Compare and Despair

Was just checking my email - finally - and got one of those update letters that sounds like some sort of braggadocious "I'm almost as awesome as Mother Teresa" type deals:

"We're saving the souls of shop-a-holic desperate housewives;
We're rescuing all the dudes living in vans down by the river;
We're hand-quilting baby blankets made from used training pants and burlap coffee sacks and sending them to naked heathens in the tropics;
We're leaving tracts about Jesus in every public bathroom in our city;
In short, we are the wonder-children of our town and our mom has the bumper sticker to prove it!

Well, I am not doing any of that stuff but I did, in my shallow way, add red and blue streaks to my hair. I wonder if that counts as doing a good deed so that my stylist could afford Christmas presents? But seriously, I got depressed for a minute reading the "top 10 good deeds list" in that email. You know how it is - you start thinking that you've got to be a superstar too - next thing you know, you're face-down in a vat of red wine singing UB40 songs.

Then I came to my senses and thought, "Feeling like an inadequate failure in comparison to those guys is stupid. Now I'm going to go look at cupcake blogs and feel happy: Yay! Cupcakes!! so there."

I might even make some tomorrow and give a couple to a dude who lives in a van down by the river. Maybe I should throw in a bobble-head Jesus for his dashboard and one of those "Christian" t-shirts, like the orange one that says, "Jesus' Pieces".

All I know is that if my cupcakes don't turn out like the pictures in my cookbook I am really going to be pissed.