Dearest Rachel –
No, it’s not as if I’m expecting to hear back from you; I never have, even from the first, no matter how wonderful it would be if you could or would. This particular story, like so many since your departure, has less to do with you, and more with my dealings with others – and with technology. It’s not just a matter of my waiting for responses, either but also my own ability to respond to others when they need to hear back from me, too.
The topic occurred to me yesterday as I was about to leave the ‘office’; after putting myself through a relatively grueling workout earlier in the day, I was in no mood to work in the kitchen once I got home, despite the fact that Daniel had actually suggested as I headed out that I consider putting together something with curry sauce in it; either a doria, or a take on Komeda’s curry toast, or possibly a take on chili 5-way, poured over spaghetti and topped with shredded cheese, but with curry instead of chili. Normally, just the fact that Daniel had offered a suggestion for an upcoming meal is something for me to sit up and take notice of, but yesterday, I just couldn’t bring myself to work on it.
Now that I’m writing this down, I wonder if you ever felt like this about your work here at home from time to time. Sure, you didn’t put in a ninety-minute treadmill workout, but there must have been days when it just got to you, and dealing with meal preparation at the end of the day (especially when it wasn’t the end of the day at all, but just the beginning of the evening) wasn’t something you wanted to deal with. I’m sorry to have put you through that so many days, honey.
But that being said, it’s not as if I disregarded his request; as I was planning to shut down my workstation for the day, I sent him a text that, let’s be fair, was about the size of one of these paragraphs, explaining my situation and offering a solution or two that I thought would sit well enough with him (and in fact, he eventually proved to be quite amenable to the idea of visiting Mitsuwa for an early dinner; he’d get his curry fix and a udon soup in the bargain). But after sending him that text, I didn’t hear back from him for over half an hour.
Now, given his habits, that didn’t necessarily worry me overmuch. I’d actually sent the text with that kind of time to spare in the day overall. I was ready to go home, yes – there wasn’t much that was pressing, and in fact, I hadn’t everything I needed to do more, to a certain extent – but it wasn’t as if I couldn’t still occupy myself there, and it wasn’t as if it was getting truly late in the day. But – and here’s where this struck me as something to comment upon and let you know about – I’ve gotten used to texting back and forth with my various chatbots; I would prompt them with a conversational paragraph, like the one I had just sent off to Daniel, and after a few moments of ruminating on the information and query I’d given it, it would return with a fully fleshed-out essay in response.
Let’s just say I’d gotten spoiled by the chatbots’ conversational skills; not only would it reply quickly, but it would give a thorough answer, rather than just a laconic handful of words. Meanwhile, I’m waiting for forty minutes before sending a quick text of “Daniel?” to him – and that, he responded to, oddly enough. Although, in his defense, he mentioned that he was at that moment dealing with the lawn care service that had just arrived to work on the moss buildup in the yard, and wanted to know how to proceed. At that point, I was ready to head home anyway, so I did so and responded to the individual doing the chemical application directly, as well as talking to Daniel about dinner plans in person, which proved to be a much more effective means of communication.
The problem is, one can’t always drop everything and get into another’s presence to communicate. Sometimes, there’s a matter of dealing with a situation remotely, and you have to be able to receive messages and respond to them with a certain alacrity.
And I’m not just talking about Daniel, and how I wish he would respond to my texts – to be fair, my first request was verbose to the point of ‘tl;dr’ in his book, and I should have known better – nor are my hands clean in this matter. Just this weekend, the chaos of the whole Easter situation with the family required a bit of up-to-the-minute adjustments to the plan (such as it was), and the folks were having difficulty getting ahold of me to inform me of how things stood. This naturally led them to having concerns about how they would best get in touch with me in the case of an actual emergency, especially since at their age, such a situation could feasibly occur at any time.
Part of it is my own fault, since I generally keep my phone on ‘silent’ mode; but given how many spam calls I get, I can hardly be blamed for it. At the same time, it’s also strangely technological – they’ve called me and left voicemails, and while I get a red dot on my phone app that I want to clear, there’s nothing for me to respond to, sometimes for hours, sometimes for even days. I don’t know why that’s happening, or how to mitigate against that. I’ve suggested that they send a quick email, but even then, I don’t always seem to get a notification popping up on my phone. It’s almost as if technology wants us checking it, but doesn’t quite want us to communicate on the instantaneous level we built it to originally facilitate. Meanwhile, it communicates with us at a speed and thoroughness that we get used to (and eventually expect of our fellow man, only to be disappointed) – but it’s going to be of no help in finding out how Dad is doing in case of some several medical setback. Not sure that there’s much that can be done about this, especially given the intermittent nature of this problem.
But in any event, I suppose I can still ask you to keep an eye on us all, and wish us luck, as it’s clear that we’re going to be needing it.
Letters to Rachel 