Mail

 I was watching "You've Got Mail" last night, a Fall tradition.  For the first time, I realized just how technologically dated it is, which probably reveals me as pretty dated myself if I'm just now catching on.  I had always huffed at the sound of the modem connecting and how abbreviated the timing of it was, but I had never really picked up on the social aspect of it, how it's set in a time when the internet was still a new and novel thing.  Many of the online jokes fall flat now that the internet is so tightly wound into our social fabric, but there was a pleasant nostalgia for the element of innocence in those early days as well.

I was taken back to that time when as Meg's character says "my breath catches in my chest until I hear three little words, 'you've got mail'."  Remember when you could log into your email account and NOT necessarily have anything new there, much less fifty emails you have to sift through?  I remembered anxiously waiting for one.  Please tell me I have mail!  Even though conveyed by that robotic voice, those three little words were like a colored greeting card envelope in your mailbox, a jolt of excitement and anticipation before the who and the what were revealed.

I guess that's it.  Just a quick Remember When.