An Internet junkie

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

The prospect of a summer vacation does funny things to you. One of them is to create a Godzillian to-do list for the vacation. Do this, plant that, buy this, sell that. After many delicious do-nothing days you wake up to see the semester hurtling towards you with the Wal-Mart sized list not even given a dekko....aaargh...

Out ambles the mammoth of a list and you look around for the easiest one to start on first. Small successes help. Clear the Inbox. Aahh...that is easy-peasy :)))

Out pops yahoomail and you start...hmmm....now where should one start? 3124, the pregnant Inbox screen screams at you...Huh? Well, what are MBAs for? Lemme break this huge task into bite size chunks....what can I delete first? All those side-splitting funny emails? No, no, no, I need those...it’s my storehouse for a rainy day when I might need a good laugh. How about the scores of newsletters that I've subscribed to in the hope of reading them when I finally get the time? Well, what if I manage to finally get the time and settle down on a quiet summer morning to read them? Then I’ll need all those emails to bury myself in. Nope...I need those too. How about all those mails sharing photobucketsful of life with me? However can I delete the lovingly shared memoirs of my nearest and dearest? No way!

As I chide myself for this crippling inability to squish the delete button, I muse that it might be a hangover from my more mundane material life...a life filled with unending stockpiles of ancient outfits neatly folded and stashed away, only to be taken out, sunned and returned lovingly to its cosy corner for another year or so...all in the now fast receding hopes of slipping into those once upon a time single digit sizes; or my son’s textbooks and notebooks religiously being hoarded away in quiet dark nooks and crannies of the attic.

As the years march past...std 1, std 2, std 3...and three boys burst through the ranks of nursery and kindergarten, I am sure my spouse will have to stage a coup and overthrow the burgeoning piles of paper in the face of my shocked protests...‘OMG...that’s his first drawing’ ‘aaah...not this....this is his first certificate from the little firefighters association’ ‘and look at his first A...mmm.....’ tiny precious memories scrawled all over my heart. And I just learned the other day that the superwomen who so efficiently run the house have decided to take matters of the daily news into their own hands and have been clandestinely collecting and selling off the newspapers to the Singaporean version of our raddiwala. They just don’t get it, do they?

Aaaahh...for the joys of opening up a fading pink ‘n’ cream roses printed box from ages bygone, covered with the fine dust of a few score years and to peek into its deep contents that haven’t seen light for ages, except to linger as a dull glow in some corner of my heart....to feel the softness of my baby’s first socks, once bright red berries he had picked on his way back from school, assorted strings of coloured wool we had collected on a lazy summer afternoon, a photograph with the edges shaped like a heart...

I sigh...wanting to cling on to all those precious thoughts, outfits, photos and berries...As though a sign from the virtual heavens, the unlimited storage sign flash across the screen, instantly brightening up my spirits. I console myself that at least an overflowing mailbox in virtual life is not quite a sin as in real life...I am told I don't ever need to delete a single mail...the guys at yahoo have figured out a way to store all my little emails in some far away cyber corner...for ever and ever... Perhaps Internet junkies are souls like me who can unabashedly stash away all our virtual junk in some remote corner of cyberspace far away from the prying eyes of spouses and housekeepers.