SPREADING THE LOVE BY NOT SPREADING THE LOVE

You get, "Spread the Love" emails? Sometimes they just have text. Some have photos Some have really cutesy graphics of, for example, a purple teddy bear swinging on an idyllic park swing. Under the heading of "Overkill", some of them even have insidious background music. They go something like this "Love is [picture of puppy]. Love is [picture of rainbow]. Love is [picture of banana split]. Love is [picture of two little girls playing dolls]....que the background music......Shouldn't you tell those you love how you feel. Are you too busy for those you love? I'm sending you this to let you know how much you're loved [picture of big, red, animated heart in background]. If you want to spread the love, send this email to 350 of your closest friends sometime in the next 15 seconds and then send a copy to me to prove you did and because I'm so freaking insecure I need affirmation constantly....."

Sometimes these little guilt trip beauties will have religious backdrops and sometimes they'll give a sermonette about how we're all too busy to show the love and we really should do better. I guess this is designed to make us all want to move to Vermont and do wood carving or macrame while we wait for the sap to run. This would also leave us time to send elaborate caligraphy to our loved ones. Somehow, I just can't see St. Peter being particularly concerned at the pearly gates with whether I mass-forwarded a computer file to a bunch of people who already know I care for them. It pretty much just convinces me the sender might be a little too needy/clingy. For a topper, Sometimes we'll even be promised a curse of some vague sort in the event we don't forward the little electronic bucket of love to the equivalent of the entire population of New Zealand. ("The last man who failed to forwarded these blessed wishes, suffered through 38 years of jock itch").

To those of you who are simply compelled to send these electronic love spams, please leave me out. First, I'm perfectly capable of selecting a medium to tell my loved ones who they are. Second, I receive about 1000 non-spam email transactions in four different boxes a day. There is just no time to fit reading of gooey cyber-valentines into this challenge. Third, one of my best friends sells paper greeting cards for a living. I don't want him to lose his job. Fourth, if you really want to like me and tell me what swell pals we are, compose something yourself, and hold the dancing teddy bears soap opera synthesizer music. If your write it yourself and you don't ask me to forward it to my entire family tree, my second grade teacher's ex-husband and partridge in a pear tree, I'll read it.

So do me a favor and don't do me a favor. Save the cyber love chains.

I'm already wearing the paint off my "delete" button.