"Free Marissa" is the new "Donna Martin Graduates"

You've got to feel bad if you're a coach for some team sport and you coached some ragtag group of misfits/oucasts/underdogs to victory, and your life hasn't been made into an inpsirational movie. Do these not-quite-inspirational coaches feel bad when they see their contemporaries raking in the feel-good sports movie dough?

Yes. Yes, they do.

The solution? Jared. You know, the Subway guy who makes a living standing next to his old pants. I've been involuntarily signed up for Jared's twice-daily inspirational phone calls, and lemme tell ya, after a long day at school, there are few things more uplifting than hearing:

Hi, this is Jared. You can add a little incentive to your goal by playing Subway Restaurants' Fresh Resolutions Instant Win Game, with hundreds of prizes awarded daily when you try one of their eight delicious subs with six grams of fat or less. These are the same subs that I ate when I lost 245 pounds. My big prize? Better health and confidence. That's something everyone can win.

Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon who has yet to learn the true meaning of Christmas, but that message isn't really inspirational. (And that second sentence is unwieldy, but that's another matter.) What'd be inspirational: a Million Little Pieces-like story from Jared's past, something along the lines of "One night I ate two dozen Twinkies and washed it down with turkey gravy. There was a lump in the gravy and I started choking, and eventually blacked out. I woke up hours later, covered in gravy and bile. I think the weight of my body falling forward dislodged the gravy lump, and then my stomach empited its contents all over my "Winning in the fight against anorexia" t-shirt. Thankfully I had another box of Twinkies on hand, so I sopped up the discharged gravy with a few of those heavenly golden snack-cakes. Who says rock bottom can't be delicious?"

You know, it occurs to me that while I can't remember Jared's last name, I instantly know who we're talking about when the name "Jared" comes up. He's like Cher, except he's had his boobs reduced, not enlarged.