Love in the Digital Age

Thank you to Yahoo! Mail for sponsoring this post about staying connected. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.

I’ve had an email for more than half of my life.  I’ve had email since the only way you could get into email was using PINE.

Screen shot courtesy of Slackware/Slackbooks.org.  Sometimes I miss Unix.

I actually fought going to GUI email at one of my first tech jobs because I liked text based email that much.  To say that I love my email may be pushing it.  To say that my email is a huge part of my life is not.  I have no less than four ACTIVE email addresses.  OK, so maybe I’m a little obsessed.  I have email for work, that comes with a blackberry and on call and being available at all hours every 10 weeks or so.  I have email that I got with my married name, before I was even married just to make sure I have it.  I have email for my blog and online identity.  However, my oldest email account, the one that I hold on to tightly and will never let go is the my very first web based email accounts.

You see, way back in the day, around 1997 or so, I got one of the very first Yahoo! Mail accounts.  It is not, a-hem, professional enough for me to have used it for much more than personal correspondence much past my early 20′s, yet I just can’t let it go.  It is one of my oldest nicknames.  It doesn’t have any numbers in it.  Something I still get comments about when I give it out.

If I had to pick my favorite thing about that email account, it wouldn’t be that it is old, and doesn’t have any numbers, or that it is my identity.  It would be that because of that email, I met my husband.  You see, way back in the day, because of Yahoo! Mail, I signed up for their now defunct personals service.  It was free, tied to my email, and well, did I mention free.  It was there that I placed an ad for a replacement for my friend Dave.  Dave had stood me up to see A Prairie Home Companion so that he could see Midnight Oil’s final show in Boston.  One of the people that responded to that ad was A.  He was the only one I actually emailed with.

There is a folder in that email with our first emails.  Emails that I printed out, along with all of our dating service correspondence, before it disappeared into the ether, and gave to him.  When I agreed to write this, I went into the closet and found them.  Then I read through the emails in that folder.  Gosh we we were sappy and silly.

Email is my favorite way to correspond, it really has been since I wasn’t the only person I knew with an email account.  Maybe it is the introvert in me, maybe it is the instant gratification that I like so much.  Maybe it is the fact that I wouldn’t have the life that I do now if it wasn’t for those emails that I was sending almost ten years ago.

Part of this post involves including one of the adorable Yahoo! videos. Which totally made me realize that I am an email purist. I like words way more than I like photos. However, I am a sucker for cool animation.  This also seems fitting considering in addition to the cutesy first emails with A, I found some of our fights via my sent items. Some things never change.