Satire: Curse from 2007 chain mail finally lifted

Noah Staninger / Satire Columnist / The USD Vista

You’ve just come home from a long day of fourth grade. Spending a whole afternoon doing long division can be taxing on a young mind, so you just want to relax. What is there to do? “Drake and Josh” is on, but it’s a rerun. You check the freezer but you’re all out of hot pockets. Mom took away your DS. Alec can’t come over because he called you a “a**butt”. Your Tamagotchi is still alive so you can check that off.  You already bumped The Jonas Brothers on your iPod Nano, and you’ve already watched all the Blockbuster rentals. With your options limited, you decide to go on the computer, and after a few short minutes, Internet Explorer is finally up and running. You go to this cool new site called YouTube, where a grown man tells you to leave Brittany Spears alone. You go on Club Penguin for a while. You’d check your MySpace but mom said you’re not allowed to have one. But what she doesn’t know is that you have your very own Hotmail account. The only new message comes with the subject line “FORWARD THIS FOR GOOD LUCK.” You read it and it says that if you don’t forward this to 10 other people in the next hour you’ll be cursed with bad luck for 12 years. But you’re much too smart for that – after all, how can an email cause bad luck? You forget about it and move on. Your childish carelessness will be your downfall.

You didn’t notice anything at first. The bad luck wasn’t immediate and dramatic, instead it was deliberate and subtle. That same evening you go to Blockbuster to return the rentals but there’s a sign on the door. It’s going out of business. Months go by. You graduate elementary school and go on to middle school. It’s terrible. You make some regrettable fashion choices, childhood friendships unravel, and just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, you hit puberty. Acne, voice cracks, hair in new places. Then, some good news. You hear that the world is supposed to end in 2012. The sweet release of annihilation will finally save you from yourself. But your bad luck prevails because nothing happens, and the year is now 2013. 

You’re in high school. It’s nothing at all like high school musical. No one is singing and dancing. Your Tamagotchi has died a long time ago. Your childhood pet is also now dead. Kanye got weird, “The Office” ended, The Jonas Brothers broke up, and you can’t find a date to homecoming. What’s worse is that your still going through puberty, even though it’s been a few years now with absolutely no signs of slowing. How did you end up playing the tuba? The promises of a bright future slips through your fingers as you see the world crumble around you into some twisted perversion of what should have been. You think your luck can’t get any worse, but you were wrong about that email, and you’re a damnable fool if you think it won’t get worse.

The years that follow continue to demonstrate how the ignorance of youth would orchestrate your doom. You find yourself in college, but are you studying something useful like law, business, or medicine? No, you’re majoring in the humanities. You’re not going through puberty anymore but you’re still awkward as ever. You’ve gained weight. You have no money. The hair on your scalp relocates with reckless abandon to other strange locations. 

Fascism is on the rise, climate change has gone from distant prophecy to tangible reality, and you still don’t have any hot pockets in the freezer. Existence is pain. If only you’d forwarded that email from 2007. 

But then you realize something. It’s 2019. It’s been 12 long years. Could it all finally be over?