Bastages! (Stealing words from Baji)
Nothing brings one's (read: my) mood down like logging into an old Yahoo! email account and realizing it was deactivated because I hadn't logged in for four months. Yeah, like your 1GB of space helps me now, Yahoo!, when I've been using GMail as my primary email account for nearly two years.
Thanks a lot for deleting all my emails. BASTIDS!
I can get over losing other people's emails. What I really hate is the thought of losing my own words - all those hundreds of emails I CCed/BCCed to myself at the Yahoo! account in question, using it for nothing else except as an outbox of sorts.
It's equivalent to what I'd feel like if I were to lose my childhood journals or everything I've written on this weblog over the years (which reminds me that I should figure out a way to back up all these posts). Fittingly enough, that email account was exactly like this weblog, if this weblog were updated compulsively: It was a daily "sent mail" chronicle (in some cases, a multiple-times-a-day chronicle) of my life over a period of perhaps the most difficult eighteen or so months I can recall, through a series of emails to selective friends, but mostly to one friend who, at the time, probably knew me better than friends I saw more regularly.
If you'll forgive the self-pity and over-dramatic tone of this post, it's a bit devastating to know that all those emails I sent are irrecoverable, gone forever. It's one thing to live life without documenting it. It's quite another - in my opinion - to put so much time and effort into sharing stories, amusing anecdotes, quick bursts of inspiration, and then have it all disappear one day without having a say in the process.
You could point out, I guess, that if those pieces of writing really mattered all that much, I would have made a conscious effort to check up on them more often. Who doesn't log into an email account for four months? (Truthfully, it had probably been closer to a year.) Well, I don't, when friends move on and lives change and friendships shift and new things take the place of old and life is neither necessarily better or worse, just different in a good way. I don't make it a point to obsessively check in on my writing - I just like knowing it's there. There are three years worth of archives for this weblog, for example. I haven't revisited most of those old posts, but I like knowing they're there.
So, yeah, I hate losing my words. Gotta back up this weblog damn quick.
Thanks a lot for deleting all my emails. BASTIDS!
I can get over losing other people's emails. What I really hate is the thought of losing my own words - all those hundreds of emails I CCed/BCCed to myself at the Yahoo! account in question, using it for nothing else except as an outbox of sorts.
It's equivalent to what I'd feel like if I were to lose my childhood journals or everything I've written on this weblog over the years (which reminds me that I should figure out a way to back up all these posts). Fittingly enough, that email account was exactly like this weblog, if this weblog were updated compulsively: It was a daily "sent mail" chronicle (in some cases, a multiple-times-a-day chronicle) of my life over a period of perhaps the most difficult eighteen or so months I can recall, through a series of emails to selective friends, but mostly to one friend who, at the time, probably knew me better than friends I saw more regularly.
If you'll forgive the self-pity and over-dramatic tone of this post, it's a bit devastating to know that all those emails I sent are irrecoverable, gone forever. It's one thing to live life without documenting it. It's quite another - in my opinion - to put so much time and effort into sharing stories, amusing anecdotes, quick bursts of inspiration, and then have it all disappear one day without having a say in the process.
You could point out, I guess, that if those pieces of writing really mattered all that much, I would have made a conscious effort to check up on them more often. Who doesn't log into an email account for four months? (Truthfully, it had probably been closer to a year.) Well, I don't, when friends move on and lives change and friendships shift and new things take the place of old and life is neither necessarily better or worse, just different in a good way. I don't make it a point to obsessively check in on my writing - I just like knowing it's there. There are three years worth of archives for this weblog, for example. I haven't revisited most of those old posts, but I like knowing they're there.
So, yeah, I hate losing my words. Gotta back up this weblog damn quick.
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