The Soccer Emails

Since May, I've been getting these emails that are meant to go to parents of some girls' soccer team at a high school called MHS. The first email arrived as I was slammed with end-of-the-year studying and grading, so I ignored it, thinking perhaps it was spam (the list of recipients was long). But the emails kept coming, one every couple of weeks.

And now it's uncomfortable, like when you don't quite catch someone's name when you first meet them at a dinner party, then sit through dinner, dessert, and an hour of charades hoping that someone else will call her by name. But if anyone did, you missed it. So now you're leaving and want to say, "Nice to meet you…" Jennifer? Jessica? Joanna? It would be weird to not call her by name, but even weirder to ask for it.

Or, at least, that's what I'm telling myself. I'm telling myself that "Dina" with the Hotmail address (Do people still have those? I guess people still have those. God…) will think I'm strange and creepy and voyeuristic if I tell her now after three months and half a dozen emails that I am not the person she thinks I am. High schools are really protective, aren't they? Didn't I just read that article the other day about the 25-year-old woman who got denied a teaching degree for posting a picture of herself on MySpace, drinking a cup of beer? I know it's not really the same thing, but it's kind of the same thing, isn't it? Couldn't they bring sanctions against me for knowing too much? For not alerting the sender that her private message about underage girls was going to some stranger?

Probably not. Probably not. But maybe that's my worry because I am a little voyeuristic about it. Because I like imagining that I'm going to spend my foggy July mornings on a freshly mowed soccer field in New Mexico. That I'm starting off my days at 8 a.m. with dirt and cleats and shin guards and ponytails.

It's occurred to me that part of it might even be the fact that this fictional, pristine high school existence I'm fabricating for myself is at a place called MHS--initials identical, coincidentally, to those of the high school that would've been mine. I wanted to play soccer as a kid, but my cash-strapped parents told me that they could only support one extracurricular, and I wasn't willing to give up my music lessons. So by not responding to these emails, I can keep living this vicarious, alternate life. One in which I'm significantly more "normal."

On the other hand, though, whatever typo got me on the email list has meant that the parent-of-the-similar-email-address isn't getting these emails. So maybe I'll let "Dina" know.

Maybe not.