I’m a bad girl. I figure you’d rather have blog posts than no blog posts, right? Don’t worry, I’m working on more Marika.

Every time I send my mom an e-mail in the darksome hours of morning, when I am the only soul awake except perhaps a prowling cat, I press send and immediately feel a wave of petty dread. What if she notices I’m sending her e-mail at 3:30 am? What if she doesn’t decide it means PM, or that my computer clock is off, and she worries about my getting to bed at a decent hour (or, as the case is, not doing so…)? What if she demands explanations and I must confess I wasn’t doing anything in particular, just writing a bit of thank-you note and dusting off my Starcraft skills? The dread passes, since, of course, the worst that can happen is my mom calling me all worried and my having to remind her I’m 23, or, alternatively and perhaps more likely (if she hasn’t read this post) having to feign innocence and claim the timestamp must be off.

So here’s the thing. I wish my e-mail client had a ‘Mom’ setting. Okay, it could be more generalized than that, with all sorts of custom settings—but basically, I want to check a box next to my mom in my address book and have my e-mail client automagically delay any messages I send her after midnight until eight, or a more plausible time, the next morning. That’s the kind of totally frivolous feature I want in my software.