There Goes August

Let’s say you’ve had a particular Yahoo email address since college. You use it to order products, give it to new people you meet, keep in touch with old friends. Now say it randomly stopped forwarding to your daily inbox about two years ago. And you? Failed. To. Notice.

You randomly log in to find thousands of messages waiting for you. Notes from old friends, notices from services, Evite after Evite after Evite.

Suddenly, you can taste the upper part of your esophagus.

Once you begin breathing again, how much time do you spend searching for the “Do Over” button before it’s acceptable to bang your head against the keyboard?

Thinky

We did a bunch of interviews about the future of technology for an upcoming issue. A few interviewees were talking about how data acquisition is changing. We’re coming up with the technology and storage capacity to record the infinite details of everyday interactions. I’m curious about how this will affect mourning. Right now, we can go through photo albums, maybe some journals or home movies, to remember someone we’ve lost. What will happen when we have thousands of hours worth of tapes to review? It seems like it would take much longer to break out of grief when tangible reminders of a loved one are so plentiful.

FLOWER UPDATE

My landlord lives above me and operates a small convenience store nearby. This weekend, his wife stopped me as I was headed out. I think I know who took your flowers, she said. She told me her husband had seen one of our neighbors, an old lady, milling around the area. We walked two doors down, and sure enough, all of my plants were sitting on the lady’s front porch behind a locked gate. Let me type that again: two doors down, on the front porch. “She’s a little bit nuts, so wait until her son is home to ask for your plants back. Fabulous. First my neighbor steals my plants, and then I have to administer the smackdown to some poor senile old lady to get them back. I wasn’t sure if I had the stomach for it. Fortunately, my new roommate ran into the ladyï¿½s son and explained the situation. My flowers were waiting on the front porch when I got home. I like people again. I plan to buy ice cream for everyone.

My cousin Ben makes a discovery about human nature:

“I have a Yahoo! email account and I was poking through my various settings and I ended up on my user profile page. One of the fields that people have the option of setting is Marital Status… Among the many choices was this one: Married but looking.”

2:50 p.m.

I just had my first feature article published. Super sweet.

9:31 p.m.

I like Caterina because she reminds me of a quirky girlfriend I had in highschool named Heather. People thought Heather was weird and pretentious, but she was actually just genuinely surprised when the guy next to her in Driver’s Ed didn’t know what contumacious meant. So, in honor of the girls who don’t dumb themselves down for public consumption, I present these Caterina moments.

12.31.00

My cousin Andrea sent me something: a man
named William Miller surveyed people who were dying. In his
research, he discovered most of them would basically do three things
differently if they had the chance to live their lives over:

1) They’d take more risks,

2) They’d assert themselves more, and

3) They’d have a lot more self-discipline.

3:35 p.m.

1.01.01

Cooking, cleaning, thinking, taking baths, going for walks are things I
hardly have time for anymore, or don’t remember to do. Funny how
these things used to be the stuff of life, but have been replaced by
driving on freeways, conference calls, showers, chinese food delivery
and answering email. Like we want as little contact with our lives as
possible.

8:55 p.m.

1.02.01

Jouke told me that “patatipatata” is French for “yadda yadda yadda.”

2:24 a.m.

12:55 p.m.