The Thorn in your Side

If I get one more piece of chain mail, I am going to scream. I’m serious – stop sending me it. I got one today, from two of my friends who are obviously just bored and have nothing better to do. I don’t pass any blame onto them. But I have no love lost for the people who start them, or who REALLY believe that they “will get a phone call from someone who will tell them they are loved” or that “something special will happen in your love life tonight if you send this to 15 people.” And don’t even get me started on the people who are really, honestly, are you actually serious, afraid that something bad will happen to them if they do not, in fact, send it on.

I got this chain mail today from friends, like I said, that compared the lives of normal men and women to the lives of soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. It made mention of things like “you stay up for 16 hours – he stays up for days on end” and “you go to the mall to get your hair redone – he doesn’t have time to brush his teeth today.” It’s a war. It’s hard. But it’s real. So stop trying to make people guilty by sending images of dead soldiers and dead children through hotmail. If I ever get another email like this, I am going to send it back with all the most hateful and oppressive slander I can muster. Which is serious stuff. Leave me out.

I really do support the work that the men and women in our armed forces are doing. They are putting their lives on the line to help people under tyranny and oppression and it’s good work, it really is. However, I have a few points I want to make first…

First of all. They are not defending our right to freedom and democracy. They are forcing it on other nations. Not that this is a bad thing, but in all reality, whereas terrorists may pose a very real threat to the lives of people living in ‘free’ countries, they do not – yes, that’s right – they do NOT pose a threat to our ways of life. It is impossible for them to destroy how we live. For them to do that, they would have to take over the country. Can you see that happening? Really?

Secondly, it makes me actually laugh out loud when I realise that these people are only sending on chain mail to satisfy their own guilt that they don’t really care about it anyway. People try to force their own deep seated problems onto others in the hopes that they’ll feel better at the end of the day. Well, if that’s what helps you sleep at night, it’s no skin off my back, honey.

And now I'm fed up talking about it.

Nothing much to report in the uni world today. Did my pitch and got away with blagging through it, as most of my work is audio-based and I have nothing to show. It’s all on my laptop. Which I forgot to bring. Awh. I did, however, get a good run through of the Pro Tools set up in the recording studio, so I now know how to set up a recording track and how to get input from the live room into the desk. Which is somewhat epic.

Other than that, it’s business as usual. More to come tomorrow.