And so now I'm in Atlanta where it's hot and wet, but not in a good way.

Despite eating a very early dinner so I could get caught up with my life, I still have 44 unread emails. Even though I just spent two hours mucking around in my in-box. Such a severe lack of progress (I'm only down 34 from 78 I started with) is really depressing. What's even more depressing is that four of the emails were all related to a rather shocking incident that a friend of mine was involved in. Everybody was all "Holy crap, have you heard this juicy bit of news?" And even though I had heard it, it still seemed so wildly out of character and impossible that I decided to do something unprecedented...

I called the person directly and asked what the hell had happened.

Turned out that none of the information in the emails was true, and my friend was in complete shock over hearing what they had supposedly done. Apparently it was all a case of somebody hearing something and passing it along to somebody else who then passed it along to somebody else until suddenly idle gossip had become fact.

Even though it really wasn't.

Modern day communication is very, very scary that way.

Eventually my friend (the one accused of all the insanity) wrote an email of their own that they sent out to their entire address book. It was very smart, clever, and funny... even going so far as to include photographic evidence to refute the crazy accusations. As if that wasn't enough, there was a list of people with phone numbers so that anybody who didn't believe them could call witnesses who were actually there to refute the stuff people were saying.

But the best part was at the very end...

"Even though this rumor turned out to be false, I'm sure everything else that's being said about me is 100% true."

But of course.

I'm sure it's the same for everybody.