One of the surreal things about being sick for three days and, more importantly, letting myself be sick for those three days — by which I mean, not trying to just keep my head down and pretend that everything is normal even though it’s clearly untrue, as I have developed the unfortunate tendency to do, because being a workaholic is a bad thing — was coming back to everything afterwards and seeing just how many fucking emails had accumulated in my absence. We’re talking hundreds, easily.
It goes without saying, I suspect, that the vast majority of them weren’t something I necessarily needed nor wanted to read. It’s a weird fluke of my job that I get added to so many mailing lists and promotional mailings in addition to things that I might, at some point, have intentionally signed on for only to forget doing so, that I get upwards of 10 emails per hour during daylight hours as a baseline; that I’ve got work email and personal email addresses also means that I get a lot of these mailings and promo emails multiple times even before they get sent to the same address multiple times — occasionally, with “FWD” or “RE” added to the subject line, in case either tricks me into opening them — just to complicate matters.
I think, sometimes, about the first time I got internet access, back when I was in art school and they set one up for each of the students. It was a nearly-impossible-to-remember address, based around our student metriculation numbers, so it’s not like we’d have been able to easily share it with anyone even if we knew anyone else besides friends we saw everyday anyway with emails of their own. Nonetheless, we’d check our email inboxes every day, once a day or so, sitting there through the soundtrack of dial-up internet — we had to log-in and dial-up each session as individual students — and then the slow load of Outlook or whatever we were using at the time.
Each time, we’d wait however long it took, excited and expectant that something would have happened, that some message would be waiting there. And each time, we’d be wrong. What a world, to go from that to a day where I delete more than three hundred messages without a thought, confident that none of them were written by people who are even fully aware of who I actually am.
