Dear Friends,
Every so often, I decide I need some extra distraction from work, and I play Email Roulette. I send 20 or 30 messages and wait to see what comes back. Having played for a long time now, I have a good sense of what will garner the best feedback: a short question, that allows for either a very personal answer or a joke in response. Also, something I can answer readily, since people will inevitably ask. Yesterday, I sent the message, what’s your biggest fear? It’s an easy one for me: getting pregnant. It’s not a very rational fear, but it’s there nonetheless, having replaced ‘losing my job’, since, well, that happened. A close runner-up is ‘getting injured’, something that would hinder my ability to continue my usual routine, and make me extremely unhappy as a result. Anyway. I was very surprised by the responses I received. There were a few jokes (my favorite was ’email roulettes from you’), but for the most part, they were painfully, gut-wrenchingly honest. Most of them had to do with being powerless: ‘going hungry,’ ‘watching someone close to me suffering and dying,’ ‘being a vegetable,’ ‘dying alone.’ I’ve ended up having conversations with folks about ongoing injuries, diseases, houses burning, family members and friends dying, and unhappy relationships. It reminds of me of the messages on futureme or confidential to:. It’s disheartening to think that it’s so easy for us to find things to keep us awake at night, to make us feel like imperfect and unhappy people. On the other hand, I find it really fascinating how the internet makes us so willing to spill our guts for absolute strangers who contact us randomly via email. It’s so much cheaper than therapy. Today, to maybe lessen my self-induced Email Roulette tension, I sent out a new message:Subject: Email Roulette from Grover Cleveland
i was the 22nd AND 24th president of the united states, and i have the sexiest moustache you’ve ever seen. so what’s your story?
Later.