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the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Tokyo, 2008.06.01

I've been blasting off a lot of email in the past year and change. At work, it's pretty much all I do (that and yack on the phone). And at home, too, I seem to always have a few dozen unread emails lying around.

I tried to think of when it had been otherwise, and I realized that that was 1990, the year I got my first Internet email account. It got out of hand somewhere around '95 and has been since.

I'm sure it's what turned me into the fragmentary communicator that I am now, and reduced my attention span to what it now is. I still write the odd letter to try to reverse the trend, but even that usually only happens every other month.

But for every letter I write, I'm sure I send a hundred keitai emails, adding to the already ridiculous sum. I guess its not going to reverse itself any time soon.

rand()m quote

It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.

—Wendell Berry