FutureMe

I received an email in my Gmail box last night that I had to open, out of sheer curiosity. The subject line was Tell The Kids I say Hi. The text read as such:

The following is an e-mail from the past, composed on Friday, March 4, 2005. And sent via FutureMe.org
______________________________

Dear FutureMe,

if you're still smoking, you're a fucking idiot!
hope everything with the house went well hope you and Jason are fine and have some great kids don't forget where you came from and never pretend to your kids that high school is a wonderful place

PastMe

I had a couple moments of wide-eyed fear reading this. Who knew this stuff about me?? Then as I re-read the first line in the email, I began to understand.

This is an email I wrote myself almost exactly five years ago – 20 days before we closed on our first condo and three months and some-odd change before our wedding in Jamaica. While I don’t remember the details, clearly I stumbled upon the site FutureMe.org and thought it would be a kick in the pants to write to the Me in 2010. And knowing the Me of 2005 – who isn’t really all that different than the current Me – 2010 must have seemed like a lifetime away. Could I make 5 years of marriage? Would I have kids within those 5 years?

Other than the surprise at having mentioned kids in the positive five years ago, the brief email sounds like me. And while I don’t remember having written those words, I can’t deny they would be my words.

So, to answer it: I have stopped smoking, for the most part. Everything went well with the condo and we have lived there – mostly happily – all this time (I had a clue in 2005 that the bottom would drop out of the real estate market, but I didn’t think it would have affected us as it has and ensured that we have spent more years at the condo than originally intended). Jason and I are fabulous. We have no kids – great or not – but Terry is still swimming strong and we’ve added a psycho cat to the mix. And I still have not forgotten where I come from although, in the intervening years, I have actually gotten back in touch with many of my former high school classmates through the magic of Myspace and Facebook.

So of course, after reading the email from PastMe to FutureMe, I returned to the FutureMe website to pen another email to another FutureMe, five years further down the road. And provided the Mayans were wrong, I should get it and hopefully will have fulfilled many of its expectations by then.