lights over heads

Mong Kok, Hong Kong, June 2009

I finally decided to commit to centralizing all my email accounts in one Gmail account to manage them from. This meant setting up my new account to import all the email from the account that I've used as my primary account for the past 6 years. When I started this process, I quickly realized that the new account, which I've been using sporadically, was still set up to auto-forward all the mail it was receiving back to my old account, which I'm still using as my primary account until the import finishes. I tried to change the settings so that all imported mail would skip the inbox, but for some reason, this isn't working for messages sent to one of my old accounts—the one I used for my family and friends.

That was 3 days ago. The import process is still ongoing. The result is that all of my old correspondence is showing up in my mailbox as new mail at the rate of about 2 weeks per hour. It's like living the past 6 years of my life in a meta-epistolary time lapse, or being inside a film written by Charlie Kauffman. I've been conditioned over my lifetime to respond in Pavlovian fashion to the ping of a new email. Now, the messages are from old friends, close friends, lost friends—reappearing in my life with a forgotten immediacy from contexts gone by.

Apologies for all the old pictures, but it's just been that kind of week. This is Hong Kong's Mong Kok shopping district—as Joe put it, the stereotypical Hong Kong image.