I’m immune to guilt

“Don’t tell me you’re actually going to listen to my advice. I give bad advice on purpose! Listening to my advice is a very bad idea. I’d advise you against that.”

– Pixel to friend Moira on advice he’d just given her about boys

In looking for an image to perfectly illustrate this post, I realized that in the movie Bambi, we never actually see Bambi’s mother getting shot. This, obviously made me very sad.

To cheer myself up, I went to my St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital collector’s cards. I have nine so far and hope to collect them all before Chili’s stops running their “create a pepper” promotion. This promotion, as far as I can tell, is specifically aimed at depressing people who wish to eat a good meal.

On Sept. 24 of this year, Chili’s will donate all of its profits to St. Jude’s. To prepare everybody for this, they’ve been scaring away their clientèle for weeks with special St. Jude coasters that each have a picture and profile of a different sad child’s story.

Now, like most people, when something gets so sad that you either cry or laugh, I laugh. Often uproariously. It’s just so sad that it causes a gut reaction. In my case, most of my gut reactions lead to some form of humor. It’s a real problem, actually… 🙁

Anyway, here are some of the saddest stories I could ever imagine and I read them all within ten minutes while waiting for a meal.

• Taylor, age 4: Just three months after her adoption was finalized, wide-eyed, rambunctious Taylor was diagnosed with Wilms tumor.
• Macy, age 11: Weeks before she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, kind-hearted, energetic Macy was saving pennies for the kids of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
• Katie, 10 months: Katie loved to play peekaboo with her parents, but she became increasingly upset when her eyes were covered. At 7 months old, Katie was diagnosed with Retinoblastoma, a cancerous tumor, in her left eye.
• Courtney, age 6: Courtney was only 2 months old when she began treatment for sickle cell disease.
• Jack, age 3: Jack was diagnosed with Wilms tumor in April 2006 and was admitted to St. Jude for surgery to remove a football-sized tumor.

After Taylor’s profile, I just started laughing and couldn’t stop. It was easily the saddest story I had heard in years and my only reaction was to laugh. That’s probably not normal.

So I started collecting all of the coaster-profiles I could. Again: something that’s probably not normal. But how normal is it, really, to try to guilt people out of their money?

p.s. I’ve decided to post some of my collected quips as intros to every post instead of waiting to accumulate them and releasing a goodie grab bag. This is bad news for grab bag aficionados (Seth) and WTF! hopefuls (Seth again), but it’ll be the order of the day until someone mounts a good argument against it.

“Don’t tell me you’re actually going to listen to my advice. I give bad advice on purpose! Listening to my advice is a very bad idea. I’d advise you against that.” – Pixel to friend Moira on advice he’d just given her about boys In looking for an image to perfectly illustrate this post, I…