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Wednesday, February 6, 2013

The pitfall of correspondence


Pitfall_of_correspondence


My only resolution for 2013 was that I'd try to answer my correspondence more promptly. Several times over the past years, I’ve left letters and emails unanswered for months. Why? I don’t know. I’m lazy. I’m shy. Personal relationships (even via correspondence) take a lot of energy, and by the time I get home from work, I don’t have all that much energy to spare.


But correspondence is traditional. Victorian ladies wrote letters by the bushel. My mother spent time almost every day writing letters; she wrote to her own mother once a week, and fretted if her mother didn’t write her back immediately. “Grandma’s mad at me,” she’d say nervously. She bought little twenty-nine cent pads of letter paper, about six inches by eight inches, and filled at least three or four pages per letter. I have a bundle of letters she wrote to me over the years; I don’t like rereading them – they bring back too many memories of my foolish youth – but I like keeping them. Maybe, after I’m dead, someone else can read them and chuckle over them a bit and then throw them away.


Anyway: so I “resolved” to answer my correspondence. And I had some free time between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Perfect! I answered one or two every day, and soon I was free and clear.


Except that people kept answering me.


Now I remember the problem with correspondence: it never ends. Now I just have a whole bunch of additional emails to write.


What to do?


Keep writing, I guess.


Oh god here comes another one.


Why am I so popular?



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