While reinstalling my local mail client on a brand spanking re-format of my desktop I realized that email as a communications medium has changed quite a bit in how I use it over the past fifteen years. This is what happens when you browser about idly as you wait for Thunderbird to index all that crap I’ve kept since the summer of 1995 when I walked into the Bruin Online office and created some of the very first @ucla.edu addresses to exist (this is why Sue’s email at UCLA is sue@ucla.edu .. come on, that’s awesome, isn’t it?).

I had an older email address through the library system. Even remember it. izzyuk4@mvs.oac.ucla.edu. Bleargh.  

Read one I sent to an old friend, Stacey Hirose, on 11/20/1995:

Got an A-.

One essay was B+, with the comment: "Your understanding of language (its use, arbitrariness, social function) is quite puzzling and makes me wonder what you get out of this class.

The other was A-.

The ID's I jammed in.

I love the comments people leave on my essays.

I still remember my freshman paper on the Cariboo Cafe.
"Your style doesn't have clear topic sentences, which usually means that the point is lost and the reader loses direction.  But I didn't get lost.  So nevermind."

Then she gave me an A.

 

Oh, well.

So how are you??

I found another one that apparently was a collection of stuff I could only copy off the screen and therefore could not save as timestamped messages. It was simply called "BEN and old BOL mail compiled shorts", and I had archived it into Eudora, my mail client at the time, in May 1997. One of them kinda made me jump.

    Simon wondered exactly what happened when he flipped the switch to turn on the kitchen light and instead the World Trade Center erupted in flames.  Was it coincidence?

So I probably wrote that around the summer of 1995. Granted, the WTO was a showcase for all sorts of fictional destruction and the WTO bombing was just a couple years before I wrote this, but reading it now did unsettle me a bit. There are a bunch of little bits of writing like that dotted across my senior year at UCLA and my using email as a select publishing house to the annoyance of friends. Of course, the ones I really liked I ended up putting up here long ago (Falling by Starlight and Earthshift). But these, as I read them now… they really deserve to be on here somewhere, too.

Why not?