The email address I give out to people and use when signing up for mailing lists is a forwarding address.  It contains the domain of the college I went to, but is not an alumni address, per se.  I still have to access mail through another service.

Like for almost anyone else, that’s Gmail.

Gmail’s on the short list of technological, generational phenomena into which I’ve been sucked over the last few years.  There aren’t many – in addition, there’s the iPod (four hundred broken dollars sitting on a shelf in my living room), AIM (no longer), DVR (nice), and I suppose even having a website counts on there.  I’m a staunch holdout versus MySpace and Facebook.  No flat-panel TV for me, yet.  A digital camera might be on the way.

I was proud and excited to get that Gmail invitation back in the day, back when it was still early yet, back when you had to be invited.  I thought I was one of the first to have it, at least in the first wave of people.

The reason I use that forwarding address from my old school is because my Gmail address is unwieldy.  And it’s only unwieldy because of how specific I had to be when signing up, since there’s another “Dan Mooney” out there who beat this one to the punch and got the straightforward nickusername.  Not me.  I have to write a whole bunch of letters to sign in, the middle few of which kind of jumble together on a tiny computer screen, on account of their being so skinny.

The crux of this post is this: I think I’m an individual.  Unique, special.  Outstanding, in that literal sense of standing out.  But if my email address is any indication of my social status, I am not even the most special “Dan Mooney” out there, and certainly not the most web savvy, or ahead of my time or visionary when it comes to all that.  By comparison, most of my friends and co-workers are lucky enough to be so individual as to have “firstnamelastname” at gmail dot com as their email address.

So maybe I’ve always had it backwards.  I’ve seen myself as extraordinary, in that literal sense of “beyond the ordinary.”  Not necessarily superior, just different – most definitely on a different path from those closest to me, in emotion or in proximity.  Like being on the service road running alongside a major highway: going toward the same destination, but not as part of the same stream.

A dash of humility well seasons a fevered ego.  I’ve gleaned from this little observation of mine that while I’m not the only Dan Mooney out there, I can only be me, as specific and as drawn out as that has to be.  But if I do want to differentiate myself from the pack of them, it’ll take conditioning and work, not relying on my sprinting abilities, which can quickly exhaust, but in keeping the steady vigorous pace that’ll push me to the top, or the front, when the determination, or the fatigue, sets into the rest of the pack.