Gratitude
I’m trying to migrate my IT infrastructure to places where it won’t cost much but will be my problem, at least partly so that I don’t feel as much guilt when I see my friend Bill, and perhaps partly just to clean things up. The first of these was this blog, which I moved to Blot because it’s just ridiculous how easy it is to post here. I realized even having to commit and push to a repo is a barrier to writing for me. Which is, on the one hand, silly, but on the other hand, I don’t exactly revise blog posts over and over again trying to make them pass unit tests cleanly.
The second thing I started moving was my mail, which meant I had to go through ~45,000 emails going back to 2003ish. Yeah, 22 years of email. Let me tell you what I have learned.
My hobbies are pretty cyclical. I guess I always knew that, but would you believe my first exchange with Aaron Hsu was in 2008, on the topic of how to write Scheme on Plan 9? Then we were reintroduced in 2017 when I wrote APL Symbol Fetishism, and then I re-reintroduced myself to him a few weeks ago after hearing him talk on Episode 100 of the Array Cast. Funny to me! I doubt he remembered me from before, at least I hope not, because he found that essay pretty irritating and sent me quite a few corrections for it, which have not (as yet) been implemented.
The next thing I learned is that most of my email comes from my mom. Yeah! My mother is my most frequent email correspondent, and it’s not even close. After her it’s my brother. The frequency has tailed off in recent years, but there are months in my old mail that are just one after another from him, with no one else intervening.
I also have a lot of mail from my friends. And I have found quite a few emails apologizing for setting me off, or replying to my apologies for setting them off. I regret that my depression caused a lot of people to be on eggshells around me, that many people were sliced by shrapnel for the crime of trying to be my friend. I became pretty intolerant, and pretty intolerable, and lost a few dear friends to this. I blanket apology is probably insufficient. But in the compressed timeline, I can really see how much of an asshole I have been, to many, many people.
I was reminded of all the major moments of my life since college. Meeting my wife, having my kids, buying and selling houses, moving, deaths of friends and dear ones. Weird to think that email is this important. But it is.
Anyway, I’m grateful to you for reading this, and if you have emailed me in the past, I am even more grateful. Thank you!