On Email

I promised I'd write. I think everyone in the yearbook signing frenzy does. And it wasn't just in true good friends’ books that I pledged to communicate faithfully, but it also happened to those strange connections like "shared a good laugh backstage during a musical," or "sat next to in AP Bio," and most often "had a crush but really didn't do much about it" people’s yearbooks that my ink touched. Graduations (and their lesser photocopied cousins, Reunions) are the wakes of adolescence complete with eulogies for the victims, a few tunes of nostalgia for the audience, and snacks afterwards for everyone. Though it is a time to say goodbye, most are unwilling in the way that we chant encore at the end of a concert in the hope that just maybe there could be one more song, one last chord. And so we promise we will write.

The letting go of this notion happens weeks or months later when perhaps new friends push out old memories or the hobgoblins of everyday life catch up with us. We get too busy to send a simple note. I didn’t write much for years after high school. This wasn’t entirely unexpected. I have at best an improvisational sense of grammar and am medically certified at skipping words. To write was to be afraid of exposing these inadequacies. As a math and computer science major most of my words were variable names.

At the fifth reunion I promised I write though I was unaware of how hard grad school was going to be. The conversations at fifth reunions are about how you can’t believe you are drinking with the faculty on the Mesa (the ones for the tenth are about marriage, and the fifteenth are about kids). Writing was a drunken promise, and these are seldom kept.

It was in the after moments of the tenth reunion when a small group of us were at a diner in Carpentaria, and as we lingered over pancakes and that the concept that one of our classmates came back with a sex change I promised once again that I would write. Technology had changed to the point that most of us were excited by having email accounts (it was early enough that we didn’t know that we would spend a good portion of our careers going through our in-boxes). Instead of hand stamping envelopes we could to string a few names together separated by semicolons and click send. The effort level to correspond had been lowered; it was possible to be a lazy writer.

And the writing became lazier too. Full sentences became optional as did capitalization and spelling. Exclamation points grew like weeds. In this grammatical haze, I felt that my own insufficiencies weren’t that much different than everyone else’s, and I did something quite unprecedented.

I wrote.

The first few emails about an improv class were clumsy and my most recent about my water heater still missed words, but over the last ten years I have sent every few months to a handful of friends and other assorted random people from Cate pieces about life. I believe that everyone should have an adventure every couple of months. Each of us has a good story about what happened last week. Looking back at mine there were probably a little too many about exercise and not enough pieces about how exactly I did something about the crushes, but a past can’t be edited. It can be forgotten though.

Writing is our civilization’s memory. It is our notes to our future selves. It fills the need to share what we feel is important.

Write.

Be mindful of the gatekeepers to the written world. I don’t want to minimize the importance of grammar. Our current president has shown the danger that comes from opaque syntax (I wonder if he accidentally spellchecked Iraq into Iran). Clarity matters. Bad grammar deflects the reader from the piece’s trail of logic and minimizes the acceptance of an argument.

But I also believe that sometimes you need to chuck whatever poorly constructed ideas you have out into the world. Writing is about hitting the send key and then dealing with the consequences. (Blogging is about hitting the save key and hoping someone browses). Sometimes these half formed thoughts collide with someone else half formed ideas, and they fuse together briefly before decaying like uranium in a reactor or the Police getting back together for a reunion tour. Sometimes people are actually helpful with giving you grammar suggestions, though sometimes you get comments back that you should use fewer metaphors in business communications.

Write.

It might be only ever so often. It might be only about a field near your house (this worked well for Robert Frost). It might offend (and if counter argument seems reasonable then write it again). It might be ignored. But write and hit send anyway.

Society has always had a class of professional writers. They used be called scribes, then later monks, and finally communication specialists. Steal their techniques but graft on your own thoughts. There will always be the need for the professionals because they are so much more fun to read, but in the last decade the internet has created a world where amateurs can contribute. Take advantage of this but play nicely.

Write.

I promise I will.