round robin

is there any less effective way of communicating with, or more effective way of alienating neglected friends than the fucking round robin? such a stupidly innocuous description - cheepy chirpy little fellow - of an utterly worthless form - first cousin once removed to spam itself.
the annual christmas letter was bad enough - that tragic listing of happy family triumphs ("and we finally succeeded in persuading malcolm's teachers to let him chew the legs off his desk whenever he started to feel a bit ADS") composed over god knows how many miserable weeks of trying to think of the positive - anything - the cat didn't shit on the landing in October - in order to convince everyone on the christmas card list that life is so much better on this side of the fence. straight in the bin, every time. but the e-mail variant is so much worse, because not only does it try speak to everyone - therefore no-one - about everything - therefore nothing - but it wants at the same time to impress the recipient with the size of the spammer's address book - look how many other people I'm sending this shit to - as if to say - look, these are all the wonderful people I should be writing to who I haven't because I couldn't be arsed, just the same as with you, so I hope you'll understand that it'd take so long to catch up with everyone and anyway it's the thought that counts, isn't it? well, no, actually - and no again. it's lazy, it's careless, it's boring, it's sad and it's very very annoying. if you want to talk to me, talk to me - to me, not number forty-seven in your address book. if you don't, don't. simple. delete.