The other day, I was going through some of my e-mail archives. I’m something of a digital pack rat and I tend to save e-mails that I think I might want to read again someday. My archive goes back to 1998 (it would go back further, but I seem to remember some kind of system crash that caused me to lose a bunch of older messages) and going through it has evoked a mixture of nostalgia and embarrassment. There are the tentative e-mail exchanges with potential employers while I was still a law student, the back-and-forth between my brother and I as we planned for a trip to Los Angeles, the silly little newsgroup flame wars I got into as a way of proving how intelligent and clever I was, the messages from the med student on whom I had a galaxy-sized crush (and my carefully composed and wincingly overearnest replies), the random correspondence with friends and family as we made plans for a dinner or a weekend visit or a marathon evening of gaming on my computer, the messages from friends and colleagues I haven’t seen or thought of in years.
When I’m gone, I like to think that my e-mail archive will be the best available record as to what kind of person I was. It does a pretty good job of recounting the transitory ephemera of my adult life, as well as illustrating the more immutable passions and eccentricities that made me…well, me. Maybe some distant descendant will collect all of this crap and make a school report out of it or something.
