forwards.
Whoa. That's, like, a whole 'nother level.
I admit that my mom used to forward similar things (not quite that bad?) from time to time, but you know, you can't really send your mom's emails to the trash bin, like, automatically. Unless you're a monster.
5: I think that the worst you can say about Him is that basically He's an underachiever.
(Does not really fit but just finished watching that for the nth time. Also, Jewish.)
It's never inappropriate to quote Love and Death. Of course, I can't even guess what my n might be.
Did you hear about the researcher into sexuality and psychology who, in his youth, was able to devise cunning experiments and shape innovative, powerful arguments, but who, as he aged, gradually lost those abilities? Yes, it's a sad story; as he aged, he felt his craft ebbing.
______________________
The above joke, such as it is, has evidently been used before.
One easy way to tell who are my people in the special needs adoption community and who aren't is that if they're saying "God wanted these kids to be with us" and forgetting that apparently the divine method chosen was abuse/neglect/abandonment plus all the joys of foster care, I can basicslly write that person off. I often tend to keep reading out of some sort of emotinal masochism, but at least I know why I shouldn't.
9: Demand she send pictures of cats. Best you can do under the circumstances.
Ask her to caption the cats, obviously.
I'll ask her to caption them all with "What a misunderstanding!"
Ask her to caption the cats obviously
21: Be careful what you wish for.
Actually, the sender is Jewish.
Who by Pre-K, who by donut, who by alarm clock, who by turnpike, who by food, who by spark plug, who by band-aid.
25: holy crap. Old Possum got served.
Actually, the sender is Jewish.
Hah! I struggled with this in my comment. First I referred to "religion," then I erased that and put in "Western religion," then I was going to go with "the Judeo-Christian tradition," but that still seemed unfair.
24: Thanks for making that explicit.
29: I omitted a comma, you philistine.
31: so, see, you said that she should obviously caption the cats, and then my implication was that she should obviously caption the cats, right? So I googled "I am a cat" on google image search, and it's totally true that the example I found is maybe not the most obvious obviously I could have found, obviously, but man, it was still pretty funny, you know? With the value add? That I added? To the... the value.
You hate America.
I hate only fourteen states and some of those pacific islands.
That is, some of the Pacific islands that are not state-parts but are US territory.
So fourteen undetached state-parts?
Right. And various islands I can't spell the names of.
I would like to state that I know 26 to be a Rosh Hashannah joke* for the benefit of AWB who swears I'm not even Jewish.
*um, or the Yom. But definitely one of those.
(I'm going to guess that my n for Love and Death is greater than ten but less than twenty. That's my Rosh Kippur service!)
I got in trouble along these lines when there was some plane crash where only one person died and immediately people started calling it a miracle and I was all "you know what an even nicer miracle would have been?"
"I wonder if I might call your attention to an observation of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. He said: 'Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web'."
Well, you can tell him from me he's an ass.
I am not a magnet for crazy emails. Some people are magnets for crazy emails. What do I have to do to ensure that I never join their number.
"Sometimes, if pious men are to be believed, God's mercies are curiously selective. Toplady, the author of Rock of Ages, moved from one vicarage to another; a week after the move, the vicarage he had formerly occupied burnt down, with great loss to the new vicar. Thereupon Toplady thanked God; but what the new vicar did is not known. Borrow, in his Bible in Spain, records how without mishap he crossed a mountain pass infested by bandits. The next party to cross, however, were set upon, robbed, and some of them murdered; when Borrow heard of this, he, like Toplady, thanked God."
There is no reason to click through and actually read the damn thing. I just included it for completeness. Also I'm not going to post any more of her forwards unless they're particularly amazing, so don't worry about this becoming a thing.
Thanks for including the finish of the other forward the other day and all of this one. And I actually kind of like the posting of the crazy forwards: it's a worm's eye view of the American id which I find interesting. (I never get these; my sted-dad's dad was mailing this kind of stuff to step-dad all the time and it was always amusing to glance at.)
I also appreciate the bezerk spacing of this one:
One'sHee!
Car wouldn't start.
Two's
Can eat as cheaply as one!
max
['Oh! Well, I'm glad the meek
Are getting something
Cuz they have a
Horrible time down here!']
47: I never get them, despite being at high risk (raised in the deep south, in a fundamentalist mileu). My advice is to be an unpleasant person with a reputation for not suffering fools and foolishness. Your acquintances, when about to forward, should imagine your contemptuous reaction, and strike your name from their list. More importantly, preserve your email address for mostly professional purposes. Your various idiot aunts and cousins and childhood friends should only be able to reach you through facebook, if at all.
This is the only person that sends them to me, actually.
My advice is to be an unpleasant person...
Are you going to remind us to breath next?
Anybody corrects my spelling and a step on a kitten.
52: Having one email-forwarder is nearly as bad as having a dozen. There are many things I could analogise that to, if only the bylaws of this august community would permit me.
It is "an kitten" like "an historian" or "an apple"?
Thurber nailed this phenomenon pretty well in "The Luck of Jad Peters". Subscribers to The New Yorker can read it in their archives. The unwashed can pretty much read the whole thing via Amazon's "Look Inside" for The Thurber Carnival (or just buy it already, unless you have all of his original collections) or you can find Keith Olbermann reading it on YouTube.
Well, sir, I don't suppose any of us will know what it was now, but somethin' must of told Jad to turn around.
57: Why did the kitten cross to road?
Because Moby's bus stop was on the other side.
My grandpa sends me a curious collection of email forwards. A lifelong union Democrat, he remains solidly supportive of things like collective bargaining rights, Social Security, and Medicare, while being skeptical of things like "welfare" and "government spending" and "those bureaucrats in Washington." The turn I've seen in the forwards since about, say, January 2009, is a marked uptick in xenophobia and jingoism.
What is it about this kitten that provokes all these typos? Quick, someone kill it!
62: Kittens are known to give one paws.
61: Sounds like a classic Reagan Democrat. Safety net for me, but not for thee.
63: I was sad that my kitten had no paws until I met the one that was stuck to Moby's shoe.
If I would have known how the morning would go, I would have wore my shoes with the leather soles and avoided that problem.
68: Think globally, act globally. Let the local sort itself out.
Short version: God hand-selected certain people to live that day, but did a spectacular job making it look like the ordinary statistical distribution of reasons why people sometimes run late. So next time God is making you late, console yourself that he's probably saving your ass.
I would find this perspective useful for staying calm in traffic jams. But how do we know God isn't making us late to save us, and not as part of timing a horrible death?
You know how sometimes people put their small children on the phone to chat with the phone solicitors?
I'd love to put her email address in one of these comment threads, and let you all cheerfully exchange ideas.
But how do we know God isn't making us late to save us, and not as part of timing a horrible death?
We don't. But either way, isn't it nice to know it's all part of a beautiful and perfect plan?
70.last: That is basically the punchline to the Thurber story; the guy has a set of embellished stories (and a collection of associated artifacts) about close escapes from death. He is taking leave of a friend one day and then turns around and starts to come back to say something else and gets whacked by a rogue 20-pound rock fragment from a blasting site. His widow adds the rock to the collection of his lucky mementos.
Having trouble finding your kitten in the dark to step on it? "Glow-in-the-dark kittens to help produce cure for AIDS."
