Inbox Insanity

Inbox Insanity Considering the lack of inactivity on these blogs in the past week or so, I think I speak for us all when I say it was “one of those weeks.” Not that almost every week at MIT isn’t one of those weeks (is that one of the most vaguely negated sentences ever or what?), but this one was more one of those weeks than other weeks. …Yep. So anyway, today I thought we’d go into a part of MIT that is seldom seen by public eyes. You can’t find it on the website, they don’t show you on the tours and you probably won’t even see at CPW. Ladies and gentleman, I’m warning you, this is even a little intimidating for me, and I’ve been a student here for a whole 76 days (but who’s counting?). Today we are venturing into the deep and dark place that is my Inbox. Please keep your hands and arms inside the computer and don’t take candy from strangers (but other free food is okay). We begin at the beginning, when I, just like many other eager freshmen, still believed 24 hours in a day was surely enough time to do everything I wanted, like ice skating club and Origami Club and Marching Band and juggling club and salsa dance and do Model United Nations and Medlinks… Well, I’m sorry to say that that belief was shattered like the sad sad idealistic glass it was pretty quickly. You know you signed up for too many mailing lists when you get four different emails saying “Meeting TONIGHT at 7:00. FREE FOOD.” And these decisions â€" whether to go to the MIT Literary Society Meeting or LucHa â€" are among the many character-defining moments that you will encounter as you grow up. It always comes down to a really, really tough question: “Chinese food, Thai, or Mexican?” Yes â€" these are the perks to being over-committed. You’re never hungry (unless you do something like the DarfurFast, but even then it’s only for a day). Anyway, the point is that I signed up for entirely too many mailing lists and now they’ve all kind of grown on me (like quickly-reproducing mold…) so if I stopped getting my weekly mailing from Braintrust or MIT Beef, I’d be kind of sad, even though I never even read them. I have received 3398 messages since August. Only about half of them get read at all. The other half get quickly scanned between classes, and from those, the lucky ones get put into a folder to be re-read and noted later. (Most don’t). Of course, not all of them are from mailing lists for activities. Some (many) are from dorm mailing lists â€" the topics in those can range from the undependable nature of our printer to announcements for parties to full-blown spam wars complete with the silly people who try to end them by sending out even more emails… But in the end, checking my email is still something I look forward to every day (and every hour, half-hour, etc) because you never know when youre going to be surprised by something really cool. And even though I know there might not even be anything Ill actually read, I still get kind of nervous when I cant check it for a whole day (Wow. Im truly a child of my generation). Well, thats all the time I have for now. I have to go check my email :)