1/10/2024 0 Comments Chain letter chain manThe corporate retreat where everyone is expected to take part in restorative breathing exercises before the budget meeting? Unforgivable. The family dinner where, guest or not, everyone at the table is expected to join hands in prayer before tucking into the pot roast? To my mind, perfectly acceptable. Granted, the line between that and just being a good sport can be a fine one, and it is drawn in different places by different people. This was a month or so ago, and already it felt strikingly familiar: a bunch of people who don’t want to participate in something but also don’t want to express their real feelings about it, given the prevailing atmosphere of solemnity, solidarity, and grief.Īll this is to say that there are few things in life more irritating than coerced participation in an allegedly uplifting group activity. Watching the scene, in which all the other mourners studiously examine their freshly shined loafers, I felt a combination of vicarious horror and dismayed recognition. But the chief problem is that Tony’s sister, being similarly manipulative and murderous, is incapable of proposing the idea without coming across as equal parts deranged, disingenuous, and smarmy, like Madame Defarge doing a turn as a camp counsellor. Soprano was so manipulative, embittered, narcissistic, and homicidal as to render her entirely eulogy-proof. One problem with this kind of organized emoting is that it is wildly at odds with the funerary traditions of Italian-Catholic mobsters. There is a scene in “The Sopranos” (I can tell you this because, in a rare welcome side effect of stay-at-home orders, I finally got around to watching it) in which, following the death of Tony Soprano’s mother, his sister tries to convince everyone gathered for the memorial service to share a special memory of the deceased. As a childless magazine writer whose peaceful rural home makes a quarantine look basically indistinguishable from Yaddo, I do not have the excuse of being too overburdened to rummage through my cookbooks.īut am I going to send you my favorite soufflé recipe? I am not. The issue is not that I am an introvert, liable to feel invaded by what one astute commentator called, in describing these e-mails, “social homework.” Nor am I temporarily running a third-, fifth-, and eighth-grade classroom out of my kitchen while simultaneously running a legal-aid office out of my bedroom. In every one of these that I have ever received, and they are numerous, I am the weak link, by which I mean I am the intransigent link. I can, however, think of a very good reason to discourage you from sending any of those things to me, which is that your Great Chain of Being E-mailed will promptly rupture. These are trying times, and, assuming you steer clear of pyramid schemes, I can think of no good reason, if it makes you feel even the slightest bit better, to discourage you from sending Joyce Kilmer or Psalm 91 or Chicken Surprise winging around the Internet. When you’re done, simply add your name to the seventh empty slot below, copy and paste this note into a new e-mail, move my name to the third slot above your own, hit “reply all” to send your response to the non-blind-carbon-copied strangers on this note, then forward it to twenty friends you never want to speak to again. It shouldn’t take more than fifty hours of wondering how to graciously decline this request followed by another thirty hours of ignoring it followed by six hours of obsessively refining your recipe for microwave chocolate-chip cheesecake in a mug. This is meant to be FUN!, so please don’t spend too much time on it. Friends! I know these are trying times, so, in the interest of bringing a little joy into all of our lives, I’m inviting you to join in sharing a beloved poem/recipe/Bible verse/inspiring quote/home workout/elephant joke/photo of yourself in your favorite Renaissance Faire outfit/drawing of a cat in a litter box. I mean a minor, unexpected, and vexing byproduct of them both: the feel-good chain e-mail, some version of which you have almost certainly received since you’ve been stuck at home. I don’t mean the pandemic, the origins of which are more or less clear, temporally if not yet biologically, and I don’t mean our great national hunkering-down, which hadn’t even started back on the Groundhog Day it now so resembles. God only knows when it began, but I can tell you this: it is never going to end.
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