Friday, May 23, 2008

Do this, actually

I just read about a website called FutureMe on my fine friend Daniel Leary's blog. It's a site where you can compose an email to yourself and then designate its delivery for a time in the future. (Interesting in itself, though I feel like regular old email has that function?)

BUT: I invite and encourage you, dear readers, to go this very instant directly to FutureMe and click on "view public entries". There, you can all experience for yourselves the stunning discovery that at the core everybody's problems are exactly the same. More evidence that our contexts are our only differences?

Deal with that!

You may also feel free to wonder (1) why people elect to send themselves messages about bad things and not good ones, and (2) why people don't email themselves "big" questions. We wonder what colleges we'll get into, not why we all devised the institution of education in the first place. A survival mechanism, presumably. Questioning the status quo is difficult (and for a few good, solid reasons, at least in the short run).

As for not going back even further and wondering why we're all here in the first place to think about life -- much less eduation, much less what college we're going to go to, much less why we are bothering to email ourselves about it ... well ....

Once you're done with that, do this.