cosmicomedy
by lavinia plonka

You’ve Got Mail!

Gimme a ticket for an aeroplaneAin’t got time to take a fast train Lonely days are gone I’m a goin’ home My baby, she wrote me a letter.
The Box Tops

I can’t decide whether I need a diet or a 12 step program. Somewhere, while I wasn’t paying attention (it always happens when you’re not paying attention), I have fallen prey to overindulging—in e-communication. What started out as a delightful new sensation has burgeoned into a mailbox bloated with SPAM, trivia, endless forwards, misunderstandings and indigestible junk. My problem is I can’t stop checking it. I can’t stop answering it. Each time I hear the little “boink” that signals a message, I drop everything – cooking, writing, cleaning – in order to see who it’s from. I’m worried that any day now, I’ll get up during dinner to go check my email. Or suddenly wake up in the middle of the night and feel the irresistible urge for a midnight snack of surfing. I have not yet broken down and bought a Blackberry, but I have caught myself wondering what it would be like, connected all the time. Yum.

Like sugar, email seems to … oops, I just heard the boink, be right back. Ah, now I’m getting Asheville City Council announcements. Delicious, I just eat that information right up.

The way I understand it, the human being has spent eons foraging, interacting, growing crops, building cultures. Scientists have postulated that our system relates sweetness to something good. “Aha! This is not poison.” It delights the senses. Until the late 19th century, sugar was not part of everyone’s diet. The processing of sugar cane made sweetness cheap and available. Where sweetness had been a rare and especially delightful treat before, cheap sugar cheapened the experience. In The Botany of Desire, author Michael Pollan says even our use of the word sweetness has changed. Jonathon Swift (Gulliver’s Travels) called sweetness and light “the two noblest of things”. Pollan explains, “The best land was said to be sweet; so were the most pleasing sounds, the most persuasive talk, the loveliest views, the most refined people, and the choicest part of any whole, as when Shakespeare calls spring the ‘sweet o’the year.’” Something valued as special became ubiquitous. Yet our nervous system continues to crave the taste, our aboriginal programming saying yes! This is special! Bring on another Snickers Bar!

“Boink!” Excuse me, got another email. Ah, just what I needed. The 900th time I’ve received the dire warning forwarded message about avoiding carjacking. But she forgot to include the text, just sent me all the addresses from all the times it’s circulated. Sigh. It’s like drinking sugar free Coke.

So if we are genetically programmed to crave sweetness, is it not possible that e-communication addiction is the result of some genetic quirk as well? I cast back to my distant past, when people wrote letters longhand on stationery. When I was younger, one of the things I loved best was having a pen pal. The idea of writing letters to a complete stranger in another part of the world freed me to be someone other than a prepubescent geek. I remember seeing the mail truck stop at our driveway, and I would run down to peer in the box, filled with excitement when a fragile looking letter on onionskin or parchment, with foreign stamps appeared addressed to me. For a while I corresponded with a boy in England until we made the fatal decision at age 11 to exchange pictures. Our disappointment was mutual and total. I could not believe that he did not look like Paul McCartney. I can only imagine his face as he stared at my chopped bangs, my anxious smile (or what my younger sister calls my “scowly face”) and of course, my sexy St. Mary’s School blackwatch plaid jumper with the logo emblazoned on my embarrassingly huge breasts. But my addiction to correspondence remained.

Etymologists say that the word correspondence comes from the Latin root respondere – to answer. Com-respondere: we are a team responding to each other. But I once read a 19th century book that also suggested that correspondence comes from the Latin words cor cordis – coming from the bottom of the heart. Cor –respondere – Responding from the heart. Now research is revealing that there is a “correspondence” between the heart and the brain. “Emotional intelligence” apparently heals everything from marital spats to heart disease. Interestingly, ancient Egyptian texts often refer to the “intelligence of the heart.” I think of the letters of Abelard and Heloise, Cyrano and Roxanne….

Receiving a letter creates an emotional reaction – the dreaded Dear John, the Invitation to the Ball, the IRS Bill, the Sears catalog. Until this century, many people were illiterate, they hired someone to write and to read their letters. Only something really important was delivered in the mail. The knock on the door, “Special Delivery!”, the thrill of opening the telegram has to be connected with the Messenger From The King, the Town Crier. The message coming to your door may mean you are summoned to court, or being arrested, or will marry a prince. And when you receive a letter from your Romeo, the delight, the sweetness of it outdoes any hot fudge sundae.

So my biological imperative to value correspondence as part of the human experience has gone on a binge. I’m not alone. Besides the SPAM and the eternal forward of the Dalai Lama’s good luck message, I get letters from my forgotten past. Someone recently wrote to me from my second grade class. I try to imagine what unpleasant task they must be avoiding to go so far as to wonder, “Hmmmm, I remember a girl named Lavinia Plonka in 2nd grade. I wonder what she’s up to these days….” Do they google everyone from second grade? From their entire childhood?

“Boink!” Oooh, who could it be? Oops. It’s an email from someone I haven’t responded to in the last 24 hours. Or maybe it’s been 48. Where am I? Did I get the last email? In the past, when I got a letter, I walked around with it for a few days, unfolding it, smoothing it out on the table. Sometimes I’d write a draft and study my words before responding. Now, I often suffer from send and regret.

A friend of mine once wrote a presentation for a corporate event where the chairman wanted to address “flaming”—the tendency to instantly send a vicious response to an apparently inflammatory email. He began his talk in a spotlight. As he talked, he spoke about body language playing a significant part in communication. As he continued talking, the lights went out. He spoke of the pitch and tenor of his voice and its ability to communicate. Then suddenly, he became silent, and his words continued on a screen —emphasizing that often, what we say in email is misinterpreted and that we often say things in print we’d never say to a person’s face.

I once sent my sister Liz the news that my book was being translated into Polish. She wrote back one sentence, “Boy, how come I never have anything good happen?” Hitting reply, I lashed into her, listing her successes, her fabulous marriage, her beautiful home. “How dare you not be grateful?” I lectured. She wrote back, “Sheesh. I was just teasing you. You’re always whining about how nothing good ever happens to you. I was, you know, quoting you, it wasn’t about me at all….”

So I’m cutting out the VIAGRA ads, not reading another business proposition from Nigeria. I’m not forwarding any jokes about Bush or reading another political tract. Just the nutritional protein—real correspondence. Well, maybe a newsletter or two. Can’t skip my Word A Day email. Oops! There goes the boink! Gotta run. Email me.

 

Lavinia Plonka delights in human interaction more than anything. She is director of the Asheville Movement Center, where she teaches the Feldenkrais Method®, a profound use of movement to learn to communicate with yourself and discover the correspondences within your movement habits.

laviniaplonka.com