Dave and I got into a little tiff at gaming. Mostly my fault since I knew which buttons to push. Heck, usually I know what buttons to push with my friends -- I just restrain myself most of the time. In any case, we were talking about some email that Dave had sent but only half of us had received. Now, I had received that email, briefly looked at it and then had trashed it. Later, when I wanted to look at it again, it was totally gone. Let me explain that trashed email is supposed to stay in the Deleted Items folder for a month before being erased.

Since I really hadn't taken a good look at it, I went along with the "I didn't even get the email" group. Later on we find out that the email was dated a year ago. That explains it for Shannon and Pick -- they have a lot of messages in their In Box sorted by date so Dave's email was off the top of the screen. It also explained it for me. Once I had trashed his email the Mail application had deleted it since it was over 30 days old. Strange, I would think that the Mail application would start timing from the time the email was trashed rather than by it's created date.

Here's a problem: I had already said that I hadn't ever seen the email (it seemed the fun thing to say at the time), and arguably that was true. Gosh, I had almost convinced myself that I must have been imagining it when I couldn't find it in the Deleted Items folder. So I mentioned that I set up my Mail application to automatically trash Dave's messages and it was of course immediately deleted since it was over a month old.

It took Dave about 15 seconds to get mad about that comment. Ok, it didn't help that I phrased it to imply that I considered Dave's emails to be spam (really, they're worse than spam since I don't even have to read spam). Blah blah blah, why do you always pick on me you ungrateful varlot. Heated words and complete sentences were exchanged. And eventually Dave left mad (I wasn't too sure if he was still mad by then but the remaining people seemed to think so). So now I had Shannon and Donald and Chris trying to understand why I was doing this to Dave. We didn't really resolve anything about that question that day.

But now I have to think about it a bit more. First of all, it's hard for everyone else in the group to understand the way I treat Dave. I keep saying it's a valley thing, and when I say that maybe only Eric understands what I'm referring to, perhaps Pick and Woo though I'm not sure for them. Donald, who claims to have grown up in the valley, doesn't know what I'm talking about. From that I can infer that it's probably more of a central valley/ Sacramento valley behavior, hence it may also explain why Dave takes it so hard at times.

Really, the way I grew up, you only really go after your friends. Strangers and new people you are relative polite to and indifferent. It's only with your friends that you can really let loose and be mean and let off your frustrations. It's never personal, but there's a lot of the "kick him while he's down" mentally. The difference between doing that to a friend or an enemy is that with a friend you're supposed to know when it's not appropriate. Admittedly, if I'm cutting too deep then it's because I don't know the target well enough. Hence why you are polite to new people and strangers.

That may explain my actions that day, it doesn't explain why I do delete Dave's emails almost immediately. We've gone over this before and he just doesn't understand that the way he writes emails truly grates on my nerves. Every line is it's own paragraph and every paragraph uses hanging indents. Visually it's horrendous and his excuse of trying to do wrapping for email readers that don't wrap correctly doesn't make sense. Write normal paragraphs and wrap at 65 lines like everybody else does.

But it's more than that. Dave, when he writes emails, is not Dave. It's someone who write short, clipped sentences without any sort of warmth or humanity in them. I keep thinking "this guy graduated in Letters and Science, how could he write this badly?" Subconsciously, that grates on me even more than the formatting. When I read Dave's emails, I don't see Dave -- I just see some sort of cold soulless machine that writes these emails under Dave's name. And I can't stand it.

Really, that's my problem. I shouldn't have said anything because it's not my place to change people. If he wants to write that way, let him be. But to keep my sanity, I try not to read his emails.