“Find an email from a flame as old as Ben the Longshoreman, here.”
I am freakishly obsessed with email. Dear reader, you’ve gotten to know me enough in our sweet, sweet time together to understand that when I say I’m obsessed with something, I do not exaggerate. In high school, my friend Cathy and I would stuff notes into each other’s lockers every day, multiple times a day, just to get through the tedium of each period, or “mod,” short for “module,” as they were called (causing every student to walk around with this odd 1960’s beatnik-esque element in our vocabularies. Cool, baby; it’s lunch!) Now I have a number of correspondences that do the same for me, only I don’t have to wait till the end of anything official to check for new messages. Which is so, so bad.

Like any addict, I’ve grown to feel both fondness and irritation for all that marks the familiar path to “Hello” from a good friend who is not trapped at my workplace. After I type in the url, there’s that same old friendly banner, yes, hullo; and also, those same fricking irritating photos on the sign-in screen. See, about six months ago, Yahoo finished up some focus group nonsense or something that caused it to decide it was time to get rid of the Lands End model who had bid greeting to all its users for a while, there. Well, she did look like she fell slightly above the 18-36 range, so, onward-!, to a group of (mostly) younger lookin’ folks, all hanging out together during one happy day at the beach on the side of the information superhighway.

Now a visit to mail dot yeehoo dot com calls up one of six or seven photos, featuring the same group of skinny, fresh-scrubbed youngins—and one salty old captain—making merry by the seaside. We’ve moved from Lands End to Banana fricking Republic. And I can’t. Stand it. Stand them: I’ve come to take my dislike for this attempt to make my email brand more sophisticated, out on oh, this woman gazing wistfully out on the ocean with the perfect zen of someone who knows the convenience of accessing her account from any library in the land, and on this one holding a giant beach-ball in front of her face, so that all you can see are her luscious, luscious…ice cream cones. No. Not really ice cream cones.

I’ve had this email account for nearly seven years now, and when I first registered, this company was about as slick as the Sunday comics. Suddenly, I feel…targeted. Advertised to. Like some focus…something. I don’t know. It’s weird. And it bums me out that no one can scrawl graffiti on websites. Because I wish someone would. Completely theoretically, of course.

Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally,
for I’ve been absent. I know. But really, what’s been going on in la vida mia is not a glut of emailification. Instead, it’s been some seriously hot nose-on-grindstone action for me: at work and moreover, preparing for MFA program application. Every second I’m not at work, I’m working on my writing samples or my statement of purpose or figuring out how many transcripts each of these schools wants or sending bags of fancy coffee to the nice, nice folks writing recommendations for me or studying ALGEBRA for the GRE. Actually, I didn’t study that much Algebra, since what I’m lookin’ to return to school for is writing, not the quadratic equation. So I studied just enough to giggle at my complete ineptitude.

So the deadline looms now, for school #1, a place I’d really like to go. Oh, how it looms. My writing prof from last spring looked over the only writing sample I haven’t finished—I won’t bore you with details, but it’s an essay. Anyway, she returned it to me today with the advice “to put it away for a few days,” before tearing into it once again, to which I felt like screaming, “But there’s no tiiiiime!” Except I couldn’t, really. Because she’d written this in a note, which she’d stuck in her mailbox along with my critique. I think she planned it that way on purpose. But she’s right. I’ve been eyeball to eyeball with the essay’s narrator for a couple weeks now, and I can’t even tell who’s seeing what, anymore. To coin a really bad turn of phrase. But I’m allowed to do that here. Ha and HAW.

And so, yeah, that’s the real reason for this rambling, Mr. Henshaw. I just had to write something else tonight, something I could write while not really thinking, without proofreading even once, with Wolf Parade at full blast through headphones: the surest route to deafness. I really should make the most of this night of Not Really Working: Watch this Harry Potter movie my coworker lent me three months ago. Eat a few gummy pounds of red licorice, enough the glue my jaws together, and my digestive tract, too. Turn the heat up to a money-bleeding extreme and take a shower with the bathroom door open, rock and roll blaring. Shave my legs. Sigh.

Anyhoo, thought I’d pop in and see how you’re doing, Mr. H. Drop me an email, why don’t ya?