Catch Up on my E-Mail

Still working at this, little by little. I have a so-close-to-being-finished letter to my ex-boyfriend that I am going to finish and send TODAY. It’s a bit difficult to write to him since I mostly “know” him through his weblog now, and the persona he projects through his blog is quite different from the persona he projects through e-mail and in person. Keeping an actual e-mail dialogue going with him reminds me that he’s not the (self-proclaimed!) asshole that he is on his blog.

After that – yikes! I have a couple people I need to write to who haven’t heard from me in ages. These are “good friends”—at least, they should be, but thanks to me, they may not be anymore. I don’t know how to apologize enough to make it even vaguely acceptable that I haven’t written for so long.

It occurred to me the other day that I’ve been writing e-mail for eleven years now, and I still haven’t gotten it right.

I wrote a long-overdue e-mail to a good friend of mine—my former roommate from Japan who’s now traveling across China. She’s got enough politeness in her to pop into libraries and Internet cafes and send periodic updates of her travels to all of her friends. I should have the decency to write her back once in a while, particularly since I have the luxuries of time and a computer keyboard without any unfamiliar characters. So I wrote her and finally told her how much I’d been enjoying her travelogue and updated her on these last, oh, seven months of my life. Yikes.

And, of course, it was painless, and only took thirty minutes. Self, remember this, and repeat it: your friends may be annoyed at you for not writing often enough, but they’ll be happy to hear from you when you do write. Just remember that every day you spend not keeping in touch with people is another day that those people have an excuse to be annoyed with you.

Though this didn’t do anything toward my “spend less time fooling around on the Net and more time actually working” goal, I spent about 10 minutes at work today sifting through my Yahoo inbox and weeding out messages that didn’t need responses: old LJ comment e-mails, mass e-mails from various charitable oragnizations, things I’d responded to three years ago but never deleted or sorted into a folder, et cetera. Sure, I didn’t actually answer any e-mail, but I felt a lot more motivated to do so, now that my in-box is down from 135 to 80-something. And a lot of those are old, too. I need to do some more sifting and just figure out if I’m actually going to respond to a letter sent to me in October 2003. Yeah.

Goal for this week: write 3 e-mails to friends who probably think I’ve died.

I am really in the gutter with this goal. I just checked my sent mail folder in my Yahoo account and discovered that the number of e-mails I’ve sent from that account this year is less than 20. And several of those were to Adam, and since we live in the same house, those don’t count. I’ve probably sent a few more e-mails from my Gmail acccount, but I know (and Adam knows, and my friends know, and the E-Mail Gods know) that I haven’t sent (or written) any of the important ones. And, of course, with every passing day, it gets harder and harder to say, “Sorry I haven’t written in so long!”

My birthday’s on Thursday. I’m not expecting many happy birthday e-mails and e-cards because I’ve been so crappy about doing the same for other people. However, I think I owe it to myself to send good wishes out to other people on that day.

Despite using the Internet as my primary procrastination tool when I was writing a massive curriculum development project throughout December and January, I managed to e-mail friends exactly ZERO times. If I’d collected all the time I’d spent looking up stuff on Wikipedia and reading Livejournal communities, I would have had more than enough time to write to everyone. But, as I can’t go back and change that (and, really, I wouldn’t want to, because that would mean redoing the project, too), I just have to go forward. I wrote one friend yesterday afternoon. I’ll write someone else this evening after dinner. And maybe after a week or so, I’ll be into the swing of this enough to be able to write (gasp!) TWO people a day.

Latest e-mail progress:

79 bits and pieces o’ mail in my Yahoo inbox, and 17 in my Gmail inbox (though the new ones are just work things that I need to save. Nothing new to reply to.)

The Gmail style, with its conversation threads, doesn’t beg for long replies, but instead shows each particular e-mail as what it really is: a small part of a longer electronic “talk.” I’ve kept up with my work mail really well using Gmail; I should shuttle some of my friends’ e-mails over there as well. Maybe doing that will make me realize that I don’t have to fill screens and screens of text with every letter I write.

Having a concrete deadline for e-mails makes things easier, too. Work is going to get crazy starting tomorrow when I leave for Baby’s First Business Trip. I’m forcing myself to finish up some more of the important e-mails tonight instead of gambling on having enough time to write them during the two weeks of evaluations in NJ.

If I ever accomplish this one, it’ll put an end to nearly ten years of frustration. I first got an e-mail address (with long-departed Prodigy) in 1995. Within a year, I was carrying a load of unanswered letters in my e-mail box, and a load of unrealistic expectations in my head. I wanted to make my letters long and thoughtful, as though they were handwritten pen-pal letters of the past. But being online connects you to so many people that it becomes impossible to write something floridly long-winded to each of them.

I have dropped so many correspondences over the years with people I wish I could have gotten to know better. But, then again, if I had kept up a correspondence with each one of those people, I’d never have had time to do anything else. I wasn’t much into the Livejournal system of online socialization at first, but now, I’m damned glad that I can keep up with a bunch of my online friends just through comments and journal entries instead of through e-mail.

Still, the e-mail bugs me. Adam always says he’s glad my Prodigy account finally kicked the bucket, because it was a constant thorn in my side. It was—there was no way I was ever going to catch up with that account, and I let old, old, OLD letters continue to sit there and bother me as I imagined that maybe ONE day I’d write back to all those people and apologize for being two or three years late on replying to them. Now I just have my Yahoo account and my Gmail account. Yahoo’s used for personal correspondence and some work stuff. Gmail’s for freelance writing stuff, and it’s the address I give to my students. The Yahoo account is the one that will look like the Prodigy account in a few years if I don’t do something about it. Already it holds a lot of GUILT mail from people who wrote me back in ‘03 and ‘04, and whom I never got back to. What do I do about those people? Some of them are online buddies, but some of them are real-life friends who I just haven’t seen in a while.

I have to get it through my head (and subsequently to my typing fingers) that not everybody needs a drawn-out response. In a case where I might unnecessarily break off a friendship just because I can’t reply to e-mail on time, a simple “hey, how’s it going?” really is better than nothing.

Anyway: 85 e-mails left in the Yahoo account.
15 in Gmail.