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Upgrade | Apr 09 2002

There’s something wrong with my email program. It was working fine until I decided to upgrade. Never upgrade unless you absolutely have to; bad things happen.

Everything seemed okay until I received this bizarre email from my ex-girlfriend Barbara. It was an invitation to a party she was having. At first I thought it was just some generic invitation, but then once I started reading I realized this couldn’t be true.

It went:

The only reason I’m inviting you to my party is because I’m worried if I don’t invite you, you’ll hear about from someone else and realize I don’t want you to come, which I don’t, only I can’t let you know that because it makes me look like a person who was hurt by you, which I am, only that’s intolerable for me, to be exposed like that, so I’ve decided to pretend I’d like you to come, or maybe don’t totally mind you come, when really I’m praying you have the good sense to ignore this invitation and stay the fuck away.

Barbara had never sent me anything even remotely like this. It’s just not her style. Her style is: pretend that nothing ever happened. So the only thing I could think was that it was mistake, that Barbara wrote it as some kind of therapeutic exercise, but then got carried away and accidentally clicked SEND. It happens. And if it happened in this case, I figured that Barbara must have felt like shit about it. To be exposed like that is really her worse nightmare.

The more I thought about this, the sadder I became. You don’t stop caring about a person after a certain number of months apart. And of course I couldn’t help thinking about the moment that Barbara recognized her mistake. That’s always the worst: when you see what you’ve done and realize it can’t be undone. I’ve seen Barbara want to hurt herself at such times.

It took me a good hour to write a response. I kept typing things and deleting them. My idea was to try to convince her between the lines that her email hadn’t been a mistake, since I hadn’t realized it was a mistake and since my reaction was the best possible reaction to such an email, mistake or not. In the end I was left with just four brief sentences:

I received your email today. More than anything, I appreciate your candor.

Suffice it to say, I won’t be coming to your party.

This is all.

Between the time I sent this off to Barbara and the time I received her response, I imagined that I’d done a good, caring thing. That’s really what I thought. Certainly I never dreamed it would inspire the reaction it did:

I have an idea, sweetie. Why don’t you bring your new girlfriend along and fuck her on the couch? I think everyone would enjoy that immensely.

Then you can feel bad about it, and tell everyone how badly you feel, particularly since we used to have sex on the same couch.

This was too much. It was as though it’d been written by someone other than Barbara. Not that Barbara would never think such things; she very well might. But I simply couldn’t believe she’d express them to me.

I went into my OUT box to re-read the email I’d sent her. For it occurred to me that maybe I’d said something hurtful between the lines, not intending to. It didn’t seem likely; I’d been very careful in choosing my words, but at this point I really didn’t what it think.

This was dead end of course. My email to her was nothing if not respectful.

I went back and read Barbara email again, then scrolled down, intending to read her original email, the one that started all this, only I soon saw something that made me stop. Right under her latest email, in the place where my email to her should have been, was this:

> If you don’t want to invite me to your
> party, don’t invite me to your party.
> Like I fucking want to come to your
> party. What for, so that you can find
> new ways to shit on me?
>
> It’s only because I’m a total idiot that
> I hold out hope that you’ll one day
> treat me like a human being and
> stop blaming me for something that
> was nobody’s fault.

I recognized these sentiments immediately. They were my thoughts on receiving Barbara’s first email.

The rest should be obvious. I trashed my email program and re-installed the original application, without the upgrade. It was the upgrade that had caused the problems.

I don’t know when I’m going to learn to wait until they work out the bugs with these things. For some reason I feel I have to have the latest version, or else I’m going to miss some cool feature. Never again.