Solution!
I did notice the age, yes. But this was literally the only other example I could find online where a person was having a similar experience.
That said, I spent a significant amount of time troubleshooting this problem last night and this morning, and I narrowed it down to a script that was running every time i received a new email. The scripts purpose was to display a Growl notification for each new email received. What I also found out, is that that same script referenced the address book in an attempt to add a picture of the sender to that notification. I removed those lines of code associated with the address book, and I finally was able to resolve my issue.