With all the technologies these days for sharing even short amounts of information with lots of people at once (Facebook, MySpace, mass texting, BCC emails, Twitter, blogs, comments, profiles, chats, etc, etc), sometimes when I write an email to just one friend, I get a weird feeling like I'm either going behind everyone else's back, or sharing top secret information.
Can you even remember the last time you received a handwritten letter at your physical mailing address from a friend? I still have my last one – it was after a summer camp just before I started freshman year of high school (1995). Is it a coincidence that I started drinking the same year I stopped writing letters? Because if there's a correlation, it's still holding up to this day.
I also saved a bunch of written stuff at the beginning of college, including scraps of paper I wrote ideas for the original issues of Points in Case on. Some of those ideas never made it, but I've broken open the file and there's nothing you can do about it now:
Have you ever realized how every day up until a rental movie is due, you're in a panic to get it in on time, but as soon as you miss the due date, you completely stop caring? It'll sit in your car for weeks after that, getting stepped on and racking up additional late fees until someone finally says, "Taxi Driver? You hadn't seen that before??" [Ahh, late fees…]
During finals I felt like I was in one of those Suzanne Somers commercials: "Hi, this is Court. Court is subjected daily to unsanitary living conditions and long hours of hard labor with only a meal a day, if he's lucky. With your help, Court could be given proper medical attention and a decent education. Please, won't you call now and sponsor Court? If you do, he will send you progress reports every month, detailing how he blows off reading assignments for wild nights of binge drinking during the semester, only to have finals bite him in the ass yet again. But you'll feel good knowing that you have helped support a child's drinking habit. Doesn't Court deserve a seventh chance? Please, don't delay – call now and pledge as little as $2000/month to cover his expenses. He pledged as a freshman, isn't it your turn?"
Guys, have you ever had to pick between undershirts in your dresser during the week, and instinctively set aside your "favorite undershirt" for the weekend? You know, the Hanes one with the still-not-totally-stretched-out collar and hardly any pit stains on it?
Have you ever said "What?" to someone even when you know what they just said? But by the time you realize you know what they said, they're already repeating it while you're reprocessing it, and then you lose track again, so you have to interrupt them from re-explaining because you're already re-explaining it to yourself in your head? But then you realize that even though you know the words they said you still don't understand what they meant, so you have to ask them to clarify and then they're not sure if you mean the semantics of it or the actual context?
Wait, what?