No one knows anything about Pity Me because anthropologists refuse to study it. I mean, who wants to spend three years studying a bunch of whiners? At grad schools across the country, Pity Me ranks even lower in popularity than its neighboring regions of Nobody Likes Me or Everybody Hates Me. Budding anthropologists even find it more congenial to go native in the wilds of I Guess I’ll Go Eat Worms. Time and again, the scene plays out at our nation’s universities.
“Susan, I’m shipping out tomorrow, perhaps never to return. This may be our last night together. Won’t you give me something to remember you by?”
“Oh Tommy, I wish I could, but it’s just not possible. Where are you being shipped off to?”
“Pity Me.”
“Oh, all right, we can do it, but no photographs.”
The few facts that we have about Pity Me come to us from the reports of explorers who never amounted to much after visiting Pity Me. “Why bother exploring,” they would say, “if we’re all just going to die eventually? In fact, I’ll probably be the first to go, with my luck. I think I’m coming down with something right now, and look at this rash, it’s—” and the people they were talking to would excuse themselves, saying they have a pressing engagement that they entirely forgot about until right that second. So very little was learned about Pity Me through them either.
Sometimes people escape from Pity Me, hiding their origins. When other people ask where they are from, the people from Pity Me usually reply, “Cleveland, Ohio,” not realizing that for most people, this is functionally equivalent to saying, “Pity Me.” With their diminished comprehension of social mores, the people from Pity Me can therefore never understand it when the people they are talking to suddenly, yes, excuse themselves by saying they have a pressing engagement that they entirely forgot about until right that second.
It was a man from Pity Me who devised the first practical room-temperature fusion reactor that could deliver cheap, virtually unlimited energy with no pollution or byproducts. But then he threw the blueprints into the trash, because nothing every works out for him anyway.
People from Pity Me rarely write anything, but when they do it’s usually about Pity Me, because they really want people to understand what it’s like in Pity Me, and why everything is worse there,, and how the universe is conspiring to ruin their lives. In fact, that the best way to tell if someone’s from Pity Me, is if he writes about Pity Me and uses the phrase “Pity Me” a lot. They like to use the phrase “Pity Me” because they hope, futilely, that people will pity me.