E-mail is an addiction.

If only there was some sort of treatment for wanting to click on the “check mail” icon once every five minutes. This is no joke. I’m a serious e-mail junkie in desperate need of help.

When my day begins, the first thing I do is wait impatiently for the computer to boot up just so I can see what sort of nonsensical musing someone has forwarded me or what the latest deals from the Internet’s most popular Web sites are.

If only there was hope for someone like me.

The problem with checking e-mail every time my heart beats is that I don’t get it all that often. I mean, there will be a few things here and there but usually it’s just chain e-mail telling me if I don’t send it to 1,000 of my friends in an hour, I will have a terrible love life.

Most of the time when I check for e-mail, there is none. Nothing happens. Nothing except my heart sinking into my stomach because nobody loves me enough to send a one-line anecdote or a brief recap of their day.

So the solution to my problem is to join as many joke-a-day and newsletter sites as I can. Filling my inbox to the brim and so every time I check my mail, I can brag about how I have so many people wanting to talk to me that I don’t have time for it all.

It’s kind of fun, really. Checking mail so often that the real friends I do have start to think something is wrong. But you know there is something really wrong when I start ignoring real-life conversations to check and send e-mail. But it hasn’t gotten that extreme. Not yet, anyway.

But those bulk e-mails get to be so shallow after a while. And “Dear Valued Costumer” is only good until you see someone else with the same message. All that time you thought you were Company X’s favorite customer.

E-mail is a hobby and, in some cases, can be considered an art form. So much speculation surrounds the proper etiquette that those who send the most e-mail could be considered pioneers in the journey down the Information Highway (and, by the way, does anybody still call it that?).

It’s a challenge to everyone choosing to type out a paragraph or two to a friend or colleague to let them know the funniest thing that happened to them on the way to work.

What’s most interesting about e-mail is how much more of a jerk, or a smooth operator for that matter, someone can be in a typed message as opposed to face-to-face.

People are so tough in an e-mail but can’t speak up for themselves in so-called real life. So what? It just so happens that some are better at the written word than others. But I guess I’m just a wimp. It doesn’t matter though, as long as I am in the protection of my trusting keyboard.

Nothing can beat a personalized message from a friend, though. That brings up a good point. One thing that is necessary for e-mail is friends.

And that’s what I’m still working on.