Feb 26, 2009

Poladroidoscopy

I completely made that word up. It doesn't even remotely make sense, I just like the sound of it.

I must preface this somewhat long post by saying there is no real moral to this tale. The short form is I just read an email and was thoroughly, utterly and completely flabbergasted that it could have come from me.

If anyone has Yahoo mail, you might have noticed for the last year and a half they've been soft-selling their "new" version of mail, which is essentially a java Outlook clone instead of the typical Yahoo template (which is a lot more like gmail).

I finally clicked on it today out of curiosity (read: boredom) and was fiddling around when I realized I had over 15,000 emails in that account. And I have two email accounts! Gradually I'm finding myself phasing out the Yahoo one and simply using Gmail for everything. Ironically, of course, Gmail has a theoretical storage limit while Yahoo does not, which was my original rationale for getting a Gmail account for online registrations and all the resulting spam.

Without getting too nerdy, I will just say that it's not often we can tangibly demarcate how our communication and human interactions have shifted from an off to online paradigm. Reading emails from three years ago is one of them. And I even recall deleting thousands of emails from that account some time ago, so I could have had more... but for some reason I got rid of them. I honestly cannot remember why, but it was vaguely practical. Faster loading times perhaps? But I digress.

My point being how silly the notion would have been 25 years ago that we could click a button and bring back a conversation from a completely forgotten era. And reliving a single conversation is like being able to essentially relive a moment in time. The same feelings come back, except now we have hindsight, which in some cases is not so much 20/20, but rather the difference between having eyes and not.

"Did I really say that?" Was a thought I often found myself uttering mentally. Sometimes, but thankfully rarely, punctuated with a "Damn. That's embarrassing."

I've sent many emails I regret. This is the real point of this post.

One would hope as one grows older and wiser, these unfortunate emails become increasingly rare.

I feel ashamed, really, still, from some of those emails. I can't even describe it.

I need to shower.

3 comments:

Cammie said...

really, you know now we just want to see these emails.

Vivian Mau said...

i totally know what you mean. not that your emails were embarrassing, because they never were, except maybe one or two but let's not get fickle (just kidding!) i saved a lot of my emails and i cant even bear to read them because some of my loser traits are so transparent! CRINGE!

that album isn't available to download..boo :(

are you talking about music week? i just made the connection today when my friend was asking me about it. i'd love to go with you, but...no money.

boo again.

Simon said...

Hmm... well, I don't think I'd describe silly words as indicative of loser traits. That's just harsh, haha