One nice thing about a vacation was that I got away from my email. I don’t have a smartphone. Checking my email means firing up my computer and clicking on my firefox icon. (God, it feels old-school just writing about it.)
The distance, however, gave me a little clarity. For this moment in my life, email has too much importance. It plays too many roles. It’s my form of communication for work. It’s my form of communication for staying in touch with my friends - and, admittedly, I have far too few friends within driving distance at the moment. The people who play big roles in my life are all very far away. (A dream, within the next year, is to have friends in proximity. It should be easy! It is not.) And I have gotten myself in that worst sort of email pickle, the email equivalent to trying to date a dude who is sort of interested and then decides to give you the slow fade, without rejecting you outright or telling you what’s going on. The dude that disappears. It’s all a recipe to stare at the gmail inbox, hoping it will tick forward to one, so that you have that very special email in your hands and can move on with your life.
That’s no way to live! So, from now on, time to wean myself off in the smallest of ways: 30 days of checking email at noon and four and that’s it. Replying right away. When it comes to friends, I want to make more use of things like Skype, for now.
Hopefully, things should be improved. Nobody should be chained to their computer and email in the summer. That’s just not healthy.