Lately I don't have a lot to do during the day. I can't just take off and do something fun because if something does come up at work and I'm not available to take care of it, well, there could be some rather uncomfortable questions about how I spend my time. So I'm semi-tied to my computer between at least nine in the morning to three in the afternoon. When not actually working I generally spend this time doing household chores, reading, watching movies, or playing with the dog. Six hours can be a lot of time to kill when you can't really go any where day after day.
Even still, like most people who have face-to-face social interactions, I have better things to do with my time than wait for email. And yet I sometimes fall prey to the emotional pitfalls of an email conversation.
You check your email in the morning, maybe dash off a message or two to friends. One of your friends happens to be online and responds immediately. You shoot a message back and that's how it starts. You've just gone from exchanging messages to having an interactive conversation. But the reality is that you're trading mail. You're not chatting on the phone. You're not even short-handing a conversation through IM. It's mail. Mail gets put on hold for pretty much everything else in your life. Which is exactly what happens, except you're the one who got put on hold.
One minute you're tapping out a witty retort involving a reference to "Knight's Tale 2: Chaucer's Revenge" as you wonder briefly if IMDB has updated Heath Ledger's profile page yet, and the next you're making sure you didn't lose your Internet connection. You can logically deduce what happened on the other end - life intervened. A job had to be done, a kid needed tending to, bran muffins kicked in, whatever. But that doesn't stop you from hitting refresh again.
Still nothing. You walk away for a bit and tend to your own life, but in the back of your mind you're listening for the tell-tale "ding" of your mail program.
You don't hear it. After a while you go back to your computer; maybe you missed it while you were in the bathroom. Still nothing. To top it off (or maybe it's actually the root cause of this little emotional fiesta) you have nothing really going on on this particular day. Your phone isn't ringing and you have nothing but busy work to do. You know you're being silly but you can't help it. You have sunk into the cycle of "e-pression". Regardless of how you feel about your social "status" on any given day you are suddenly shuttled back to middle school and you're convinced that you just wore the wrong pair of shoes to a new school. No amount of logic can overcome your growing feeling of unpopularity.
So you check your email one more time...
