2/6/2011 - sitting omnisciently in the present. . .

I had lunch with my friend Paul on Friday who said that on January 1st, 2012, I will have quite the impressive document on my hands if I carry this blog to fruition.  He likened it to a postcard from every single day of this year, sent to my future self so I can see what my thought processes were each day and remember how it was all spent.

 

Little does he know, I already have a way of doing this, and on a much grander scale. The following paragraphs are an account of my neuroses, or at least a small sliver of them.  Please reserve judgement. 

 

Sometimes, when I get bored, I go through past e-mails.  Not just from days before, or even weeks before.  I would open up my Gmail account, click on the "Show search options" tab, and start going through year by year.  Today, for example, I would start with e-mails that were written or received within one day of 2/6/2010, then 2/6/2009, and so on and so on until I get to the first year I started using Gmail.

 

(Kinda scary, right?  Stick with me, please.)

 

Often, they are very benign, "Lunch today?" e-mails, and those I skim through pretty quickly.  Other times, they can be from friends I no longer speak to, by choice or by circumstance, and I laugh at some of them, cringe at others.  I've relived whole conversations, felt like it was just the other day that I had had them.  

 

I find myself compelled to do this archival search every few days, reading through over six years of "On this day. . ." e-mails.

 

Yesterday, I found a copy of Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams in my room.  It has long been one of my favorite books, a philosophical presentation of hypothetical worlds where time operates in different ways than we are used to, asking questions like: what if time ran backwards?  What would time mean if our life spans only one day?  What if we could trap time under a bell jar, and in doing so, freeze a moment we wish to preserve? 

 

In one particular world, people get stuck in time, trapped in their memories.  An ex-footballer is unable to stop eulogizing his glory days from high school; a mother is unable to let go of the memories of her son as a hopeful young boy while he wastes away from drug use in his adulthood.  Lightman writes, "Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone. . .  The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy." 

 

This chapter strikes a nerve as I don't know if I agree with him; reading my old e-mails actually makes me feel more in tune with today than ever.  In a way, they allow me to foretell their future while sitting omnisciently in the present.  

 

Did that even make sense? 

 

For example, I've read exchanges between me and Eddie, rambling about Lost, Kelly Clarkson, and clothes shopping, knowing now that these conversations were completely untainted by the unavoidable fact that in a few days, we would be broken up.  Within a month, I would leave his house for the last time and never go back. 

 

Seeing old e-mails from Steve, who passed away over a year ago, softens the blow of what was then unexpected.  It had seemed that one week, we were on a cruise to Alaska, having dinners weekly while watching our stories, and then, out of the blue (though not really), he was gone. 

 

Reading these e-mails and knowing what I know now makes me feel like I can see myself hurtling towards a future, tumbling headlong into some things that did really knock the wind out of me.  Yet now, it all seems so predetermined, so clinical.  With a healthy cushion between now and then, it also feels so safe.

 

I'm sure it all sounds really strange, and it probably is indicative of some pathology or other.  But after having lunch with Paul and listening to what he said about this blog, I can't wait to wake up on January 1st, 2012, and relive these days all over again. 

 

Sick, I know.