reassuring? creepy? and what's with the coke thing, anyway?

While it's true anyway that you never know who will show up in your inbox, stumbling across your weblog is another way that someone might be reminded of your existence and be prompted to write. I'm amazed that people still talk about the advent of the Internet and the widespread diffusion of e-mail as being isolating things that shrink people's social networks. E-mail creates a layer of communication by which you sometimes hear from people that ten years ago you maybe only would have interacted with ever again had you bumped into them in an airport somewhere.

Exhibit A: Received yesterday, from someone I went to graduate school with and hadn't heard from in several years, now in San Francisco, CA:

i told erin maher a while ago that i  wanted to write you an email 

telling you how i stumbled on your 'blog through completely inexplicable 

means and have been really, sincerely enjoying it. every time i'm 

reading it, i keep thinking to myself  "any day now i will write jeremy 

an email" and "i wonder if there's anything else besides a wicked sense 

of humor that is driving the chinese to pee in coke?" it would seem that 

i have finally had a minute to focus on the former. so. that said, i 

think your weblog is hilarious, and perhaps it will be reassuring and 

just a little creepy for you to know that even the most tangential 

people in your life are aware of you...