EMAIL, GOAT MEAT, & FIREARMS

I am finally caught up on the email. While I was traveling it backed up like my digestive system at the all-you-can-eat goat meat buffet at the Best Western Kabul. Alright, so there was no goat meat buffet in Kabul. No Best Western, either. But there was a buffet, actually, at the Serena Hotel, though I don’t think the meat was from a goat. I don’t know what sort of meat it was. But I ate it because everyone warned me not to eat the vegetable-looking stuff or the bowl of cold soup because of the water and I had to eat something so the meat-like substance won by default.

But I digress. I was thinking about all the email I had to sort through when I got home. Took me more than a week to clean out the inbox. The very occasional computer access I had overseas did not give me enough time to even think about going through the mail and I didn’t want to leave any of it unanswered if I could help it. I got some really encouraging notes from people I now feel connected to, even though we’ve never actually met.

Speaking of email… Take a second and go to your email inbox and see how many you have in there. I’ll wait here.

Well?

I was just using my wife’s computer a little while ago and in her inbox in Outlook there are 343 messages. 343. I can’t stop thinking about it. We have completely different approaches to dealing with email. For me, email in the inbox represents work to be done. As long as the mail is in there, I feel I’m not done working. I know I can rest only once the inbox is empty. A bunch of email in the inbox is as annoying to me as someone parked in my driveway honking their horn to get my attention. My wife, on the other hand, seems unaffected by this sort of thing. She treats the inbox like other people treat the junk drawer in the desk. Every so often she rummages through there to see what she can find, and occasionally she actually starts to clean it out, moving half a-dozen out of there every few days. At the same time, 30 or 40 more arrive. She’s got a few thousand in the deleted folder. Doesn’t bother her at all. I’m never going to use her computer again.

My son, Brandon, emailed me the other day asking if I would ship a shotgun to him because he has a friend at his college whose family owns some land nearby where they all want to go and shoot trap. He wrote, “Dad, could you ship my shotgun to me?” It was only after I replied yes and logged off that I remembered the shotgun is not his shotgun. It is my shotgun. I never use it, but it is my shotgun. It’s some kind of fancy Italian model. He has some other kind of gun that has gone untouched in the storage room for the past 6 years. Its not the sort of gun one uses to shoot trap. Neither of us are hunters so I’m not even sure why we have the guns. I’ve been trying to figure out how to write him back or call him and tell him the shotgun is not his, and now that he’s reminded me that we have one in the storage room I’m thinking of selling it and using the money for something we actually need. I feel guilty because he obviously thinks it is his and I didn’t correct him on that point when I had the chance.

Had my wife received that email, it might have gotten lost among the hundreds of other emails in her inbox and that would have been the end of it. But there it is, in my inbox, honking its obnoxious little horn.

I wonder if Brandon reads dad’s blog?