Thursday 29 October 2009

It's in the Mail--Or Was

Nothing like an accident to put things in perspective: I seem to have trashed all the folders on my e-mail program, but, amazingly!, I realize that this is not such a terrible loss.

This morning has been spent in trying to figure out what happened--it appears that because I wasn't deleting messages I let the files get so big that the program caterpillared, as my mother would say. The address book is still there, though, and that is what I really need. Any important document I have saved elsewhere or printed out. What appears to be gone are all those bits and pieces that I've sent or received from friends and family. Bits and pieces of a life. Flotsam and jetsam.

So why was I keeping nearly three years of messages? For posterity? Yes, I realize now that's indeed what I was doing. The idea that some day someone might want to reconstitute my correspondance was lying around back there somewhere, like a self-indulgent, bloated ghost. Bad karma. Serves me right.

1 comment:

Martin Langeland said...

Please don't feel like the lone stranger. Plenty of us (ulp) with far less chance of scoring a biographer are drowning in similar pack rat proclivities. Hell, Even I am bored by some of the letters I wrote as a teen -- yet there they reside, neatly organized, awaiting their chance at the compost bin.
n.b: yes the "some" was on purpose. Self exposure is so-o-o gratifying.
--ml