watching expired appliances align

grumble, grumble

i don't have any proof for what i'm about to mention. somehow during the past year or two i've started to use email only for communicating about upcoming events. it's not longer a substitute for a long letter written to a friend. those letters seem to have disappeared with adolescence. of the five to ten non-work email messages i compose during the course of a day, 99% of those involve plans for that night, the following night or the upcoming weekend. email for me is like the telephone was ten years ago. i have no desire to "waste my time" with pleasantries. these days i'm in such a rush to dash those communicative thoughts into an email that i barely breathe - even if the email is several sentences long. i think i'm getting old in that mid-to-late twentysomething kind of way. what's next after email? when i'm 70 will i be sitting in my garden thinking about writing a long letter to a friend across the country? will i be sitting in that same garden with some laptop on a table? a brain reading machine strapped to my forehead? i don't know. thinking about the future confuses me.