touchy feely forwards

I hate the Chicken Soup for the Soul Series. The deliberate emotional maniuplation garnered to wring a dramatic touchy feely response just leaves me... cold. Don't get me wrong, when those books first started coming out and I read the odd story while sitting on Mom's toilet, I'd occassionally get all teary. "Awwwww.... *sniff* *sniff* Isn't that so touching? What a sad story."

But after awhile, the deliberateness of the set-up starts to shine through and all I can think about is the authors "term searching" through masses of "touching stories" to compile these endless books. And I imagine some poor slob sitting there reading them and labeling them with key words so they can be immediately added to the book for the "Dog Lover's Soul", the "Nurse's Soul", the Computer Programmer's Soul", and the "Cubicle Facing North-North-West's Soul". For crying out loud there's a book for every possible niche out there.

Anyway, those books have left me really cynical about touchy feely email forwards as well. I just can't get into them and feel my "heart melt" like I'm apparently supposed to.

I enjoy heckling the fundy ones and have several (?) times here on my blog. Hmmmm Checked the archives using Richard's blog search feature and only came up with I Want To Barf. Thought I had heckled more often than that, but perhaps I'm just not searching properly, and I can't be bothered looking further at the moment.

The most recent one mom sent was filled with the typical sickly sweetness of no less than 12 cute babies. 12???? Seen one at a time these pictures are adorable. But 12? And each one captioned by a life-affirming smug little "saying".

For example this little tyke...

Ideas won’t work unless ‘I’ do.

It's like someone found a catalog of motivational posters and copied down all 26 nifty sayings, covered the post with cutesy baby pics and clipped onto the end a challenge to try and get 12 people to email the damn thing back to you to prove your self-worth as a friend and quality human being. It's like the little antidote for all the happy thoughts they just sent you. That little seed of doubt planted so it creeps in and you're left feeling vaguely dissatisfied knowing there's no way you'll get 12 people to send back an email you just sent to them. And really? Who would want to get back an email they just sent anyway?

Stupid emotional claptrap if you ask me.

However, it was the first part of this email that caught my eye. Which is the only reason why I bothered to read to the end and heckle it here.

There comes a point in your life
when you realize who matters,
who never did,
who won’t anymore...
and who always will.

So, don’t worry about people from your past.

There’s a reason why they didn’t make it to your future.

That one got me.

Courtesy of Neil Domenico - click the image to buy prints.

Now I wonder why I'm sad?

Stupid touchy feely forwards.