Missing Snail Mail

After returning from a week-long conference I decided to take off Friday and Monday before returning to work. It took me all day Friday to get the cats settled back home after a week with my parents, clean the apartment, do laundry, clean the apartment, etc. Yesterday I worked from home all day and started to catch up on all of the back-logged emails I missed after a week of spotty wireless and no time to check email. Today I literally spent the ENTIRE DAY on email. I am at the point where at times I have practically given up on personal email in order to keep up with work email, though I still have two personal accounts, only one of which I end up checking more than once a month. I remember once also having an inbox of messages to check when I was still on social media nearly two years ago.

Sadly, I only vaguely remember when I still enjoyed reading through emails, before keeping up with them became such a daunting task. I do still remember the excitement of reading a new email back when emails took days to transmit from one part of the country to another shortly after email was invented. But I do still remember as if it was just yesterday how it felt to routinely receive snail mail letters from friends across the country or from other countries. Email and other methods of digital communication is just not the same. At least when I lived in the forest a few friends regularly wrote to me the only way they could - via good old fashioned snail mail letters. This was my only communication with the outside world at times for many months. Now I feel old, but sometimes the ways of the past were simply better (in my humble opinion), of course only in hindsight.