Looking Backward, Looking Forward

4/13/11

So over the weekend I finally bought an iPhone and have really taken a liking to it over the old Blackberry I used ever since my arrival in LA. Funny side-note: when I first asked my now-girlfriend for her phone number whilst fishing out my phone, her apparent thought was, “Wow, who under 40 still uses a blackberry?” One major difference between the two smartphones is that Blackberry only receives new emails from the moment you tie an account to it; iPhone goes and gets all your old emails in your inbox.

Now, I’m not terribly anal about these sort of things, but several of my more tech-y friends (gf included) have long balked at my inbox filled with 2000+ emails. Most are read, don’t get confused, its just, I read them and then don’t delete them. When confronted about why I don’t ‘Archive’ them, I was simply bewildered as to how an archive is any different than my inbox. To me, they are the same. I guess some use the contents of their inbox to tell them what they have and haven’t checked/responded to, but I figure that out well enough without needing to archive everything. I did this same thing when I played WoW, using the in-game mail box as a sort of second bank, mailing things to an alt and letting them slowly bounce back to me and sit in the ol’ inbox.

Well now that my iPhone was freaking out about the 100+ emails I had unread in my various accounts, I decided to go in and archive them all. In doing so, I was faced with a sort of history of the past. My gmail account goes back to my last 2 years of undergrad, 2008 and forward, and that was kind of cute to be confronted with emails about old projects with classmates now already forgotten and left behind and kind of sad to be confronted with a few messy relationships now long over. The yahoo account proved even stranger, as I had gotten it back in 2003 and had emails from then to prove it. Heck, I had emails from “The Marshall University Facebook” which had a school colors banner, the words ‘the facebook’ in white on Kelly green.

This combined with my attempts to consolidate my digital life have forced me to reflect on what a different person I feel like now than I did then. I feel like if I were to meet the Marshall of 2003, I wouldn’t know him. Some people say how ‘I’ve always been me’ and I just never really feel that way. I mean sure, there are parts of my life that I look back upon fondly or maybe a bit enviously, but its like, I remember that part of my life as though I were not in it. Like I have dissociative disorder, but only for my memories.

As if to coincide with this slogging through the past, today I was invited to a new Facebook group by my highschool creative writing teacher. I went to a school with a special arts program called SCAPA (School for Creative And Performing Arts) and there I majored in theatre and creative writing. The SCAPA kids were like most arty, brooding teens: we hung together in packs, didn’t associate with many non-SCAPA types, and took ourselves and our chosen artform way too seriously. The group was a collective of all the students from the creative writing division which the professor could find, and so here I am transported back to high school, with the whole cast of characters, a completely different world than the one I am in now. I don’t know if I would be recognized by any of these people, I don’t know if I’d recognize myself. I sift through writings from junior year, senior year, and I try to remember what it was like writing them, how did I come up with some of this stuff, did I really get up in front of a coffee house of strangers to ‘perform’ this?

I’m sure I will post some of ‘this stuff’ at some point on here. Was just talking with the girlfriend and asking her ‘mom technical support’ questions like “How did you get your domain for your website?” because I am some kind of retarded old man who has tricked himself and the world into believing he is 27. Maybe soon this link [link removed, thanks Meredith for explaining yet again how the intertubes work ;) ] will work and I will really have one of those self-indulgent, fill-up-cyberspace-with-me style pages that everyone else has. Gotta keep up with them joneses.