Am I Too “Stupid” To Even Recognize Hate Mail?

Wait, before you answer that question, you need to help me out on this.

Recently, I received an e-mail that I think is hate mail. Can’t really be sure, though, which is why I need my faithful readers to lend a hand. Here’s the content of the e-mail I received, in its entirety (bold and italics mine):

You are so stupid! Why don’t you stop writing about stupid things and write about stuff that’s not stupid!

Yup, that’s it. Nothing else. Not even a subject line. The e-mail address (which I won’t post here), appears to be legit and the IP address it came from is also legit–it appears to be where this person works. I don’t recognize the person’s name and I have never had any dealings with the company from which the e-mail appears to have originated. All that, plus the fact that the e-mail mentions my “writing about stupid things”, which I have been known to do from time to time (mainly because I like to), would all seem to point to it being legit.

But seriously, who writes like that? It sorts of reeks of something one of my friends would do just to mess with me. And if the e-mail is legit, they obviously wanted to anger me or get a rise out of me. On both accounts, they failed. To be honest, even if it’s not real, the e-mail made my day. I must have read it at least 20 times the very day I got it, and it got funnier each time!

If this thing really is legit, the e-mail arrived the day after I posted my article on Gore Orphanage. Guess that article could have made a few people mad, but I don’t think anything in it was stupid, per se. The other  popular articles the day the e-mail showed up were The Day Batman Stood My Daughter Up and the post about People.com totally blanking on their choice for an “iconic ghost” to represent the state of Ohio. Controversial stuff, huh? Oh yeah, and as always, most of the Tokoloshe articles were hot that day, too. But everybody knows there’s nothing stupid about the Tokoloshe.

Real or not, I do have a few bones to pick with the author. First off, I don’t think they used the word “stupid” enough. I think they should have opened the e-mail with the salutation “Dear Stupid.” That would have freed them from only being able to use “stupid” as an adjective. And by using the capital “S”, they could have made “Stupid” a proper noun, which would have made it possible to re-write each sentence as if there were addressing me directly, thereby adding an additional “stupid” to the end of each sentence: “You’re so stupid, Stupid.”

So what do you guys think? Is this legit hate mail or just someone messing with me? Feel free to let me know in the Comments section, below.

In the meantime, I’ll be over here, pondering whether or not I should start selling the following shirts at my presentations and posing for pictures next to anyone who buys one: