Postalatry

The Quick-and-Dirty Short Fiction

2012-02-07T11:48:00.000-06:00

I have a humble formula for generating short stories. It's a little simplistic, but when I'm absolutely scraping for ideas, a big, elaborate convolution of high concepts won't help me. I just need a quick-and-dirty checklist for a basic short story, just to get something written. Later, when I'm convinced of its brilliance, then I can worry about the complicated matters.

First, pick a conflict: Man vs. Man, Man vs. Circumstance, or Man vs. Self. I know there are over thirty tropes, but these three will suffice. Next, I write a little column of three abbreviations...

Want:

Obst:

Fail:

The first is what the main character wants to achieve. I think this can be anything, though some would suggest it's important that the reader be able to relate to the goal.

The second is "obstacle," that is, the primary thing in that person's way. There could be several obstacles, and many of my short story ideas have two sets of these points: one for the Man vs. Man storyline and one for the Man vs. Self parallel thread.

The last is very important because it seems to be the hook in good fiction writing. It represents what happens if the person fails in their little quest, and the repercussions must be disastrous. It's not just a matter of disappointment ("Oh, I really wanted that slice of cake."), it's a life-changing result ("Well, without my job, there goes my car payment and child support."). It's that tension from the high stakes that makes it really gripping.

Obviously, any of these can be tweaked for specific effect. Once again, I just want to impress this is simply a brainstorming exercise, not to be argued with over finer points and hair-splitting. It's more important to get the idea out on paper and actualized, rather than quibbling over how its reception should present.

This is my takeaway after reading the first few chapters of Practical Short Story Writing by John Paxton Sheriff. Despite it having been written in 1995 (rereleased in 2000) and constructed in England (I don't recognize any of the literary magazine it cites), it's a wonderful spark of inspiration. I've been struggling with my writing so any impetus is welcome. I was out on the town when this inspiration struck but happened to have some junk mail in my pocket: I tossed the contents and meticulously deconstructed the envelopes to gain as much writing space as possible, and I filled them with a dozen short story ideas.

And this topic may sound like a deviation from my normal focus, and it is, but whatever. I haven't written anything in a long time, and I would contrive to laud writing exercises as useful for personal correspondence, as who doesn't like a good storyteller?

My Goal (and Rationale) for Creativity

2012-01-01T14:52:00.000-06:00

Worth reading: 33 Ways to Stay Creative. You don't have to agree with them, but they're worth reading.

I ritually seek out creative stimuli and kick-starting literature the way other people seek out other self-help material. Some of it's crap, like Caffeine for the Creative Mind. That book is full of sappy humor and self-admiration, but there are also a few gems in the heap. And even the dopey exercises are worth putting real effort into because they are exercises. They're not interesting, but they are as useful as a martial artist throwing 100 perfect punches at a padded wall.

I mean, it's the new year. The start of this arbitrary temporal bracket is an excellent time to reassess and form plans. There's nothing stopping us from doing this at any point in the year, of course, but the sense of a period of time ending and a new one beginning gives us a nudge to rethink our lives. It's a natural human function: end-of-year celebrations are ancient and global. Humans have always gathered around and expressed appreciation for their relationships, braced themselves for the responsibilities and opportunities of the new year.

As I was blessed to be born into a surplus society and first-world nation (and everyone must remember that this was solely a random result: we did not deserve to be born here, no one deserved to be born elsewhere, and nobody is of more worth for being born one place over another), it is my luxury to mull and muse about creative exploits rather than repairing my house or foraging for the next meal. It benefits no one for me to neglect the gifts of my environment, but instead is a slap in the face to anyone who lives an "I would if I could" life. So I think about cultivating my creativity, manifesting it. This year is going to be my year to focus on writing, getting published. I have terrible follow-through: at the start of this new year, I'm going to rectify that.

Thanks, everyone, for reading. I'll try to make this place more worth everyone's time—that's part of my writing goals.

May the conservatives learn compassion,
May the liberals learn loyalty,
or, failing these,
May the end be swift and painless,

Christian

How the Grinch Reduced His Carbon Footprint

2011-12-19T20:38:00.000-06:00

Now, this blog is a lot of things: a guide to language, a review of postal services and conditions, a showcase for stationery-related images, and infrequently updated. I want to emphasize that it's good for many things related to paper, whether or not it's something that bears an address and stamp on it (though of course it could be put through the mail).

Here we are in the holiday season, with Merry Consumermas rapidly approaching. I'm not particularly religious: I consider myself spiritual but have little interest in discussing such matters. My personal questions are answered, and I opt to leave others to their own affairs. But what gets me down about this time of year is how far people have moved from the realm of the spiritual or even the human and wholly subscribed, unthinkingly and unconscionably, to material gain. It's just not a holiday unless you can throw a pile of injection-molded plastic trash at some child and impress upon him/her at an early age that the point of the holiday is not an end-of-year celebration of gratitude among friends and family, but that it's solely about getting and having stuff.

That's why any alternative to buying, spending, and purchasing is welcomed as a flickering candle flame to the heat-death of my heart. Regifting is a step in the right direction; DIY gifts are freakin' awesome. When the Japanese government released a PDF on how to wrap presents in a piece of cloth (furoshiki) so that it could be reused and gifted back and forth without wasteful gift-wrapping, I loved Japan all the more for it. (And apparently I've mentioned that link before. Sorry.)

Photo: How About Orange

A friend just posted an interesting DIY article on alternative gift decoration, namely, making a fancy bow out of a glossy magazine page. And yeah, that's a lot of work to put into a bow that will end up thrown out in the trash with the rest of the wrapping paper, but. It's not a bad exercise to be present with what you're doing, that is, sending a gesture of your affection to someone you care about; it's not bad to work with your hands and get crafty; and if something's going to be trashed, let it be something that's been once or twice around the block, instead of buying a new plastic sack of new gift bows that are hardly given any mind before they're discarded.

I'll apologize for my flinty cynicism, here. My world travels have left me disillusioned and humbled: tripping around impoverished developing nations stands in stark contrast to walking through a shopping center in the frenzy of the holiday season, watching people spend money they don't have on physical possessions they don't need for people who won't value them. So rather than storming around in a hair-shirt and condemning people who don't know any better, I'm actually seeking out alternatives to consumption and wastefulness and finding ways to candy-coat these, the better to insinuate them into people's everyday practices. It's better to get honey stuck in your fly than vinegar, after all.

Not Generally Minding the Rules

2011-12-08T20:09:00.001-06:00

This must happen to many different professions: it's the scenario where you meet some new people, they ask what you do, you tell them, and they playfully rear back and say they must be careful about [behavior they associate with your profession].

It happens with English teachers: "You're an English teacher? Well, I'd better be careful with how I talk around you!" They who crack the joke also laugh, as though surprised by their own wit, even though this is such a standard convention of speech that it should emit, word-for-word, from a novelty key fob of prerecorded messages.

It doesn't happen with dentists: "You're a dentist? Well, I'd better floss twice a day around you!" More's the pity, most people don't floss once a day.

If you care about the littlest, most casual errors,
you really shouldn't vacation in Asia.

It doesn't happen with proctologists: "Well, I'd better be exceptionally diligent in wiping my ring around you!" Though in honesty, I'd try to befriend whoever said that. They must be a blast to go out drinking with.

But I'm an editor—or I try to be, as no one's hiring me right now—and people get the notion that I must be driven mad by all the errors I see every day, everywhere I go. And it's true, there are errors everywhere. Every-freakin'-where. If you pay attention, it's a little astonishing our current surplus society didn't collapse 80 years ago, the last recorded point in history when handwriting mattered, or 50 years ago, when our politicians could ad lib a stirring and cogent rant. Now our senators and even our presidential candidates, even when reading from a script, come off like a live Alabama news interview with a guy living next to the guy whose house burned down after a domestic incident.

Does my head explode on a daily basis? It does not. Why? Because once you're really an editor, you don't care about the small potatoes anymore. You don't care that people confuse their usage of less versus fewer in casual conversation. You don't care that... actually, if shite English like irregardless and broughten bothered you before, they will still bother you deep into your career. But you don't freak out about the various abuses of your/you're or there/their/they're, that's freshman concerns. That's what your friends freak out about when they're trying to show sympathy with you or show off their acuity to others.

So, no, no one needs to watch how they speak around me at parties, because I'm not on the clock. (I would definitely go to more parties if I could bill my current rate for attending.) I'm unconcerned with average people struggling through half-remembered grammatical forms in casual conversation because this isn't a financial report or a peer-reviewed journal. Friends apologize needlessly to me in e-mail and occasionally check my stress levels about their text messages.

Hardships of the USPS

2011-12-06T11:55:00.001-06:00

Hard times at the post office: facing default on a $5.5 billion Treasury loan, the USPS is planning to cut out its overnight delivery of First Class mail—so plan ahead—and lay off about 30,000 workers. Also, First Class stamps will rise one cent to 45¢ on January 22. Invest in your Forever stamps now, kids.

Me, I've got packs of the things because I strategically stashed them in very clever places I couldn't possibly forget. Once in a while I find another one. Of course, all First Class stamps are being generated as Forever stamps and now they're all interesting-looking, but I did this back when the only style was the Liberty Bell, so I've got packs and packs of these boring old stamps to share with Postcrossers around the world who are normally vociferous in their praise of more-interesting stamps.

But my plight is nothing compared to what the USPS is facing. They suffered net losses of $8.5 billion in FY10 and $3.8 billion in FY09. The reduction of six billion pieces of mail (increased competition with the Internet) between those two years represented a revenue loss of $1 billion. In an effort to save $3 billion in expenses this time, they're planning to close half of the nation's nearly 500 postal processing centers, which will lengthen the delivery time (and distance) of mail to be processed, kicking up the normal one-to-three-day delivery to three-to-five-day delivery for First Class mail.

When I used Netflix mail service, I could drop a DVD in the mail and see it checked in at the local office within 20 hours. I thought that was impressive. Similarly, I could write a friend in Madison, WI, and she'd let me know my letter arrived the very next day. I suppose this downgrade in postal services means it's settling back down into my original expectations, as opposed to remaining planted in the realm of pleasant surprise.

It's in the Constitution that we have a Post Office—"...one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the United States Constitution"—and I would rather have my tax dollars go to its support than so, so many other places they're allocated, yet the Post Office does not receive support from our taxes. I heard mention of a poll (but can't find its citation) that 85% of Americans said the Post Office was their favorite Federal department, but I suppose there's a wide difference between loving something and using it every day when advancing technology offers more convenient and immediate solutions.

Believe me, I've had impassioned arguments over what makes a book—the paper and ink or the story contained—when discussing traditional wood-pulp books versus e-readers. Being precious about tradition or habit doesn't serve anyone, and I say this even as I've converted to refillable fountain pens and shaving soap/brush. Getting rid of my physical book collection and stocking up on e-books was a great boon... until my Kindle screen broke for no reason other than being two-and-a-half years old, and Amazon's tech support only offered to sell me another one. So, to access my virtual library, I must always have some kind of electronic device, whether a tablet or my laptop, to access it, which in turn relies on the grid being in place for the rest of my life, and every few years I'll have to buy a new $70-250 tablet/e-reader since these manufacturers fully subscribe to planned obsolescence for their business model. That's a strong argument for books-on-the-shelf right there.

So there are advantages to advancing technology and to retaining the old-fashioned way, and there are detriments to each. What's best? There's no simple and uniform answer to that. In the meantime, I'll continue to use the USPS and send out my frivolous little postcards around the world, continue to write letters to people who don't write back, and rely on it for disseminating holiday cards. (You'd think the wedding stationery industry would rally some support for the USPS! Gods know that's where the money is.) Why? Because I like practicing my handwriting; because I know people like receiving mail that isn't junk; and because I enjoy the illusion of communication for what it is. Because it's a luxury and not a requirement, it's fun and not a chore.

But my contribution, buying stamps and sometimes padded mailers, is about as helpful to the system as my recycling catalogs and glass bottles is to the environment: better than nothing, but not to any appreciable degree.

Friends and Dining Abroad

2011-12-04T15:55:00.001-06:00

On my main blog, I built (for the sake of building) a Page of naive but well-intentioned tips for traveling throughout SE Asia. I did the best I could with it, attempting to show how to say three important and handy phrases for wherever they go: hello, thank you, and (very) delicious. Using even this little of the language will put you on people's good side and make your interactions more positive, as folks living overseas are used to tourists blowing through their proud nation and not making any effort to learn their language.

On Postcrossing, I listed in my profile that I'd like to learn these phrases from other nations—when people send me postcards, they come from all nations around the globe—and many senders have been nicely compliant with this request. Here's a summary of what I've got so far:

	Hello	Thank You	(Very) Delicious
Belorussian	Prevet Dzen dobry Priviatanie	Dzjakuju Dziyakuy	Velmi smachna Smachno
Chinese	Ni hou	Hsieh hsieh	Hao chih
Chuvash	Ira kun pultar	Tavta pus	Pite tutla
Dutch	Hallo Hoi	Dank je wel	Heel (erg) lekker
Finnish	Hei	Kiitos	Erittäin herkullista
German	Hallo	Vielen dank	Sehr lecker
Bahasa Indonesia	Selamat pagi (morning) Selamat siang (afternoon) Selamat sore (evening) Selamat malan (night)	Terima kasi (banyak)	Enak (sekali)
Japanese	Ohayo gozaimasu (morning) Konnichi-wa (day) Konban-wa (evening)	Arigato (gozaimasu - polite)	Totemo oishii desu
Khmer	Sua s'dei	Au kun	Ch'ngain
Lao	Sabaidee	Kop jai	Siep (lai-lai)
Latvian	Sveiki	Paldies	Garshigs
Maori	Tēnā koe Kia ora (casual)	Tēnā rawa utu koe	Kakato
Russian	Privet Zdravstvuyte (polite)	Spasibo	Ochen vkusno
Spanish	Hola	Grácias	Molt bo
Taiwanese	Li hou	Lou hsia	Hou chia
Thai	Sawatdee men add "krop" women add "ka"	Korp kun krop/ka	Aroi (maak)
Vietnamese	Xin chao	Cảm ơn	Ngon wa

The differences come, of course, from various regions, various learners of each language, and perhaps some discrepancies in handwriting. For instance, I was not able to transliterate the Cyrillic or Kanji hands or replicate them here, but I thought they were awesome nonetheless.

My Postal Carrier is a Donkey Penis

2011-11-08T18:26:00.000-06:00

It pains me to write this, as I would only like to reflect the entire postal system as the generous and glowing network it is. I love it, I use it all the time, and I encourage others to avail themselves of it as well. So many postal worker and postal carriers are hard-working, good-spirited civil servants, worthy of commendation and recognition for their tireless, consistent efforts. I consider them friends in absentia.

But an untarnished panegyric would be disingenuous, and we must be adults about these things. We love America, we love our parents, but you have reached adulthood when you can admit to yourself--however uncomfortably--that they have some flaws and they could be better. So it is with the post office.

My postal carrier is, to avoid cussing, a colonic polyp. I've never seen him in action, I only know him by his results and evidence. But first, let's look at what makes a postal worker angry.

I've heard it theorized that working at the post office is frustrating because there isn't tremendous room for growth. If you don't like the position you're working in, you still have to plug away at it for years or as long as you care to stay there. Is that true? Can anyone confirm or deny that? So that makes some people grumpy and may even have precipitated the the events that generated the unfortunate colloquialism "going postal." (And yet, when a student brings a gun collection to school and commits an atrocity against humanity, no one calls that "going scholastic." The post office suffers a bias here.)

For this reason, as well, some people may not care to join a dead-end job and do the same activity for decades, and some of those who do may not have many other career options. One of my postal carriers in a prior neighborhood was a sketchy character on his own merit. I saw him pull up to deliver mail for the block and three beer cans fell out of the driver's side of the delivery vehicle. He seemed unconcerned about that and that there was a witness to it, as well.

But I have no theories about the polyp who delivers my mail, no origin story for what made him a malicious or at least irresponsible person. He could've been bitten by a radioactive Iron Man suit for all I know. Maybe he lost a lot of tolerance from the people who used to live here, because that is one factor of the problem with the mail here: all these damned catalogues. It looks like, based on the "Or Current Resident" mail I get, that these people bought all their clothes, furniture, and home furnishings from catalogues, because not only do we get a high number of them on a weekly basis, they also come in a broad variety. Some are thicker than a comic book and some are just smaller than a phone book.

Another factor is that we have just a little mail slot to hold all our mail. It could comfortably ensconce a circular, two bills, and two postcards without conflict. Instead, it has to hold a weekly supply of thick catalogues from places I'd never shop at plus all the mail we desire (my postcards) and all the mail we're required to receive (stupid grotty circulars).

Our postal carrier's technique is this: put in the smallest mail first (postcards), then stuff the larger mail in (insurance packet, Hadasah Magazine (which my wife doesn't even want but apparently it's forbidden to remove yourself from the mailing list), circulars, etc.), and then he packs in the thick, unwanted, erroneosly delivered catalogues on top with as much force as was used in the Civil War to barrel-load a light cannon.

He's upset at his job. He's upset at the sheer volume of these catalogues that are clearly labeled for someone else--and he even wrote a little sign that said our boxes must be labeled with our own names or we won't get any mail (yet he's more than willing to give you mail that does not match the labeled name)--and he takes his frustration out on us. This is unfair, it's unprofessional, and it resolves nothing. It doesn't make him less angry, but it creates brand-new anger in me and my wife for this colonic polyp in the blue uniform.

I've tried to play the game by the rules. I took out a set of undramatic postcards, snipped out the delivery address with all the attendant codes, pasted them on the postcards and sent them out. (I even wrote about this some time ago.) I sent them to Macy's, Neiman-Marcus, Pottery Barn, J. Crew, and all the others requesting in no uncertain terms that all delivery of catalogues to our residence cease upon receipt of notice. I recognize it takes a few weeks for the lugubrious wheels of capitalism to turn in the opposite direction and stop forcing marketing down someone's throat, but legally it's required when requested. Yet we're still getting catalogues and our mail carrier thinks it's our fault and is taking out his aggression on our other mail. I haven't received an unmutilated postcard since I moved to this apartment, and that really hurts. Even the horrible slum-lord sublet in Southeast had a perfunctory mail service that at least kept our crap in presentable order.

I took a bunch of the catalogues, circled the return address on them, wrote RETURN TO SENDER in Sharpie, plus a note to remove me from their distribution list. I figured so: if the materialistic, capitalist swine were going to promote such grief in my life, I could return a little and ship back their catalogues on their dime. But it was not meant to be: my postal carrier took those catalogues and delivered them straight back to me on the same day, in a heap whose characteristics ran parallel to the condition of this carrier's soul.

That's justice, in the mind of my postal carrier. He's mad at me for catalogues that were meant for someone else. He delivers these unwanted catalogues to me and mutilates my actual mail in the process. When I try to prevent the delivery of these catalogues, he foils my attempt and returns them to me, for no other reason than to perpetuate (in direct contrast to alleviating) the process.

Names have been called in to Missing Persons for much less than this.

Yes, Virginia, Lists are Freakin' Awesome

2011-11-05T13:29:00.001-05:00

Today's a good day. Why? Because I have a full day to kill, and tomorrow will be the same. I can do whatever the hell I want to for two days because I have to occupy my mind and hands while my wife's out of town or I will be ground into a paste with crushing depression. It's happened before, I know what I'm talking about.

One thing I do to escape this Indiana-Jones-style Incan deathtrap of malfunctioning neurochemistry is make lists. I'm terrible with keeping all my plates spinning of my own volition. Food will rot, clothes will pile up, and self will be unwashed and underfed. Once, a mouse crept behind my CD cabinet, got trapped somehow, died, and liquefied in its decomposition, creating a smell that bugged me for a week until I located its source. That may not be related to my disorganization but it's a good story, I think.

So I create to-do lists to remind me what needs doing. I come up with items all day long, as events warrant, and record them on Post-It notes, in my Moleskine date book or any of the three journals I maintain, or in a special little Moleskine reporter's notebook I keep in my winter jacket, if I happen to be outdoors when a good idea hits me. Every few days I assemble all these notes into one large to-do list and that night I begin to attack it.

Many of these items are actionable.

What people need to know about a good to-do list is that it should have too many items on it. That way, even if you only do half or even a third of all the items on that list, you still achieved a hell of a lot. There is a tremendous sense of accomplishment that comes with literally crossing off items on your personalized to-do list, even if those things are abstract or electronic and the only tangible result is a list of crossed-off items. It's fantastic, there's very little like it in the world. One starts to feel like a feasible adult when the list is done.

And it's okay if some of those list items are stupid. One of mine was to catch up to my wife with watching Parks and Recreation. Great show, but viewing it is hardly a life achievement. Still, I wanted to do it and currently I have some free time (see above) so I finished Season Two while filling out eight Postcrossing postcards destined for Germany, Russia, and Poland--strictly a coincidence. I'll note that I took care not to put apply the Ronald Reagan commemorative stamps on any postcard going to Russia. Don't want to pick at any scabs. So that's two items scratched off my list right there.

Next, I've joined NaNoWriMo and will begin hacking out one of the novels I have locked in my skull. I can also get caught up on my other writing pursuits and eliminate a couple more slots on my list. See how this goes? By tonight, I will feel a tremendous burden lifted off my shoulders, and a sense of freedom mixed with competence will infuse my chest cavity. And not a dime of discretionary funds will have been spent: this is all stuff I can do right here, in my apartment, with presently afforded resources and my mitts.

Lists might not be for everyone. Some people are organized on their own; other people can't read or write. But for me, this is a perfect solution for a long-term, persistent problem I find otherwise inescapable: life.

Oh, Beloved Moleskine

2011-10-27T19:36:00.000-05:00

You can't believe how excited I am this evening. In the era when a bad day of fishing is better than a good day at work; as the northern hemisphere tilts until, on my daily commute, I can see the sun rising on the way out and the sunset on the way back; when too much news and too much casual contact erodes my sanity, the precious things in life seem few, and when they come they must be cherished.

And so I tender to you, gentle Reader, purple prose in panegyric of my new Moleskine notebook.

The new year approaches and I'm filling up my old journals. I have a softcover normal-sized book for my work journal; I have a spiral-bound Neon Genesis Evangelion notebook for no good reason, been carrying it around since my college days 15 years ago, and now I'm using it as a daily journal; I have a crappy spiral-bound notebook covered in a certain stock photo that comes up in the circulars (an orgasmic blonde woman's face in reaction to her eye surgery, presumably), just to reinforce that it's extremely low value. This contains my morning pages, and the ritual behind that is only to crumble away as much pretense of worth and expectation as possible, in order to write as frankly and unpretentiously as possible.

But the new year comes, as I said, and I am in want of a nice notebook. I turned to Moleskine promptly (I also turned to Rhodia but I just don't like their look, even though their paper is superior) and started looking around... and immediately discovered that the Moleskine site looks different, and has a different selection, than the Moleskine US site. I searched on both to find the perfect notebook I hoped existed.

I require a ruled book. My handwriting is neater in these later years than it ever has been, but I still like lines to guide me. Read into that as much as you like.
I wanted a daily planner, one day per page. Some of my best journaling went into such a book, so I think it's a successful formula. In blank books, I tend to whine about loneliness or how important it is to accept substandard relationships.
I have destroyed all my blank book journals. All of them.
I did not want a cahier or volant--I wanted a black hardcover, though I admit I was attracted to the Cover Art series... another time, perhaps.
I like the normal-sized notebooks, but I wondered if there were something a little larger. I searched around for a double-size notebook but had a hard time locating the one I wanted. I noticed the search function on the Moleskine US site was a little wonky: setting up some search terms would rule out certain notebooks that actually met your criteria.
Also, if it was going to be large, it should probably be hardcover just because a softcover would be unmanageable.

Long story short, I did actually find exactly what I wanted: the A4 daily planner. I ordered it last weekend and it arrived four business days later. I was so excited, I changed out of work clothes and into something a little more casual, just to make a good impression with the book at its unboxing. (And no, though I know the term unboxing, I did not film/narrate the event and upload it to YouTube.) It's only a 12-month book, though, so I can't get down to business for two more months--although I did write an entry on Oct. 27, 2012, noting the one-year anniversary of receiving this beautiful construct in the mail.

The pages are huge! Comparatively. They're like the size of a sheet of paper--the site claims the book is 8.5" x 12", though it's actually just under 8.25" across and slightly over 11.75" in length--which isn't big if you're looking at notebook paper, but when you're accustomed to Moleskine paper, the 5" x 8.5" variety, it looks indulgent. It's conceivable I may actually go out more and do things just to have interesting things to record, something worthy of sitting in this book.

I mean, it's going to be a regular journal. I'm not hyping this up, and I'm not going to change my voice for this book, but I do want to deserve it. Part of deserving it was actively maintaining the other three journals--doubtful I'll fill the work journal before the end of the year, but I'm making good work on the anime journal. I'm 1/3 of the way through, and I've vowed to exhaust it before 2012. As long as I prove to myself I'm dedicated to handwriting, I will earn this journal. It will not have been a wasted purchase, and I hate wasting Moleskines.

Calculating the Cost of My Postcard Habit

2011-10-22T13:28:00.000-05:00

It's that time again, time to send out another batch of Postcrossing postcards. Yes, it's exciting and fun, but...

I don't want to sound ungrateful, but there are times when a hobby resembles a chore. Look at World of Warcraft: gamers have spent (by now) six million years, in aggregate, fighting their way up the ranks in Azeroth. I've read so many complaints of people who spend eight hours a day their job, drive home, and their WoW guild demands another six hours for a high-level dungeon raid. (Yeah, I used to play, but I never got into guilds because the only ones that would have me were petty, backstabbing little gangs of unreliable teenage boys, with all the social graces that attend.)

Now, Postcrossing. You start out being able to send out five postcards at one time, and you had to wait until some of them were registered before you could send out more. But once your sent total went up to 20, you could have six cards out at once, and so on, and so on. I'm up to 13 cards out simultaneously, and most of them go through--I think I've talked about the problems with sending cards to China. (Also, flimsy postcards only serve as appetizers for all the postal processing machines in their thousand-mile trips. Voice of experience.)

All but two of my cards have been received. That's eleven postcards I get to write today (or whenever I get around to it). I already have a dozen booklets of designer postcard sets, so I don't have to run out and spend eleven USD on new cards, though many users would prefer a map of my state to whatever artsy-fartsy cards I like to send. But then I've got to look at sparse user profiles and compile personal messages for each person I'm assigned to write. Many Postcrossers don't do that, I've gotten cards that just say "Happy Postcrossing" or "Greetings from England." But participating in this program is part of my belief in quality correspondence, the dying art of thoughtful expression, and I want these cards to be a treat to receive. Coming up with nine unique expressions, however, in response to "I love Justin Bieber" or "no ads cards please" can be daunting.

Once that's done, I like addressing the postcards because I'm good at it. I like any opportunity to practice clear, controlled handwriting. But then the stamps: I no longer buy 98¢ stamps because they only come in one design. I'm sure Postcrossers overseas have had their fill of this solitary design. The solution is easy: buy two sheets of First Class stamps and one sheet of 10¢ stamps, and that will get any postcard to its intercontinental destination.

So: eleven postcards (not counting US$11 for them), plus overseas rate postage for each... that's US$10.78. I guess that's not terrible, once a month--and it does take about a month for the majority of the cards to reach their respective destinations. But if I did have to buy new cards each time, and if I had to buy postage for all 13 cards, that would be US$23.74 each month.

...I guess that's still not terrible. That's, what, four lunches at the cafeteria at my work, or two reasonably nice dinners at a neighborhood restaurant. If I only ate out twice a month, I'd feel better about myself. And that's still only one-fourth what I pay in bus fare, and I've got to take the bus in order to get to the job site that earns me money for bus fare and postage stamps.

Perhaps I just had to work that out on my own, say it aloud and see it outside of my head. It's not that bad. And considering how SE Asia's been flooding ever since August, it's a pretty lame complaint to have anyway.

How to Get Off a Mailing List

2011-10-11T21:56:00.000-05:00

We moved into our current apartment over a month ago. We love the place, the people before us loved the place--it's a great place. Big windows, everything's within walking distance, and there are several choice bus routes in case we need something more than everything.

It's just that the people here before us don't seem to believe in forwarding addresses, and they did a lot of catalog shopping or got on a bunch of mailing lists. This combines adversely with our ill-tempered postal carrier who (using his handiwork as evidence) is on the verge of "going postal" in the grand old-fashioned way.

Routinely, every day of every week, if there is mail coming into our narrow mail slot, he packs it all in as though muzzle-loading a musket. He could take all the mail and roll it into a tidy cylinder, but no: he seems to put my postcards in first, then the bills, then he rolls up the catalogs and jams them down on top. All my mail is crushed and spindled, to borrow a relevant phrase.

My response to this is two-pronged: I've obtained a phone number to call to complain about this guy. I love the postal system, I love mail, I even understand that our mail slots are not roomy at all, but his behavior is a sign of either incompetence or poor anger management skills.

A glimpse of my secret world: Swiss Gear travel bag,
cutting mat and X-acto knife, How To Draw Manga
Women, and three tedious, unlikable postcards.

Secondly, I've undertaken a little project in which I cut out the mailing label from every catalog (including the bar code and any catalog/customer IDs) and paste them onto the backs of postcards. For this, you can use anything from posterboard to the lid of an old pizza box. In my case, I'm using some ugly postcards I would otherwise be too ashamed to share with anyone I liked. They're from a set of vintage gift wrap designs from the '20s, and many of them were nice, but some were so bland that no one would be delighted to receive them in the mail.

This is how you formally request to be removed from a mailing list, in a forceful and legally compliant way that no responsible business has any right to refuse. Beneath the label (or just your address, if you prefer), you write these three things:

REMOVE FROM DISTRIBUTION LIST
DO NOT SHARE CONTACT INFORMATION
DO NOT CONTACT AGAIN

Anyone who writes back to you after receiving that is in line for a lawsuit.

And remember, the destination address must be the lowest address on the postcard: paste (or write) your address up high and then write the destination address as low as you dare. Leave some room for the bar code label the post office will apply there, and what I do after that is write the address in reverse order, going up from city and state and ZIP, line by line. That way, I leave as little room as possible at the bottom of the card.

Colbert's Ironic Commemoration

2011-10-01T11:57:00.001-05:00

Image: blog.zazzle.com

There was no way I could let this slide by. In actuality, I'm embarrassed that I haven't posted about it earlier: that's the level of my procrastination.

What you see is what it is: Stephen Colbert has designed (as anyone can, and as I have in the past) his own First Class rate stamp through Zazzle.com. The image is of his gleeful farewell to the U.S. Postal System via smartphone. (For the record, I'm an avid fan of Colbert.)

This is in reference to my prior post, about the struggling economics supporting the USPS. Reports I read in the news are conflicting: some suggest that the USPS will shut down for the winter, relegating all postal freight to private companies like UPS or FedEx; others, in line with the articles the Missive Maven cited, predict more moderate outcomes, such as losing Saturdays in the delivery cycle.

Either way, if you're thinking about shopping for postage, Colbert's levity provides yet another alternative. I just sent out a large batch of square postcards going out to global destinations. That's 98¢ plus a fee for using a square postcard--because there's no clear up or down on it, it has to be hand-processed. This fee used to be 13¢ but recently I sent some out and it seems the additional rate has gone up to 20¢. I was unable to confirm this on the USPS' website, indeed, I couldn't find any chart delineating the rates of variously sized postcards. I really need to buy one of those handy graphed mats the postal workers use, or else photograph one and design my own. In fact, that will be my next project, and when I come up with a definitive answer you know I'll post it here. Eventually.

I mean, sending postcards is tricky business. Did you know the stamps can go anywhere on the address side, but the USPS will process the lowest-appearing address (be careful when supplying your return address)? And you've got to leave four inches clear to the left of the stamps (in the upper right corner) to make room for the postmark. Postcards can be pretty tricky.

There's No More Work at the Post Office

2011-09-19T14:03:00.000-05:00

Wow, two obvious things. Obviously I haven't posted here in a long while, and obviously the biggest news pertaining to this blog, arguably, is that the United States Postal Service might close down for the entire winter. Given that the Christmas season is unquestionably the busiest time of the year for the Postal Service, wouldn't that be shooting itself in the foot?

They're worried about losing money, and they need a bailout from Congress to stay afloat, despite it being the hands-down most popular department of government. Currently they employ twice as many people as live in Minneapolis, MN, and slightly less than live in Austin, TX (they have 770,000 employees). Proposed solutions to save money include shutting down all winter, ceasing mail delivery on Saturdays, massive office shutdowns and layoffs, or repaying it the $6.9 billion it says it overpaid to its retirement program.

Guess which side the Republicans come down on. No, don't refund the Postal System and don't "prefund" its retiree benefits. Instead, suggests California Representative Darrell Issa, bust the unions (popular with Republicans and the corporations that employ them; unpopular with the working class) and layoff hundreds of thousands of employees. That said, the Postal Service itself has said it's prepared to fire/layoff over 200,000 employees, starting with several tens of thousands that don't currently enjoy layoff protection.

What's causing this turbulence? As a letter-writer and stationery-lover, of course I'm concerned with the state of the postal system. My understanding is, yes, the Postal Service indulges in some of the most generous benefits packages outside of Congress itself, and without doing any research one can estimate the rise of e-correspondence has substantially compromised mail trade, from writing personal letters to bill-paying. I'm not anti-progress. I'm a huge fan of Google and all its online advances, I love tracking the cutting edge of social media. All these wonderful new ways to express and transmit new categories of information... but I don't want to lose writing letters. E-mail programs have dabbled with fanciful online templates and designs for their missives, but who uses them? They're clunky and frequently ugly, they soak up memory and processing, and sometimes they actually get in the way of the written material itself.

We don't have penmanship courses in school anymore--sometimes I wish we did, but these have been subsumed by typing classes, and who can say those aren't more relevant to today's world, aesthetics aside? Recent generations have been inadvertently cultivated to have shorter attention spans, so to ask a young adult to find the discipline to practice clear, attractive handwriting is hopeless. It'd be like asking someone to go offline for three days: sounds great on paper but in practice it's an exercise in neurosis.

And no, I'm not bemoaning the loss of the good ol' days. There were none: dentistry and medical technology are the best they've ever been. Today our postal carriers don't have to fight through Injuns or bandits or anything. We've got brand-new problems that prior generations couldn't possibly have dreamed of in the most speculative fiction. They didn't have the technology. Here, you try it: imagine the most advanced technology you can think of, at the consumer level, and then try to project the problems suffered by the generation that uses it. Then wait 30 years and see if you were right.

So what am I saying here? I'm expressing my concern at losing the post office--Saturdays, I could adjust to, but the whole winter?--but I can also totally see how it happened. It's a reasonable, if unfortunate, eventuality. I'm not pleased with this outcome but I don't see any reasonable solutions, so in the meantime I'm just going to keep writing letters to friends for as long as I have the infrastructure to do so. I recommend you do the same.

50 Writing Tips!

2011-08-01T00:41:00.002-05:00

This will be a very terse post, my friends, because it's late at night and I'm seconds from bed, but this information is so important it must be shared with everyone.

The Poynter Institute's 50 Quick Writing Tools. Know them, learn them, live them. Not comprehensive by its own admission, but so, so, so excellent a start for so many people who don't know where or how to start.

Merriam-Webster's Vocabulary Quiz

2011-07-30T16:16:00.000-05:00

Just a little blurb between breaking news stories and startling events in the worlds of Language and Postal Services:

If you're reading this blog, you'll find it worthwhile to haunt Merriam-Webster's games section. Lovely crosswords and other games, usually gadgets retooled to center around words instead of garden creatures or gems. You know what I mean.

But what's really cool, what I really enjoy, is their Vocabulary Quiz! You get ten words that pop up sequentially, and each one has four attendant words: you race against the clock to select the best synonym. It's a real test of vocabulary--many of the words are easy or medium, but once in a while they throw in hard or genuinely obscure words.

On the other hand, if you have a good vocabulary, it's simply a physical test of hand-eye coordination and response times. My first score was 3200 points, pretty good for my age bracket (oh yes, they show you how other people your age did!), the average score being 2730. I improved that to 3800 points, and yesterday I scored 3940, after three tries. A lot of that is luck, of course, when the obscure word happens to be one I know.

That leads me to believe a perfect score would be 4000 points, and the only thing that holds me back is my response time. I'll have to be satisfied with that.

Oh, an' That's a Bad Miss

2011-07-23T18:03:00.000-05:00

This is some of the big news circulating today: Amy Winehouse's addiction has finally caught up with her. The police call it an "unexplained" death, but they have to, don't they. I think there are no mysteries behind this.

The unexplained mystery here is how the "Editor-at-Large" of Mashable, Ben Parr, got tangled over his use of "alluded/eluded." This is a screenshot of Parr's post on Google+.

You can be sure other people following him called this out. And sure, it's a common enough mistake, but it's exceptional when it comes from the hands of one whose trade is wordsmithing. One advantage of Google+ is that you can edit your posts after they go up--unlike with Facebook--but it's been over six hours and Parr hasn't touched this. Ouch.

The Subtleties of Font

2011-07-03T11:25:00.001-05:00

How many of you have ever practiced calligraphy? Many people think this means one specific style of writing, usually some form of italic or maybe even a German fraktur. In actuality, calligraphy is much more general than that: it's the discipline of very neat handwriting.

That handwriting can come in a variety of forms, which people call fonts, typefaces, or "hands" in casual conversation with other calligraphers. The accouterments that come with rigorous calligraphic execution are numerous and intimidating, and the thousands of hours of practice it requires may be off-putting. Yet at one time, penmanship was considered so essential for a civilized society, especially for anyone intending to do any kind of business, that the Palmer method of handwriting was mandatory in a young student's courseload.

Calligraphy really isn't as intimidating as all that. Once you reconcile yourself with the meditative discipline it requires--an increasing awareness of your own slight muscle movements, a calming focus in your mind--you may begin to understand and appreciate it as a world entirely of its own. And it's not difficult at all to practice, once you realize that handwriting actually comes up often in your life. Any time you're putting pen or pencil to paper, exploit that as a few more seconds for disciplined practice: addresses on bills, shopping lists, postcards, Post-It notes to coworkers, &c.

Image: The Atlantic

When I began teaching myself calligraphy (I had a miserable desk job with lots of downtime, so I started practicing drawing evenly spaced loops across a pad of paper), I tried to plunge into an "advanced" font, a very elaborate one that came much later down the timeline. But as I blundered through it, got control of it and then too familiar with it, my "hand" started slipping backward through time and I saw its predecessor fonts appearing on my page. This was a fascinating and magical process for me! Not only was I personally touched by the history of handwriting, I was able to begin to develop my own personal font--not one I'd use for writing checks, but something that would look nice on parchment and with certain acrylic inks.

Oh yes, you develop your own tastes for writing implements, inks, and papers as well.

Now it seems there's an iPad app, Typography Insight, designed to help people who work with fonts appreciate the subtle differences between fonts. I have no fear of technological culture, and I think an app like this only stands to reinforce this hobby of mine (if tidy handwriting is only a "hobby").

Typography Insight: iPad App Teaches Fonts Like Never Before

Broken Images

2011-07-02T12:52:00.001-05:00

I apologize for the sudden disappearance of all the images in this blog. I was tooling around on Google+ and saw that all my Picasaweb albums manifested in the Photos section of my new account. Not wanting them to appear in my profile--they wouldn't make sense outside of their blogging context--I deleted them in Google+.

Today I discovered that also deletes them in Picasaweb, where all my online albums are stored. Now I have to go through my backed-up archives, dig out all the photos, re-upload them and re-link them to each individual post. I'm very upset about this hassle and embarrassed about the inconvenience, but at least I learned something and therefore grew as a person.

Images will be restored in the next week or so.

One Acceptable Replacement for Mail

2011-06-30T22:53:00.001-05:00

I have to say, I'm a little impressed. Wasn't I just ranting about hating all the crap mail my mail slot fills up with on a weekly basis?

This isn't the total solution to this problem but it's a step in the right direction. My city government is working with Zumbox to transition from physical, analog postal mail to digital e-mail distribution! That's kinda cool. So anything that my local government would mail to me will instead go to my Inbox, where my Gmail will reckon with it handily. They're also pushing other big mailers (AT&T, Verizon, State Farm, &c.) to convert as well--that's less paper being printed and less fuel burned to produce and transport it.

I'm all in favor of this. I still want hand-written letters and postcards, but my junk mail and bills would serve me better as e-mail alerts rather than physical clutter.

Bones to Pick With the Postal System

2011-06-28T00:09:00.002-05:00

Okay, I know I dressed down our U.S. infrastructure pertaining to the postal system. I love the postal system, but love doesn't mean turning a blind eye to your object of affection's faults. It means acknowledging them and embracing them as a part of the whole, without which your objet d'amour would be another creature entirely.

And then there are flaws that manifest solely within the postal system's context but are not necessarily the fault of the postal system. By this I mean a few problems or annoyances that only turn up because of the USPS, but problems which are not part of the USPS' agenda or a direct result of its actions. The USPS is a vehicle for an unlimited number of variables--that these variables exploit the USPS, like intestinal parasites, does not mean the USPS is a detriment to modern life. On the contrary: it is up to us, we consumers, to mass up and address these aberrations, to resolve them ourselves.

One common problem is that of the shitty postal carrier. Many postal workers are solid joes: they do their job, they know their dominion, and they accrue valuable experience along the way. Delivering mail is not a simple or uneventful task: carriers can stand in as wardens of their community, if not the glue within a neighborhood.

Yet some carriers don't see it like this. Some of them believe they are destined for greater (albeit ill-defined) things. Some believe they're being oppressed by The Man, and the ongoing state of their employment only serves as evidence of this tyranny. Still others just don't give a rat's ass about the job they do, and that would be true of them in any position: in a restaurant, they would drop your steak on the ground and pick it back up to serve to you; in a bank, they would enter your deposit under the wrong account number; at a repair garage, they would mess your car up worse than you'd delivered it to them.

In the USPS, this can manifest as the jackass who simply crams your mail into your mail slot because he's too ill-tempered to do a reasonable job. Maybe the task is too repetitive for him; maybe his significant other chastises him for lacking ambition; maybe a group of douchebags lollygagged in front of his mail truck, causing him to miss a green light. Whatever the reason, he's inappropriately taken this aggression out on me and decreased the quality of my day in some slight but not unmeasureable way.

What he's done here is jammed the weekly circulars in my mail slot. Jammed them in without an eye toward physical space, crumpled up the very mail he has labored to deliver. Which brings up another issue: I don't want those circulars. None of those ads apply to me at all. They are a shameful waste of resources, both in the gas it took to transport them to me and in the trees that were felled to provide the pulp upon which they would be printed, not to mention the man-hours of labor in every stage of its production and dissemination.

I don't want those damned circulars. Nobody in my building wants those damned circulars. Yet they fill up our mailboxes, not addressed to us but to our addresses solely. Sometimes they say "To Our Friends At" but more often "Resident" or "Customers." It would be worthwhile to note who's advertising in these circulars and specifically boycotting them based on their antiquated, wasteful, debauched advertisement methods.

There's a garbage can at the end of the hall. It's made of metal and large enough that I--all 180 lbs. and 6' of me--could crouch down in it and hide, completely concealed by its lid. Weekly, this capacious container fills up with those blighted, horrid circulars; indeed, that can is there expressly for this function alone, to contain all the trash, garbage, rubbish, and waste that turns up in our mailboxes. (Otherwise, of course, the charming and thoughtful American citizens that live here would simply strew their postal detritus up and down the hallway.) Weekly, this container is over-filled with these accursed circulars and a variety of other junk mail.

What's the solution? I'm not specifically sure. When I meet with the postmaster general to talk about how collection boxes are extincted, I'll also ask if there's a way to opt-out of these colon-lapping circulars, or how one would begin to protest their distribution. Is that the purview of our congresspeople? And is it possible to rally enough support to reverse the tide of this wholly unwanted publication?

Searching for Mailboxes!

2011-06-21T16:12:00.006-05:00

Now that I'm back into my postcard exchange program, I had to get my mail forwarded from where it was being collected (my mom's house) to my apartment. No problem, except I wrote "St" instead of "Ave." Mail still gets to me, but with angry addendum scrawled around the destination address.

Easily fixed: I submitted new address change cards using (at the postal clerk's advisory) the address I'd been using for the last six months and my corrected address. Didn't need to make a note of the mistaken address at all.

Fine and good, but Postcrossing isn't just about receiving mail--it's about sending, too, obviously. There's a mail slot in my apartment building's bank of mailboxes, a slot crudely gouged out of the slender aluminum door, captioned with the taped note "OUTGOING." But this slot is barely big enough for a business envelope and can in no way accommodate a postcard without folding or mutilation. Spindling's not necessary.

Image: LifeHacker

So where do I send my mail? Where, indeed: more USPS mailboxes are being dismantled and removed all the time. In my leisurely perambulations about my neighborhood I've seen nary a one. This means all my outgoing mail has to accumulate in a pile until I have an errand that brings me downtown--if I can find a mailbox downtown, of course.

If I visit my in-laws at their senior living apartments, they have a perfectly adequate mail slot in their postal foyer. That's not always convenient, though, since my wife and I are against owning a car. It would be cheap to rent an Hourcar and visit them for a couple hours, and cheaper still to catch a bus (though the trip down there takes nearly an hour, and an hour back... if we leave while the buses are still running), but seriously?

Seriously? That's the best I can do if I want to send a letter?

Actually, no, I can do better. A very casual Google search turned up two mailbox locators, where you type in your city/state or your ZIP code, and they turn up results for mailboxes in your area.

LifeHacker found this Mailbox Locator program being hosted by Payphone Project (obviously, someone needed to find payphones). It's... okay... It seems to rely on anecdotal evidence for updating its database. People report in and note "this one's no longer here" or "got taken away a couple days ago or so." Maybe that's the best we can go on. Whose responsibility, really, is it to notify us where the mailboxes are? ...Arguably, that of the USPS, would be the first guess I'd hazard. But there's nothing wrong with the citizens rising up and contributing this information, answering a real need.

The responses are entirely text-based, there's no image or pictures here. It would be difficult for me to picture the address locations of each box and I'd end up typing them into Google Maps anyway. Additional confusion ensued when I wasn't keeping track of which search bar I entered my information into. Type it into the one on top for the results you want. Entering it into the search bar just below it (the more obvious one, I think) and you get a bunch of Google results that come up in the Mailbox Locator display window. They don't look like the list of addresses you'd get ordinarily, but both kinds of results do show up after a full window of ads.

But the one I like is Mailbox Map, which uses Google Maps as part of its function. Again, type in your city/state or ZIP code, and it actually provides a graphic illustration of mailboxes (including UPS and USPS offices proper).

I love Google Maps, and I love data aggregators, so this will be the application for me.

Now, the only thing to see is how accurate this tool is. It looks great, but it won't mean anything if the mailboxes aren't where it says they are. And I'd go out and check now, only we're currently experiencing a two-day torrential downpour, so... I guess my postcards will just have to hang out with me a while longer.

UPDATE: I went out looking for the mailboxes in my area when the rain let up. Mailbox Map listed three mailboxes within a three-block area of my apartment. Walking to each site, I confirmed that none of these exist anymore. I suspect the same is true for those mailboxes a few blocks further out in any direction. I tried to look up mailboxes in Mailbox Locator and it simply did not have anything listed for my area at all.

Further UPDATE: Duh. USPS has its own collection box locator. I didn't even think of that. I'm not sure how accurate it is: I found three mailboxes through Mailbox Map and the USPS site doesn't one of the ones I found (again, by walking out to each location). It did list five in my area, however, and I can confirm the location of one of these.

The Bushido of Editing: Serving a Corrupt Lord

2011-06-20T23:54:00.003-05:00

All right, cats and kitties, this is the real word as it has come down from the mountain.

According to AP style, "e-mail" is now written as "email." The Associated Press issued a wire advisory on March 18, 2011 (yes, I know this is three months later, but I was out of the country, and none of my friends care enough about such things to give me a heads-up).

How do I feel about this? Not happy. Up to this point, I was the keen-edged sword held to the throat of every lazy, uneducated lummox who tried to remove the hyphen from "e-mail." After all, "email" is already a word: a type of pottery design, from 12th century French email, etymologically linked to enamel.

The only reason they're permitting this, this... this damned typographic elision is for the worst reason of all, and it is the reason language changes all over the world, all up and down the timeline. So many people have so consistently gotten it so wrong, the educated bastion of sanity has finally slumped to its desk in defeat and permitted--nay, endorsed, by a cadre of quisling nabobs--this oversight's passage into law. That's all it takes! Language was formed by reason and logic, and it "evolves" because people are too lazy to learn/practice it correctly, so the errors are recorded for posterity!

Madness!

Imagine you went to buy a car and drove it home, and it fell apart on the highway while you're booting along (at ten miles over the speed limit, in all likelihood. Be honest). Not pretty, right? How could this have happened? It seems a number of workers on the auto assembly line stopped tightening certain bolts. "You know what I meant," they groused. "It looks like a car. There's no breakdown in communication." Factory admin were upset at first, but the workers were so unified and persistent in the remission of their duties, the factory rolled over and made it a rule that no bolt should be tightened.

That's what happened to the hyphen in "electronic mail." Thanks, lunkheads and rubes, you've bludgeoned your way into yet another "evolution" of the language. I accepted "Web site" transitioning to "website," enforced last year. I adjusted to how badly the marketing industry reapplies the word "creative" to mean nearly anything, to the point where this is an acceptable sentence: "The creative creative created a creative creative," when at some point in the past we might've said, "One of our graphic designers produced some illustrations." Oh, corporate speak, don't even get me started on corporate speak! There are some lines in the sand I will not only draw but fortify... but, as an editor, when the new commandment comes down, I have to enforce the misguided doggerel like "email."

But only in AP. Step to me in Chicago or AMA, and I'll speak respectfully of your travails to your next of kin.

The Ecologically Minded Correspondent

2011-06-17T22:39:00.001-05:00

Okay, so I'm poking around on Postcrossing (the postcard exchange program I cannot stop talking about) (partially because getting anyone else to take 20 minutes out to write me a note is like pulling teeth out of Congress), and I notice a little sidebar. Someone has assembled a small list of Things You Can Do To Make Your Postal Experience Greener!

I'm very eco and green, and I'm very against greenwashing. Traveling around southeast Asia was really hard for me and my wife, in an ecological sense, both because of our awareness of how un-green it is to travel at all, and because we were routinely confronted with the repercussions of climate change our own nation had initiated but for which these developing nations had to suffer. Imagine you're a Lao farmer, you grow your own food, you walk or bike everywhere you need to go, you reuse materials in ingenious ways to suit your needs, and then your lake dries up and your livestock die because Americans need more oil than anyone else, and more every year, and they don't believe in recycling. So the carbon they eject warms up the atmosphere, which traps more moisture, which traps more heat, and all your sources of water dry up. And you can't appeal to your government for relief because it's resolutely corrupt all the way through.

Welcome to scenic Phonsavanh, Laos! Please don't step
off the marked trails as there are still unexploded bombs.

It's heartbreaking to listen to their stories, their confusion at having lived sustainably for several generations, only this year it doesn't work because of what the rest of the world is doing, so they're going to starve to death unless one of their children can learn English and sell enough tours (of their barren, desolate wasteland) to drunken Australians or British lads to bring rice to the table, after repaying their bank loan for a dozen thousand dollars to finance their tuk-tuk, the first of many petrol-guzzling vehicles necessary for these tours. ...But I digress.

So writing letters isn't a very green practice. It involves printing paper with ink, hauling loads of postal cargo across continents and oceans by horrifically fuel-burning vehicles, and all the oil that runs the processing machinery and gets it all sorted. This list of ecologically responsible practices seems... a little pathetic in the face of what the planet is confronting. Very too-little-too-late. I was hoping for some brilliant innovation that I could implement to feel like I was really paying some penance for a lifetime of thoughtfulness. None of that was to be found here, however.

Choose recycled postcards or postcards made with fibre that comes from sustainable forests. For instance, FSC certified postcards.

Reuse/Recycle envelopes (it can be fun!)

Use envelopes/writing pads made of 100% unbleached recycled paper.

Walk, or ride your bike to take your mail to the Post Office.

Write your postcards during daylight, or outside in the fresh air, and save on energy.

When soaking off your stamps do them all at the same time and reuse the water as much as possible.

Use refillable pens/highlighters etc.

Print on both sides of the paper or reuse old study courses etc. to print things for personal use.

When wrapping things, reuse gift paper. Be creative! You can use old maps, newspapers, pages from magazines etc.

Get your electricity from a company that provides it from sustainable energy sources such as wind farms, solar energy, hydro energy, etc.

Support an environmental organisation such as Climate care, WWF, Greenpeace etc.

Here's my categorical response to each item in this list.

I don't know where to get recycled postcards. I haven't seen any that market themselves as such. I've tried making my own postcards, but many users specifically request not to receive these things.
(See #1) I have made my own envelopes out of whimsical materials, and it can be fun, but it is still 1/16th of a drop in the bucket.
This is a postcard group, and they're offering advice on pads of paper. I don't use pads of paper when writing postcards. The only pads of paper I use, I use as mousepads so I can quickly write notes while I'm surfing online, and those pads were salvaged from a dumpster, were purchased four decades ago, which is pretty good for reusing materials instead of buying new ones.
Absolutely, I walk or ride my bike everywhere, or use my city's wonderful mass transit services (bus and LRT).
The fact that I write my postcards during the daytime in no way mitigates how much light I use at night.
I don't soak off my stamps. If I wish to save them, I scan them in.
Absolutely, I prefer fountain pens that require refilling.
When I write letters, I always write on both sides, but again, this is a postcard club.
My sister and I wrap our presents in the same sheet of cloth we've reused for years. There's a wonderful website put out by the Japanese government, providing citizens with ingenious wrapping methods (furoshiki) for variously sized and proportioned gifts, to promote the reuse of cloth wrappers rather than paper.
I have no idea how our electric company gets its power. There is no competition for it, however.
Support those groups, but research them first. There are far too many groups doing the same work but diffusing donor funds too thinly to be very effective. There are also corrupt or at least wasteful, inefficient non-profits who don't know how to bring their administrative costs down. Maybe you want to support a powerhouse like Greenpeace, but maybe you don't want to support domestic terrorists like Greenpeace.

c/Lost/Found

2011-06-17T15:55:00.000-05:00

Oh my gosh, I apologize! I let the custom domain name here lapse, but I totally forgot about the repercussions. There's no need for me to maintain the custom URL, it's just something fancy and nice--but the discount many registrars offer for the first year or two evaporates and it can be kind of costly to maintain several of these (and since returning to the States two months ago, my wife and I have been unable to find employment).

But it totally escaped my attention that my blog was set to redirect to that custom URL! And what that meant is that anyone trying to read this blog--not that I have anything to post anymore--would be redirected to a place-holder, complete with the stock image of the cute college student so overused by domain-squatters.

This oversight has been rectified: I will not be renewing the domain name, but I deleted the redirect and anyone who thinks to Google my titular neologism will find me again.

Like I said before, I'm back on Postcrossing and loving it. Lacking a scanner (it's in storage... somewhere...), I find it's entirely sufficient to take a good photo of the cards I send out, with high resolution, and crop them down in Picasa for uploading to the Postcrossing site. It's unnecessary, it's just a neat little feature in which you can maintain albums of postcards you send and receive. I like to do it. But for a while, it seemed I could only write to Asia: the last batch saw two postcards going to China and four to Taiwan! Today, however, I scored a Finland address and balance begins to restore.

So I hope everyone can find me again, and I apologize deeply for the confusion.

Reverting to Original URL

2011-05-29T11:21:00.000-05:00

The domain name for this place has expired. I don't think I'll renew it.

postalatry.blogspot.com is good enough. I don't do enough with this thing to pretend to market it as some sort of enterprise. It's just my... tedious little meandering writings on an unfocused group of topics, that's all.

Today We Mourn An Address Book

2011-05-25T14:30:00.003-05:00

In the process of moving into a new place, in the process of taking things out of boxes and finding places for them to go, one is forced to reconcile with what one wants to keep or [donate/regift/trash].

Red Horseshoe (link in my sidebar)
provides many fun and exotic
accouterments for letter-writers.

This process also happens when one is packing things up in the first place. One is compelled to touch and handle every single stupid object one has accrued, and after 10,000 repetitions of this action one has to wonder how much stuff one really needs.

We have augmented this process with a third step in the middle: placing all our crap into storage. It happens in the middle. We packed everything up, placed it in a climate-controlled storage facility, and now we're shipping it from the facility to our new apartment. When one puts things in storage, one is compelled once again to weigh the worth of each object and how badly one needs to keep it in storage.

I love Moleskine notebooks. I love them so much, I've bought too many of them. I've rationalized and bargained my way into getting more. Why? I dunno. I love the concept of them, I love the color and texture of the paper (though admittedly Clairfontaine/Rhodia is consistently better), I love the reputation that comes with them. I traveled throughout Asia happily penning (most of) my adventures in a Moleskine, and it was no rare occasion to see other tourists with their Moleskines doing exactly the same thing, as tourists have done for decades.

Not personal information: that's no longer my number,

and my name/e-mail are easily had through this very blog.

But if you use a notebook sufficiently, there has to come a time to get rid of it. Obviously I would never throw away a travel journal, but there is a point when an address book has outlived its usefulness. Like when you fill one up, lose contact with many of those people, buy a new one, transfer the addresses you need, and that new one also comes with a smaller address book that could be used for some special... addressy... purpose. Yet to be determined.

So what happens to the old one? You could tras-... no, you could keep it. It's like a souvenir of an era, right? A chronological souvenir of where you've been in life's journey. And you have to protect those addresses, too. Even if you're no longer speaking with some of those people, you don't want to just hand out their addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses to anyone on the street, and if you put it in the trash you're basically doing that. Trash is public access, after all. TV and movies are full of people finding all sorts of things out about you by going through your trash, even stealing your identity. And that starts with knowing your address.

I decorated the interior with labels from sheets of collectible

stamps, an original linocut, and misc. stickers.

That sounds good, but when the fervor dies down and your vision returns, you know you've got to get rid of it. It's no good keeping it. Small as it is, it's still taking up room and it still needs a place to go. I have a much better one and though those addresses are also going extinct, it's easier to paste over them with Moleskine paper from another notebook because this new address book is larger. So when you want to throw away something you want to keep, what do you do?

It's easier now than it was before: take a picture. In the past that would've meant turning film in for development and waiting a week to pick up another physical object to take up space in your life. Now, however, I can take a digital picture and store it on my laptop. So everyone can take a moment and meet one of my beloved Moleskines even as it's on its way out the door.

Getting Things Back in Place

2011-05-23T16:12:00.002-05:00

This image from Minneapolis' history is going out

to a young woman in Toljatti, Russia.

Back in the States (with a permanent address) means back on Postcrossing!

Rebecca and I moved into our new apartment yesterday--a sublet for three months, during which time we'll search for another apartment or maybe even a house, or just a plot of land on which to build a small house; truly, the options are multiple--and I've re-upped my new address with the USPS so we should start getting personal mail intentionally sent here. And I think it harms very little to reactivate my Postcrossing account and start sending postcards out (my accrued reserve is massive) and begin receiving notes from around the world. That always was a delight for me.

Actually... I wonder how that would work, with a small house? If you just build a little structure on your land and it wasn't previously zoned for postal delivery, how do they manage that? I imagine one of those mail delivery trucks pulling up, two men in grey jackets get out, frown at the new house, walk back and forth, frown, then climb back into the truck and drive back to the city.

The next day, you start receiving mail and one parcel is a large manila envelope with your address angrily circled in thick red marker, letting you know none too gently that this is now your address.

The Battle Rages On

2011-05-05T18:08:00.000-05:00

Ugh, I haven't updated this in forever. I keep doing that, not-updating. Yes, very Zen, but not very entertaining.

We returned to the States one day after our third wedding anniversary and one day before my 41st birthday. ...No, I can't believe I'm that old either. Thanks, I don't feel I look it either. Very kind of you. Since returning I find some of my former passions somewhat diminished: I've completely slacked off on my photo-a-day blog since I don't feel anything I can do here will be as interesting as the last six months (not very generous, I know), and I've altogether stopped writing postcards or any kind of postal correspondence.

That latter is especially a crime, considering my love for this medium. Indeed, 85% of polled Americans say the USPS is their favorite federal department. (In return, the USPS says it's losing money and will have to declare bankruptcy and shut down in ten years. Can you imagine? I seriously cannot.) But after sending postcards from southeast Asia, complete with exotic and interesting postage stamps and postmarks using the Buddhist calendar instead of the U.S.'s Christian reckoning... what can compare? "Hi, I'm in Minnesota, here's a funny little card about a regional delicacy we call 'hotdish.'" "Greetings from Minnesota, we have a lot of lakes and even more mosquitos, if you can believe it." "Hello, guess who just discovered his cache of Forever stamps?"

That's not kind, I know, and it's not right. Writing a letter or a postcard is valuable no matter the origin. People love getting personal missives in the mail, period. Even moreso now, as it's increasingly attaining "novelty" status. I'm hoping I'll get over this blue funk and get back to writing regularly.

I did just finish a letter, in fact. This weekend sees the 80th birthday of my favorite author, Gene Wolfe. I've written him before and I wrote him today. I wished him a happy birthday, I apologized for not being able to visit him at the sci-fi convention in Wisconsin last September (that really crushed me, but we were packing up to leave the country and I had no free time), and I tried to share the most interesting anecdotes from our travels. Most other authors I admire to such a pronounced degree have passed on decades or centuries ago. It was imperative that I got over my shyness in the face of his auspiciousness and pen a letter of appreciation, the first time, before it was no longer an option. I've since urged anyone who'll listen to do the same.

And, truth be told, Minneapolis does have some awesome postcards. There's a big indie art scene here and some prominent creators have generated really excellent clothing, artwork, and stationery. This place is worthy of some "local pride" and investing in these artists' works is beneficial all the way around. For that sake, I love sending out postcards to my friends in diaspora--even though it discourages me that few of them have any interest in responding (some couldn't be arsed to send an e-mail or even a quick note on Facebook that they'd received my postcards from abroad). But that shouldn't be my motivation to write. Getting something in return is a terrible motivation to do something you love. The fact that I've selected a suitable pen, sought out an attractive postcard or writing set, and practiced several hundreds of hours of handwriting to create a little message to let a friend know I've been thinking of them should be the end unto itself.

My reasons to not-write are flimsy, and the reasons to write are multifarious. My path is clear, and the momentum to follow it is imminent, I just have to become the action. I will, I am.

Post Office in Narita, Japan

2011-04-07T15:06:00.001-05:00

No great and high-falutin story with this one. We were in Japan for a seven-hour layover, between Jakarta and Minneapolis, so we got out of the airport and toured a calligraphy museum in Narita. The curator spoke almost no English but tried to explain to us the first floor was only an exhibit of high school students practicing kanji in Japanese and Chinese--the good and ancient stuff was upstairs. She also declined to make eye contact and rather than coming off as rude it was somehow adorable.

After touring an actual Japanese garden, we tried winding our way back through the streets to the bus station (we'd taken a taxi to the museum but the station wasn't far at all). When we got stuck at one point I called out to a nearby teen who was walking by with his head respectfully down. "Sumimasen," I was able to forage from my scant Japanese, "Narita-eki wa doko desu ka?" I felt proud of myself but then the instructions, naturally, came to me in Japanese which I couldn't understand. I did get his hand gestures, and we found our way back in plenty of time to go back through passport registration and catch our flight.

But before that, we wrote quick notes to ourselves on postcards from the calligraphy museum, and I mailed them to ourselves at this airport post office.

Post Office in Melaka, Malaysia

2011-03-29T12:00:00.025-05:00

Just had to stop in here briefly, just like we did the town and even the entire country. What does that mean?

We weren't planning on going to Malaysia at all, but then we found ourselves with extra time and so we did. Kuala Lumpur is a gorgeous, clean, modern city and we enjoyed our time there. Georgetown, on Penang Island, is a fascinating mix of world cultures, rich with history and liberally sprinkled with excellent restaurants everywhere you turn.

But here in Malacca, or Melaka as originally written, what was there? We made friends with a woman from KL who said that Melaka could be seen in a day at most. But she lived in KL and all her friends could find to do was party, so perhaps there was more to it than that. Indeed, just in driving around we saw some fascinating landmarks and intriguing neighborhoods. By dinner time we asked the owner of our hotel where to eat and he said, "You walk down this street and if you want Chinese, turn left. If you want Pakistani, turn right." We did both and ate very well that night.

Right before we left I knocked out a few more postcards and, eager to take advantage of Malaysia gift-from-heaven postal rates, ran across town to this post office.

My Fear Is They Already Do

2011-03-26T01:33:00.002-05:00

Post Office in Tanah Rata, Cameron Highlands, Malaysia

2011-03-23T22:04:00.001-05:00

Several hours north of Kuala Lumpur, capitol city of Malaysia, is a series of mountains covered in jungle, tea plantations, and intermittent villages. One of these regions is called the Cameron Highlands (colonization provides the trade-off of sounding less indigenous but gaining mercantile augmentation), and within these is a very cute little town called Tanah Rata.

Here, you wake up to glorious sunrises in which you feel the Buddha smiles upon you, then the mists descend around the mountain tops, and around 1 PM you are drenched in several hours of rain. That's just how it is and the locals are well acclimated to it.

Note: I'm not local. Traipsing around in my fancy-dancy rain jacket is insufficient to the climate, as another couple hours of soaked jeans and Chuck Taylors will testify.

But here I am in Tanah Rata's post office, sending out another batch of postcards, and I want to note something significant here. Just as Norway was a very unpleasant postage rate surprise, Malaysia is the spectral opposite: there are three ringgit to the USD, each ringgit is 100 sen, and one postcard stamp to the US is 50 sen. Seriously! It only costs about USD 16.5¢ to send a postcard to the States from Malaysia! The postcards are more expensive than the postage, and these aren't expensive postcards!

Does my joy seem inordinate, untoward? I beg to differ: postage for five postcards from Norway was US$16, and while the postage rate in Indonesia fluctuated within a margin of 100%, its travel time was equally unpredictable. My friends are only just now receiving postcards I sent from Bali, three months after the fact. Yet I mailed a letter from Kuala Lumpur to my niece and she received it within two weeks, easy.

Vacationers to SE Asia: do your friendly correspondence in Malaysia. It feels like finding $20 on the ground.

Post Office in Siem Reap, Cambodia

2011-02-22T06:20:00.001-06:00

Oh, folks! Check me out: I'm in a Cambodian post office!

Khmer mail collection box.

I held off from writing any postcards for a while because it was getting spendy and I was writing far too many of them. But you know me, I love writing letters, I believe in availing myself of the formal postal system. It's not that I'm above e-mails: I've written e-mails to friends in times of need, just to keep in touch, stuff like that. And while e-mail's advantages include speed, efficiency, velocity, and promptness, they cannot compare in the least way to actually holding a postcard that you just got in the mail. They can't compare to regarding the exotic stamps commemorating people and events you've never heard of, to looking at the date and realizing it's been traveling for a month, to examining every bend in the card or scrape in the photo and wondering in which country these physical traces were rendered.

Main Post Office, Siem Reap, Cambodia

But my wife agreed it was time to send out another batch, as we've been in Cambodia for a week. We were several days in Phnom Penh, the capitol, and are now holing up in Siem Reap (trans.: "the defeat of Thailand"). We have visited the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, as well as many of the temples around Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. We have tried amok and lok lak (the latter is my favorite), we have stumbled with wrapping our tongues around Khmer phrases (ch'ngain, "delicious," is the hardest), and we bought two packs of postcards. One is for writing, but the other is a novelty. Everywhere we go, children are trying to sell us stuff: bracelets, postcards, books, toys, doohickeys, baubles, gewgaws, etc. We need none of these, but instead give them a dollar if they will draw us a picture, and we use the back of a blank postcard for their canvas. This places the illustration in a specific location for us, and what I've noticed is that girls in Phnom Penh like to draw flowers and butterflies, while girls in Siem Reap prefer mountains and rivers. Why is that?

Action shot: a postal clerk hand-franks my postcards.

Okay, so, Lonely Planet was correct, for once, in its placement of the main post office on its map, and it even... I won't say "taught me a new word," but it did remind me of one I'd forgotten a long time ago: franking. When they take that little hammer and bump it in the ink and thwack it on your stamps to make a postmark, that is called franking the postage. It comes from the verb "to frank" and means marking stamps with a postmark to show the time/date of their submission to post.

Franking. Totally forgot that word, but I won't again.

Post Office in Luang Prabang, Laos

2011-01-31T20:47:00.001-06:00

New country, new post office! Welcome to the interior of the official post office in Luang Prabang, Laos, kitty-corner from Wat Chon Si. If you were here, you'd know this temple wherever you stood in the city, regardless of knowing its name. It's the huge, ancient temple mounted atop the most enormous hill in the center of town. Over 300 steps to reach the top, just to see a spectacular sunset each night...

I digress. I'd written a stack of postcards and even a letter, all going out around the world. I confess I feel a certain glow of warmth whenever I have a stack of mail to go out and it's not all in the US. Having pen pals around the world to at least drop a line to (currently I have no mailing address for myself) makes me feel like I've expanded myself a little, and sending postcards from other nations is like a special "thank you" I can render to these friends who agreed to correspond with me way back when I wasn't doing anything that interesting.

Of course, this gets to be an expensive habit. Experience has shown me it's much better to e-mail from Norway, as postage rates there will quickly impoverish anyone with more than two people to write to. Thailand and Laos have rates a little closer to US rates, but a pile of cards and letters will still diminish the tidy wad you've just extracted from the ATM, leaving you pretty glum about your prospects for lunch and dinner that day. (Or, in my case, give my wife some reason to ask you to hold off on going crazy with my pastime until we actually have some form of income. Writing letters is cool, but it's not worth having to go home early.)

I don't know that I saw any mailboxes in Luang Prabang. I'm quite sure they were there, I probably didn't recognize them for what they are. I'm including a shot of the exterior of the post office, the slots where I was directed to deposit my own letters. Now, when I was in the States and brought a stack of postcards (I never write a few when a great many will do) to the post office, I was quite accustomed to being handed a strip or card of stamps and affixing them myself to my missives. That was easier in the States, with self-adhesive stickers for postage. In these SE Asian nations, they're still using adhesive you have to lick or moisten to activate, and even that's an imperfect science: my clerk handed me a glue-stick to help tack on some of the lesser stamps that wouldn't hold. So applying two kinds of stamps to each envelope or postcard, when dealing with fifteen of these pieces of outgoing mail, begins to border on the tedious and can soak up a lot of time.

But still it's worth it, because I'm enjoying sending these things out to people... though I wish my recipients were a little more diligent about letting me know they've gotten them. My friends in other nations are, they're great about that, they'll shoot me an e-mail or notify me on Facebook that something turned up. My friends in the States, not so much: I have to assume that either the postcards were lost/destroyed in transit, that the Indonesian infrastructure could not support safe transport of my postcards, or that my friends don't feel any compunction to let me know they got anything. That's a little discouraging, but then, "snail mail" has fallen out of favor in the US and we don't have any traditions or conventions governing that behavior anymore.

Post Office in Pai, Thailand

2011-01-14T10:00:00.002-06:00

This was a personal victory for me: I have the opportunity to visit a few nations outside of my own, so I've been making it a personal goal to visit official post offices where I travel. I haven't made it 100% of the time or even 50%, I don't think.

In my other blog, I posted a picture of my visit to a (temporary) post office in Bali, Indonesia. When I was in Iceland I'd only walked back and forth outside a post office in Reykjavik but never made it inside. I regret that a lot. I thought I was going to replay that regret when I finally located the post office in Chiang Mai City, Thailand, but showed up on the one day of the week it was closed.

As it happened, I was visiting Pai for two days and wrote up a bunch of postcards, hanging out at a coffee shop. I figured one of the local convenience stores around here might have some stamps (7-11 is very big in Thailand, the way Circle K was in Indonesia) but anywhere I went was out of them. Pai has a pretty strong independent artists community and its remote geographic location is a popular motif to play upon, whether it's the "762 curves" on highway 1095 between Chiang Mai and Pai or the tiny town's postal code, 58130. There are a lot of beautiful postcards for sale throughout the town, and if there's such a demand for them, perhaps people really were draining all the 7-11s of their postal stamps.

I was directed to the post office (which I was excited about) but finding it was another matter. There were several maps in town but... I don't know if the scale was off or if they were simplified to highlight the local bars and hotels. The map in Lonely Planet was worse than any of those. Rebecca and I wandered around the neighborhood south of Pai proper until she asked some directions from some friendly women at a corner cafe. We took an immediate left and found ourselves in front of the post office--we'd walked that street before on the other side and didn't see it at all. How'd that happen?

Regardless, once inside the process was swift and simple, and I think the postal rate for postcards was more or less equivalent to that in the States. That's convenient, but time will tell whether their postal infrastructure is any better than Indonesia's: only two intended recipients have indicated the cards reached their destination, out of a couple dozen sent to friends around the world. It's too soon to tell whether any of the Thailand-issued cards have arrived, but still I wonder.

Sweet relief: greetings from Pai, Thailand!

Universal Letter Writing Week: Helpful Advice

2011-01-12T09:24:00.004-06:00

What is more pointless than writing letters to people who

never write back, when you don't have a return address?

(Hotel Yani, Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia)

Well, I hope I didn't sound very down on the idea of Universal Letter Writing Week. Sure, I question the foundation of its existence, but far be it from me to suggest we swing radically in the other direction and not write letters.

I love letters! Oh, in the name of the Divinity, do I love letters! I love writin' 'em, and I love readin' 'em! In this sense I am 50% similar to my friends, and that would be the latter half. The "I'd love Christmas better if I didn't have to get anything for anyone" half. Or, as the wielder of that somewhat stunted end of the stick, "I'm not worth 20 minutes and 29 cents to anyone I know."

So why not have a week in which the laity are encouraged to please write a letter? Sure! Let's go ahead and do that--everyone put on your stationer's hats and pour a round of holiday absinthe--take pen to paper and have at it with our innermost... well, not our most intimate thoughts. That would be redundant: we already transmit those to faceless strangers via Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal. No matter: just go ahead and write to your friends... well, not your friends online, obviously. Write to your family... unless you live with them.

Huh. Universal Letter Writing Week is a bit of a sticky wicket, what?

To assist with this conundrum, I thought I'd take it upon myself to promote some solutions in case anyone else out there is encountering the same difficulties I have faced. Generally speaking, one can never solve one's own problems, but when someone else has the same trouble, don't we have all sorts of advice for them? Absolutely.

Ideas for To Whom One May Write

American soldiers
Enemy soldiers (spell poorly--it's demoralizing)
Your favorite author, if they're still alive
Swollen children in Shriners hospitals
People learning English as a supplemental language
Farriers
Your congressman/woman
Cultural anthropologists
Manufacturer of your favorite hygiene product
Geminis (actually written Geminians or Gemineans--they can't decide (gasp and swoon))

Topics Upon Which One May Expound

Your top three resolutions for 2011
Why you're staunchly opposed to resolutions
All the things you know about the culture from which your favorite food emerged
Half-baked plans to visit every nation with an atomic icebreaker
If you could build a movie star, what they'd be like
The sexual fetish you've never confessed to anyone, not because it's naughty but because it's in second place to the other one that you can't stop talking about
Who your friends were in second grade and why
Reasons why you shouldn't hit yourself when you make a mistake
How to get over a cold, in case the person you're writing has a cold

National Letter Writing Week

2011-01-10T12:10:00.002-06:00

Dear Reader,

Has anyone else heard of this? National Letter Writing Week? I just caught a tweet from Wordnik claiming that this is so (and, presumably, started this Monday), followed by a cool little link to a page listing various writing-related terms, a word-list called Penmanship.

But I can't find the source for this declared observation. There's an eHow article that corrects my presumption and puts "Universal Letter Writing Week" at Jan. 8-14 (or was that last year?) and offers suggestions of recipients for various letters, if you can't come up with any on your own. For me, the problem has never been sitting down and writing a letter: it has wholly revolved around coercing, tricking, or forcing anyone else to write back.

Awareness for this week seems to have exploded in 2008, according to my cursory and undisciplined research. A women's website, BellaOnline, also offers suggestions for types of letters to write as well as a short inspirational bibliography in the same vein. Here's an especially vacuous blog post about the event, courtesy About.com. The author collects stamps but the imagination he expends on this article rings a little limp. By accident I found a dead-fascinating article on letter writing under Japanese Etiquette in Wikipedia--otherwise, Wikipedia seems to have never heard of this week-long observation.

Int'l Society for Friendship and Good Will says they "sponsor and promote" this Week in their list of yearly Observances. Did they create it? No idea, but I've never heard of any of their other Observations, either, so... maybe!
The Smithsonian Institute's National Postal Museum features a vintage art deco post that places the Week at October 17.
Without citing a source, the DermaNetwork (for Clinical Dermatology) brings up the Week as something to observe while sitting in the waiting room for your dermatology appointment. Their topic suggestions are equally surprising ("Write a letter to someone you know who has great skin").
Holidays for Everyday, a preschool educators resource, refers to "National" Letter Writing Week as early as 2007. No source.
At least one stamp collector is looking for a 1980 Thai commemorative stamp for International Letter Writing Week, but this source does not say which week that was. If you don't believe in 1980, you can buy a later version of this stamp from 2008. It would help to speak Spanish, in this case.

Does anyone reading this know anything more about it? I'd love to hear from you.

Your pal,
Christian

P.S.: A bunch of sites claim it's actually in October. From the contexts I've glossed over, it looks like it used to be in October maybe a century ago, but now someone's started it up again and placed it in January. Can anyone clear this up?

The Riddle of International Postage

2010-12-22T22:49:00.002-06:00

Sorry I haven't updated in so long. To my dismay, I haven't actually done a lot of letter- or postcard-writing in the past two months! Postage is kind of expensive in Indonesia though postcards are cheap. Unfortunately, it seems like one company has a stranglehold on postcards throughout the Indonesian islands so they aren't very interesting--ubiquitously, they are the "image on white background" style, like a negative motivational poster, with the caption beneath. Also, they never seem to really reflect the street-level life of Bali or elsewhere, focusing instead on terraced farming lands or ancient temples. It's up to blogging to show my friends what life's really like here.

Also: I cannot figure out the Indonesian postal system. Seriously, what the hell? I went to a post office proper in Denpasar and got stamps for some postcards. Without question or options, I paid Rp. 25,000 (US$2.78) for postcard postage going to the US.

When I bought stamps on Gili Trawangan, a small island off of Lombok, the convenience store tacked an extra Rp. 1,000 per stamp, but they also insisted I needed less postage. When I had questions that bumped against our language barrier, they referred me to a bookstore that also dealt with all postal issues. They had a sign posted that explained the rates: Rp. 25,000 gets it there in two weeks, but Rp. 7,500 (US$0.83) takes a month at least to travel. Even with the convenience store's "convenience" fee, it's still less than half the previous rate.

And then I sent a bunch out from the Sukarno-Hatta Airport in Jakarta, Java. The convenience store from which I bought the stamps again insisted I needed even less postage--Rp. 5,000--but also tacked on a 100% fee for each stamp! So what is the legal rate? I have no idea, but if you're in Indonesia, I strongly urge you to deal with a proper post office rather than any other service.

On the other hand, now I'm in Bangkok, Thailand. I wrote up a bunch of old postcards from Bali and Gili Trawangan and went out to a local mall, where there was a Mail Boxes Etc. office. Size doesn't seem to matter with postcard postage like it does in the States. There was only a moment of confusion when a clerk was inexperienced with sending mail out to the US, so she deferred to another employee, but otherwise it was simplicity itself: I walked up, handed them my missives, they calculated the postage and I paid it, around US$5 for four postcards and one letter going out to the US and other countries. Awesome.

I never actually used this Bangkok mailbox, I'm just including it because I take pictures of mailboxes in other countries. I thought it interesting that the front of it differentiates between "Bangkok" and "Other Places." Tells you something about the mindset of a city, like how California and New York like to dismiss everything between them as "flyover states."

Selamat Malam! Broadcasting from Bali!

2010-11-16T08:20:00.002-06:00

Sorry, sorry! I know it's been forever (though I don't think many have been holding their breath for that long), but things have been so busy.

Did you know I'm in Indonesia? It's true! I've been here for over two weeks, living in Sanur and going to school at IALF Bali in Denpasar. The weather, of course, is stunning: hot, humid, and plenty of sun. I learned to surf the first weekend I got here, in the Indian Ocean, and I've slowly been acclimating to stronger and stronger peppers. Tonight we had ayam rica rica which means "extremely hot chicken" and it really tested our senses. Fortunately, Rebecca makes her own yogurt...

Anyway, this is a photo of a mailbox on Jalan Raya Sesetan in Denpasar. This is the first mailbox I've seen in weeks, and it stood before the wreckage of the former post office. Well, depending on whom you ask, the post office is still there: the front looks gutted and torn down, but the back may still be operational. I didn't confirm that tonight, even though I have six postcards waiting to be flung around the world.

Just wanted to let anyone reading know that I'm alive and well and trying not to giggle too hard about the snow emergency in my former home state because that would be rude. Tell you what, we've got a half day of school tomorrow, maybe we'll go swimming in Kuta to show our support.

Until I can post something useful about the postal system in Bali, please to enjoy 20 Obsolete English Words That Should Make a Comeback.

Ms. Clapsaddle of the New York Clapsaddles

2010-09-20T00:38:00.003-05:00

How many of us know the name of Ellen Clapsaddle?

It's a lovely name. Good Lord, I don't know of many others as evocative of an era, of many others that so bespeak of a time and place as well as that of "Clapsaddle." It sounds comical, yes, but it also definitely sounds like it comes from somewhere, there's definitely a story behind it. There's some Old West to it, or maybe even some British tincture; there's definitely a career or two in the story of this surname.

I don't know that story.

I do know the craft of this Ellen Hattie Clapsaddle, however, and I'm sure you do too. If you've ever seen a cloyingly sweet, Victorian-era holiday greeting card or Valentine postcard, you've almost certainly seen Ellen's artwork. Every article about her describes her as "prolific," defining an era with her work. One entry even insists that she took the old, demonic-looking (by our contemporary standards) image of Santa Claus and made him the sweet, jolly old man we know him to be. This might not make any sense unless you've actually managed to get your hands on an old newspaper from the early 1900s and have seen their rendition of Santa Claus: far from jolly, he looked lecherous, murderous, and at the very least down on his luck, and if he were to break into someone's house in the middle of the night, leaving gifts under the tree would not be what the newspapers would have to report the next morning.

But certainly, this silly-sounding name was the signature behind an astonishing body of work, not just in how it characterized a span of time, like the Currier and Ives prints, but the sheer volume of produced work. It's important to bear in mind the names of the artists who shaped our culture, and Ms. Clapsaddle's pen truly originated much of how we perceive our modern holidays to appear.

Strengthen Your Vocabulary: WotD

2010-08-31T14:44:00.001-05:00

I don't know how anyone measured it, but someone promoted the claim that William S. Burroughs had the largest working vocabulary of... well, I don't even know what the standard was. Of everyone? What a proud claim, and only the most undereducated of his most fanatic followers would suggest such a thing. Certainly, we could say he was among the most literate of his peers or of his contemporaries.

I don't bring this up to denigrate him, far from it: I think he's an icon of aspiration in this sense. It's a fun game to collect as many obscure words as possible, but it's also essential to remain abreast of far-flung vocabulary just to keep one's mind in prime shape. And who's to say which obscure word won't be on everyone's tongue tomorrow morning, or what once-handy term will next find itself camping out in the outskirts of popular culture?

To fend against vocabulaic* atrophy, a good Word of the Day project is most helpful. You can generate your own simply by picking up a nice notebook (I recommend Moleskine--if you ritualize and sanctify these things you'll take them more seriously--but anything full of paper will do) and consulting a dictionary. Flip through the hardcopy at random, or most online dictionaries feature a whimsical little "random word" feature. Pick a word, write it down with its definition, and practice a couple sentences implementing this word. Try to contrive ways to use it throughout your day. And if you're really hardcore, at the end of the week you should take your week's group of words and integrate them into a one-paragraph writing exercise.

Otherwise, many online dictionaries or special-interest groups also offer WotD (word of the day) functions, and I've developed some preferences in using them.

Wordsmith.org - Anu Garg's WotD project has been around almost as long as the Internet has, and probably before. He's dedicated to exploring the world of English language and reflecting it back to its native speakers. It's an excellent one for beginners, replete with etymology and usage, but an advanced wordmonger may become frustrated at not discovering anything new by this service.

Merriam-Webster - Also set up for beginners, this is a facile and accessible list of words that you may encounter often or rarely, depending on how much you read for recreation. And if you grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons, you probably have a better vocabulary than anyone discovering a love of literature via Twilight and Harry Potter. No disrespect intended to those very popular works; I'm just saying AD&D boosted my working vocabulary in surprising ways. The words M-W's WotD produces are useful and sometimes interesting, but not abstruse enough for my preference.

Dictionary.com - I would warn people away from this website simply because it tends to dump 100+ cookies and data trackers onto your poor computer, but if you're a diligent computer user with antivirus programs better than McAfee and Norton and you're using Firefox or Chrome for a browser, you can go here long enough to grab the RSS feed. The words it produces are very good: I'd rate them between uncommon and obscure. If it weren't so data-invasive, I'd freely recommend this site to anyone ready for a taste of advanced vocabulary.

Oxford English Dictionary - The OED's online service is pay-only: you can't access this lovely database of knowledge without shelling out a pretty penny for it. I have access to it through my alma mater and I do cherish it. But! They offer a free WotD program! How about that? Mind you, Merriam-Webster is our nation's Declaration of Independence from the OED, but if you really want to study, really want to know where words come from, the OED is invaluable. A random selection of words from this source in particular is generally a delight.

Wordnik - Why do I like this one best? Is it the design/presentation? Is it the lines of classical text used for their case-in-point examples? Is it the truly, truly obscure selection of words from all up and down the timeline? All of these things, I'm sure, and more are why I value Wordnik so highly.

Best of all is grabbing the RSS feeds for each of these sites and compiling them wherever you like, whatever RSS-feed aggregate you like, embedding them on your own blog, whatever. The important thing is just to keep practicing new words, always, always, always.

* No, that's not a real word. I made it up, but you can discern what it means, right? It sounds real, doesn't it?

When Things Will Pick Up

2010-08-24T22:22:00.000-05:00

Namsan Tower, Seoul, South Korea

I hope my readers will pardon this increasing lull in activity here. Just tonight I don't feel hard-edged enough to plunge into picking off easy targets, i.e., grammar samples from my photo collection. Yes, I've been saving them up for just such a thing, but right now I'm not in the mood.

Please to enjoy this image of Seoul, South Korea. Why this picture? Soon, I'll be living there.

My wife and I both have entertained a dream of living abroad. I got to do that to some degree when I was stationed at Camp Carroll, Korea, in the Army. We had an agreement between ourselves: either we have children or we travel, because one makes the other very difficult. And given that there are already too many people on the planet, and considering the resources a child will use and squander between ages 0 and 18, and considering how grateful teenagers are for the parents' labors, and while our infrastructure will still support intercontinental travel and jet fuel is not prohibitively expensive, we decided to travel.

The easiest way to live overseas, we figured, would be to find jobs teaching English. For the past two months I've been instructing Hispanic and Somali students from basic to high-intermediate levels on everything from common nouns to modals and past continuous tense. My wife already has degrees in education but is also teaching students from many nations. In sixty days we take the next step: a 3.5-week intensive course in Bali, Indonesia, teaching English for our TESOL certification through Trinity College London.

That done, we will look for jobs in South Korea. We could easily teach anywhere for there's no question of demand, but I would actually like to find a work doing copy editing/proofing for a marketing or PR company anywhere in the nation. Doesn't have to be in Seoul: in fact, it might be better if not, just looking at it from a cost-of-living consideration. The best of all situations would see me at a video game company, maybe even one of those whose MMOs I play, helping to clean up the final edits on all outgoing literature and software. I'd even give English lessons over lunch break.

Once I'm overseas, I anticipate I'll have a brand-new realm of postal and maybe linguistic information to share. I'll try to post a couple things in the meanwhile, of course. I just feel bad about having attracted a few followers, buying a domain name, and then not doing anything with the blog. That will change, I assure you.

The NYT Doesn't Realize They Should Be Hiring

2010-08-19T08:00:00.005-05:00

I know, I know. Big-city paper gets all hurried and flustered, rushing out to make the scoop or whatever. Trusted journalist hacks out a quick tidbit about recent events, knocks it out in a few minutes, prints it out and rushes it off to print in the paper.

No one looks it over. No editor, no proofer involved in the process. Certainly, any spell-checker would not have caught this error in all likelihood.

Yet it stood out to me. I glossed over the article, idly perusing the New York Times while sitting at the table in my sister-in-law's house, and suddenly the running gait of my eyes tripped over a large obstacle. That's what spelling (even contextual spelling) errors do to me, usually. They stop me, they take me out of the reading process and a section of my brain lights up. It's the same section that believes in justice, I think, and maybe even seats the sense of a universal intelligence guiding us along, beyond the ken of mortal understanding. Because I believe in and work with these things, discrepancies and exceptions snag my attention as my conscious thought races past.

I dug out my Wacom tablet, selected an appropriately red color for my "ink," took electric pen in hand, and marked this up in nothing more or less ignominious than a recent version of MS Paint. Now that I know how to do that, and provided I always keep my camera on me, no homemade signage will be safe from my scrutiny.

Just a Small Complaint About the Old Way

2010-08-18T00:27:00.000-05:00

This is just a little frustrating. I mean, I love the post office and I want to support it, but sometimes its failings are a little too glaring.

I've had cranky postal carriers before. One guy was very upset that I hung around while he was distributing the mail for my apartment building (we had a large bank of mailboxes that opened forward in one unit, into which he would drop our mail). I just wanted to walk past but he told me it was against the law for me to be in there with him while they were open. So I hung out nearby, patient as a tree, and he got flustered and told me to collect my mail and leave. Ever since then, about twice a week my mail would be returned to sender or mangled in its box. I had to buy a post office box to circumvent this prick.

I've also had a drunk postal carrier. One old guy who had a problem with written instructions: I left a note for him not to leave packages for me on the front step of my apartment (different building), and he kept leaving them out there and they kept getting stolen. I identified him one day, climbing into his mail truck, and saw two empty beer cans tumble out. He didn't bother to pick them up when he drove off.

But this... this is just a new carrier. He's not malicious, I don't think, he's just new. Has that new carrier scent to him, I like it. But he just doesn't pick up on certain things. The upper picture is of our mailboxes in this house, those of mine and my wife and of the landlord upstairs. Two mailboxes, two apartments, that's it. They're clearly labeled with our surnames and no other carrier has had a problem with this.

But where does this guy insist on cramming our mail deliveries?

There are two nonoperational slots on either side of the front door. They're brass plates that say MAIL on them, sure, but they're not labeled. They have no one's name on them, so how did ths mail carrier decide that one slot should get a certain person's mail? And why would be perform the delivery in a method as questionable as wadding it up and jamming it forcibly into a too-small space? Anyone might interpret that the wrong way or even question his competency.

But I love the post office. I don't want to rock the boat or anything.

The Erasable Sharpie

2010-08-09T22:56:00.000-05:00

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I'm actually making plans to leave the country, and once I do my posts will either A) become very interesting or B) fizzle out entirely. I'm hoping for the former but you never know.

In the interim, here's an interesting new stationery development: the erasable Sharpie. As the video stresses, it writes like a pen and erases like a pencil. The package says it dries to permanence in 24 hours while the Sharpie corporate blog says three days--doubtless, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. But before that time it seems to erase at least as cleanly as any pencil.

I would just want to feel it, how the tip drags across the paper, whether notebook or Clairfontaine, see where it's most useful. That's if I find I really want an erasable Sharpie, and generally I don't.

Capitalization is the Least of Their Worries

2010-07-15T23:20:00.004-05:00

Well, at the risk of coming off as "pedantic," I have to point this out, and I confess I'm gratified to do so.

This is a menu from TiGER SUSHi--the odd capitalization being their brand--in Minneapolis. Technically, this is TiGER SUSHi II, as the first restaurant opened in the Mall of America. We went to the Uptown location, and as Uptown is foggy with hipsters, the status of being almost as good as the Mall of America should hint at the calibre of Twin Cities hipsters.

Please to note: the desultory and patternless capitalization of various nouns, adjectives, and adverbs throughout the body copy. This could've been a strange and tedious cut-n-paste job from other texts, or maybe their writer just wanted to emphasize certain points. It's also possible the font they used lacked lowercase form for certain letters... no, that's not possible. That's clearly not true: it's just awful typing.

Abuse of Quotation Marks: Thai Basil "Tossed" Noodles suggests that not only aren't they genuinely tossed, but some other verb has been done to them that the staff euphemizes as "tossing." I have no idea what they're implying with their "stir-fry" style--imitating the facsimile of something resembling something else?
Alakan Salmon: Should be Alaskan Salmon, obviously. Or maybe "A Lacking Salmon," an honest confession of sub-par fish?
Chillaen Sea Bass: Wow, not only did someone not know how to spell "Chilean," but they had neither doubt nor curiosity as to whether they had gotten it correct.

Who Lives by Grammar, Dies by Grammar

2010-07-15T16:03:00.001-05:00

Back in 1989, I was stationed at Fort Ord, California, serving as a radio operator in 127th Signal Battalion. Situated 53 miles away from San Jose, we still felt the impact of the Loma Prieta earthquake. We were standing in formation at the end of the day, the First Sgt. called us to attention just prior to dismissing us, and as our boots smacked together the ground began to dance. We heard mirrors and fragile objects falling and shattering inside the barracks, and soldiers fled the building clutching towels around their waists. Every single car alarm in the parking lot screamed in petulant attention-seeking. Eventually the rumbling stopped and we laughed nervously in our relief and shock.

That was my first real earthquake. It was exponentially larger than standing on a bridge while a huge, heavy 18-wheeler lumbers by. I regarded the event with a detached curiosity because I was unable to reconcile with what the ground was doing in direct contrast to what it had always done for the 19 years previous. Some remote part of my mind had the wherewithal to wonder whether the ground would, in fact, crack right open and swallow me whole.

It did not, obviously, but I'm going through the same sensation of groundlessness lately: people much more learned and far, far better educated than I are letting me know that my confrontational position on language is wrong.

I'll go ahead and start out by depicting my early grammatical career as that of a prescriptivist: I felt the dictionary was a book of rules to be followed. A descriptivist, by contrast, feels a dictionary is merely a magazine that comes out once in a while to report on contemporary language trends.

My friends were as furious with and intolerant of my grammatical policing and logolepsy as I was with the slightest grammatical or punctuative infraction, the misuse of words, casual misspellings, &c. You will concede, of course, that when one is bound to bray over writing errors, one's environment provides an abundances of grievances over which to revel. There is no shortage of material, is what I'm saying, about which to complain or be horrified by, and by these methods to attempt to gain glory, respect, and pride in one's discipline.

But it doesn't work that way. People just find you annoying and stop inviting you to parties.

Then someone recommended that I read John McWhorter's The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. My friends breathed a huge sigh of relief when I expressed my revelation of language as an organic process (my battles with the maleficent foe that is "living language" were comedy gold for them and garnered me no sympathy with anyone, ever, at all). But that turned around on them when I began to insist, per the tome's strictures, that there is actually no such thing as language: there is only the most popular dialect of a given region at a given time. And while I conceded that language will evolve to accommodate the stupidest of its speakers, as it has throughout history (and we see this even today, as high school teachers begin to admit "text-message-speak" in essays and writing), I took pains to really nail people to the wall on etymology. Knowing where words came from only made me curious as to where all of them came from and what they truly meant. And in using as many words as possible in their truest sense possible--to carefully select exactly the most correct word regardless of its colloquial interpretation--I began to alienate an entirely new group of people, but I also felt much better about myself, more confident.

That confidence has been dissembled today. I've been catching up on Stephen Fry's "podgrams." He is a humorist, writer and actor for whom I hold tremendous respect and admiration. And then today I happened upon his blog entry-cum-podgram about "Language" (blog entry here), and I started to get excited and rejoice in listening to such a deep thinker and colorful, lavish orator expound upon a subject so close to my heart...

Only to receive the most gradual boot to the teeth imaginable (as our current laws of Physics would be taxed to permit). He detests the proud and arch linguists, the Grammar Nazis, those who vaunt their half-clue grasp of language over those bereaved of any clue. Fry roundly condemns those who get their panties in a bundle over a typo in a grocery store sign, appealing to a larger sense of priorities and a questioning of motives. To my horror and disappointment, he takes the side of "you know what they meant; there is no breakdown in communication," historically (in my experience) the recourse of those who can't live up to the rules of grammar/writing out of ignorance or laziness. But this is Stephen Fry, accomplished communicative icon, headmaster of letters, one of the few people I look up to. So when he says what's up and I disagree, my default is to assume I'm necessarily wrong.

"If you are the kind of person who insists on this and that ‘correct use’ I hope I can convince you to abandon your pedantry. Dive into the open flowing waters and leave the stagnant canals be."

I wish, I only wish, I could ask him what place he feels an editor has in this world; whether I should order a double-Socrates, no ice.

Sealed With A Kissinger

2010-07-09T10:40:00.002-05:00

Anna Chapman: part Mata Hari, part Tori Amos.

You know what's dead fascinating to me right now? This whole Russian spy ring that's recently emerged in the news. The FBI announced the bust of ten spies in "deep cover," after intercepting a surprisingly blatant and guileless missive from Moscow.

The Kremlin, of course, denied any such spies were in place and suggested this was a fabrication by the FBI to compromise the largely positive relations President Obama had recently been cultivating with Russia's third president, Mr. Medvedev.

And then the spies started confessing (those who hadn't fled). Their real names have been released to the public. Our two nations have organized and completed an honest-to-goodness spy swap. Very far from a ruse, this tableau feels more like a contrived Cold War plotline taken far too seriously by some department head not overly endowed with imagination or, no pun intended, intelligence.

But you know what this means for us postalaters? Do you know what relevance this bears to us, men and women of letters?

A new draft of postage stamps! It seems that Russia views quite positively any of her spies that have secreted any information out of the United States, and it is not at all uncommon to commemorate them on their postage stamps. I don't know how I feel about the ethics of honoring the qualities of deceit and manipulation, venerating underhandedness and duplicity... but I do know I'd be particularly excited to receive a letter or postcard with a Russian spy on it. I had no idea this was a practice at all, and how fascinating to know it's out there. There's always the potential that someone over there might send me a postcard with one such cultural luminary featured on it, thanks to Postcrossing.

Various Forms of Water

2010-07-07T13:12:00.000-05:00

You know how things come in trends? Like, someone mentions an unusual word, and for the next two weeks you overhear it in conversation, catch it in a TV show or movie, or see it in print media?

"Water" has been like that for me. Certain expressions have been coming up and I started to get them confused in my head (if I was ever clear on them). For my own clarification, I just wanted to render these here so I don't get them mixed up again.

jerkwater: Remote or insignificant.
backwater: Reservoir of water welling up behind an obstruction.
(of the) first water: Of highest value or purest quality.

The Online Etymology Dictionary suggests the first term comes from American carnival slang, a contemptuous name for small, rural settlements that had no water tank from which to refill their boilers. Instead, they drew water from any regional creek or stream.

The second definition seems clear once you see it spelled out like that, yet I don't know how I would have ever come across this term in casual conversation. No one I know has ever been overly concerned with "the section which is influenced by the conditions at [a river's] mouth."

The third has a pedigree as rich as usage by Shakespeare, and it apparently refers to the clarity of a diamond. The purest diamond should be as clear as a drop of water, then an ordinal value is added to rank the diamond from "highest quality" to "colored stone."

Not included is "greywater," about which I am absolutely not confused. This is a catch-all term for dirty, used water produced by a domestic environment, everything from laundry water to what you flush down the ter-let.

All On Board?

2010-06-27T16:20:00.001-05:00

Stretching the "word origins" platform to its most tenebrous limits, I've got to raise a public plea:

Please stop using "drank the Kool-Aid" to mean "agreed to corporate policy" or whatever.

You're maligning the Kool-Aid brand, which had nothing to do with the Jonestown mass suicide: that was Flavor-Aid. When you use "drank the Kool-Aid" to sound hip and edgy, you only sound ignorant to people who know better.

Sorry for lashing out. I'm just tired of hearing people who should know better--you know, like, guests on NPR or whatever--perpetuating this mistaken and libelous phrase.

It's Not Quite a Postcard, and It's Not Quite a Garden, But Ma-a-a-a-an...

2010-06-22T22:45:00.001-05:00

The city is taken over by vegetation.

ZOMG, have you seen this yet? It's called Postcarden and it seems really cool!

Combining gift and greeting card, PostCarden is a fun and simple pop-out card that transforms into a mini living garden.

That seems really cool to me! It's like this small box you mail out and send to someone, and they water it and it sprouts into stuff! You'll have to excuse me, but this strikes me as very cool.

Obviously it would be annoying to buy 20 of them and then have no one to mail them to since all your friends are lame and refuse to communicate in any way that does not involve a computer, a cell phone, or some combination thereof.

Likewise, it would be annoying to receive 20 of these, but I know that just because I said that someone's going to vehemently disagree with me. Yet if I'd mailed them 20 out of nowhere, they'd be seriously put out.

Making a Fold-and-Mail Letter

2010-06-17T00:37:00.001-05:00

I'm still working on this, a project in progress. I know there's a simple and obvious way to make a good fold-and-mail letter, but I haven't quite put it into practice yet.

Observe my crude pattern on the left. Ideally, the bottom half of it should fold up into the top half, and the flaps should not only enclose it securely but the corners should run flush against each other as well.

Can't say that happened exactly, though it was close. I'm making these as part of an interactive project from Facebook--actually, I probably mentioned it back in April. Too lazy to check right now. The gist was this: I posted a meme that solicited five people to sign up (who would also repost the meme). For each of these five people I had to create and send some kind of creative project, and since all I know is stationery, I thought I'd make some postcards and a fold-and-mail letter for them.

It's just that I didn't think this thing through. Each fold-and-mail item is one exterior and two sheets of paper, each sheet being half of one regular piece of paper. I glued in the sheets at the top, just below the large upper flap, so you could fold the exterior and the sheet-halves in their middle, then seal it down with the three flaps.

I think, to really help the folding and the edges meeting up nicely, one might trip about 1/8" off two perpendicular sides of the sheets of paper, but not the exterior. This should give the paper enough room to bulk up with the fold and not create extra space before the flaps can fold in.

But here's my pattern, if anyone else thinks they can use it. This isn't the cardstock envelope I promised back in December. I'm sorry about procrastinating on that thing, but I haven't forgotten about it, and maybe crafting and scanning my design for this project will motivate me to perfect and upload the envelope pattern.

Anyway, the flaps seal with double-sided window insulation tape. I trimmed it in half lengthwise to be narrow enough for the side flaps--otherwise, you can't beat it for adhesion. Leave the backing on for the letter-sender to peel off just prior to mailing. Better solution than sending everyone a glue-stick they'll use once and lose. And the address labels are my own design: I carved out the border in linoleum, stamped it onto parchment, then cut it out closely and glued it to the front of each exterior.

An Extended History of Personal Correspondence

2010-06-03T23:58:00.000-05:00

All right, if you're sick of hearing me go on and on about the wonder and miracle of Postcrossing, remember where you set your handbag down and finish your drink, because here comes some more.

I mean, seriously. It's so hard to find a good pen pal! My first was way back in first grade, when I wrote to my crush even though she was in my class and lived in the same town. The gesture was lost on her six-year-old heart and I believe I earned some mockery over it. The letter-writing process was educational on its own mert: in writing to grandparents I already knew I had very little to say (beyond "thanks for the Stretch Armstrong, I broke him already"), but in writing to Stacy Woods, the cutest girl I'd ever seen, I discovered I had absolutely nothing to say. I don't even remember what I talked about. Probably a moon rock I was convinced I'd found.

Then, when I was in middle school (Michigan) and was going to move to another state for high school (Wisconsin), I asked if I could write to my then-crush, Kim LaPlante. She agreed and I think we may have exchanged one whole letter. I wrote to her, she wrote back, and I wrote some stupid clueless drivel that was more my own mom's programming that she couldn't possibly be interested in me than any of the feelings welling in my heart for her. Never heard from her again. Yeah, I played that one wrong.

I did end up writing to my crush in high school as I went into the Army, and that only worked out because I was so reclusive in high school that when I opened up to her in letters I became a more interesting person. Kate was also very into correspondence and inducted me into the world of Friendship Books and Tiger Beat magazine, where people posted their addresses in the back so people with similar music interests could write to them. Our correspondence never turned into a romance, of course, but we are still friends to present day.

And once in the Army, plundering the resources Kate imbued me with, I spread my feeble, off-black tendrils around the nation I'd left behind (I was stationed in South Korea) and hooked up with three dozen gothchicks, all roiling in their own incurable depression, all nurturing their own impossible crushes on foreign band members. I got a lot of useful information out of those exchanges--all of it in music, none of it in how to foster healthful social relationships. Oh well.

Now, things are much better. I correspond frequently with my friend Angela, a DJ in Madison, WI; I trade postcards with Davide in Italy and Zatimi in Malaysia; and I just met this awesome character in the Netherlands. His postcard to me cracked me up, and everyone I've shown it to has insisted I need to cultivate him as a pen pal. I proposed the idea to him--proposed sending him some of my vintage stamps in exchange for his pre-Euro postage--and he wrote back:

It would be an honour, beste Christian, to receive a card from you, or clogs full of cards for my sake, with the stamps like you described. For a philatelist like me the promising lines which you wrote are like The Holy Gospel for the average Amish.

That's just his opening line. How could I not want this person on my side? He's a fun and able writer, the kind of person I need to keep in touch with. And I wouldn't have met him but for the Internet generally, but Postcrossing particularly.

URL Update: Postalatry.org!

2010-05-28T00:01:00.000-05:00

I just purchased postalatry.org, so anyone linking to this site may care to update their link.

The old URL will continue to work, of course.

Carving a Pen Chamber in a Moleskine

2010-05-23T13:44:00.003-05:00

I think I've touched on my Moleskine (pron. MOLE-eh-SKEEN-eh) love before, right? The little black notebook that comes with the onion-skin pamphlet explaining how the notebook this was modeled on was actually the favorite of, like, Michaelangelo, Van Gogh, Hemingway, Jackie Chan, the Dalai Lama, &c.?

Someone forwarded me an online article by Treehugger, featuring six "awesome hacks" for your Moleskine notebook. Granted, I could easily buy enough Moleskines to build a small cabin, but it never occurred to me to get one just to mess around with and deface. So my wife surprised me out of nowhere by buying me one expressly for this purpose. "Get silly with this one," she said. "This is your Moleskine to go crazy with." She knows that I revere the Moleskine as basically a perfect end-product, so anything I put into it has to be polished and notable, but she believes I should let myself off the hook and get stupid with this one.

I decided to start with the hack in which you carve out a small chamber in which to lay a pen. The idea, ostensibly, is that you always have a pen with you when you grab that notebook.

Firstly, I'm never without a pen. Usually I've got two or three in my pocket, and even more if I've got my SwissGear air travel bag. I'm more likely to forget to bring a Moleskine than to grab a pen when I start my day.

Secondly, I really didn't want to screw up a nice Moleskine with my amateurish efforts. I don't know how the guy in Treehugger did it, but I'm guessing a Dremel would've been handy, whereas all I have are a couple X-acto knives and a boxcutter around here somewhere.

But I did go ahead and try it out, and here's my advice for anyone who'd like to do the same.

You can trace out the shape of the pen like I did, but now I'm kinda wishing I just went with a straight-line, right-angled rectangular box for the pen. I was thinking I'd create a more form-fitting chamber for my Slicci.

You can start digging next to the spine (and expect the pages may be a little flimsy to turn) but I would recommend centering your chamber vertically. I started mine out too close to the bottom and the first six pages shredded down by where the cap is pointing. Too close to the edge, especially for a beginner like me.

Use differential light to help with the cutting. You can see where your initial cut's supposed to go, because you've traced around the pen, but after that you're relying on the scratches that penetrated previous pages and those can be hard to line a knife upon. Set up a lamp to one side and, if you can, use natural daylight on the other side. Every contour and indentation will be much easier to discern.

Dig a rut in one side: once you've made your cut, retrace it over and over to dig deeper into subsequent pages. If you just trace the pattern over each time you get to a new page, you increase the likelihood of imperfectly replicating the shape and misshaping the chamber. You really want this thing to be as tidy and homogeneous as possible, and you can achieve that by digging in the same spot a few times.

Oh, also: remember to pull that woven fabric bookmark out. When you get to the middle of the Moleskine you won't slice the bookmark, but its presence will mess up your careful efforts to retrace the chamber.

But most important of all...

Use a fresh, new blade in your X-acto knife. I used a dull blade almost all the way through this project and it was a lot of work and took hours. When I replaced the blade with a new one, I nearly wept over the difference. I could have shaved an hour off my time and done a significantly more precise job with less effort and fewer mistakes.

A Pile of Out-Going Mail

2010-05-22T11:42:00.000-05:00

Lots of letters going out this morning! I've been meaning to upkeep and address these pen pals I've had for so long, but I've been terrible at doing so. I can point to a number of factors that contributed to my procrastination (depression, job seeking, poor time management, &c.) but the end result is still that I haven't written in a long time.

Recently I have found the time and energy and I have this stack of letters and postcards to show for it. On the left are several fold-and-mail letters, enough to write a quick note if you write tiny, going out to France, Germany, Poland, Sweden, and a couple points stateside. In the center are five custom-made postcards going out to people around the world through Postcrossing: it features me and my wife standing on the tracks of an old trolley still in existence here, running around Lake Harriet. Minneapolis used to have a network of trolleys hustling people from home to work and everywhere else, but of course that technology fell by the wayside (not in New Orleans, where people still ride these quaint vehicles for everyday business). And, like I write to every single person on the backs of these cards, despite living in this city for 13 years I still haven't managed to ride the Lake Harriet Trolley. Yet.

On the far right is a beer coaster printed by New Belgium brewery. It actually has space on the back for a destination address and a stamp, but I wonder how many people have actually mailed them out. I hope it's a large number, rather than... well, no need to cast aspersions here. I'm pleased to send out a large stack of mail and I hope this turns into a trend. I really want to cultivate these international pen pals and keep the mail flowing.

Illustrating the Distances

2010-05-19T22:18:00.000-05:00

This was a great idea that never got off the ground: Google Map Envelopes.

Ideally, what you would do is write out an e-mail to a friend, then click the Google Envelopes button at the bottom of your text window. It would serve as an extension to your Gmail account (and it assumes you have entered your friend's mailing address).

"For a small fee" the program would print out your e-mail, fold it up, and insert it into an envelope that had been printed with a map of the distance between the sender and the recipient. Obviously, it would have to turn the map around most of the time, in order to make the sender's location always appear in the upper left.

Don't read the comments of the article in the link I provided, though. "Don't read the comments" is generally good advice wherever you read news on the Net, but it merits being mentioned in particular. I'll sum up: a bunch of people are very upset about the amount of paper that would be "wasted" on this project. Yet I doubt every single one of them is dedicated to recycling and mass transit, or even growing their own garden and storing solar/wind energy. They're just very judgmental of other people.

Personally, I thought this would have been a cute, fun idea to encourage people to send actual letters to each other. Yes, I hold the postal system to be particularly darling and I vaunt a little letter-writing above complete and total reliance upon online communication. And it's no secret I'm enamored of Google products, so I'm disappointed on a number of levels that this service never manifested.

P.S. Sorry for the lack of entries. Both my tower computer and my laptop crashed last week and I've been getting them examined. The tower is back home and running swell, but the laptop issued smoke out its rear ports and is pretty much cashed.

Artistry via Postcrossing

2010-05-10T20:12:00.002-05:00

This is one of those cases that exemplifies or underscores what a delight it is to participate in Postcrossing.

(Yes, it's another Postcrossing post, sorry.)

I got this postcard in the mail today, sealed in an envelope with a print-out note, clean and understate European cursive on the outside. I don't mind receiving exposed postcards in the mail, as I like the traveled look and the cramped side (would that be verso? Or is the text always recto?) where stamps, address, and terse message fight for space.

The name of the artist was at the bottom, followed by "2007." The note was signed by the artist--she designed this illustration! I thought it was charming and, once I realized it was by a regular civilian who hasn't secluded herself in the ivory towers of professional artistic discipline, well-executed. There's a difference, to me, between artists you could run into on the street and artists who socialize only with other artists, publishing editors, and socialites at parties you will never, ever be invited to or even hear about. So even though I'm not an artist, it feels to me like the person who made this is someone a little more like me than the aforementioned aesthete in his/her rarefied atmosphere. This is someone I could run into on the street (were I in her nation). This is someone I could talk to without her taking offense at my presumption.

So best of luck, Marieke Lambermont, and thank you for the delightful postcard.

How To: Map Your Postcards Online

2010-04-27T16:01:00.002-05:00

Would anyone be interested in learning how to chart their Postcrossing postcards in Picasa/Google Maps? If not, please go back and reread any of the delightful and highly informative entries with which this blog is liberally doused.

If so, this process I describe assumes four things:

You're using Postcrossing.
You're scanning in the postcards you receive.
You're using Picasa to store these images on your hard drive.
You're using Picasaweb to store and display them online.

You don't have to use Picasa: this process works in Flickr and any system that lets you attach a graphic image file to a map program.

1) a) When your postcard comes in, identify the sender's Postcrossing code. Register this in Postcrossing normally.

b) Go ahead and write a nice little note to the sender. It costs you nothing and means so much. It's such a slap in the face--to me, anyway--to hear nothing more than "THANKS" or nothing at all, but perhaps that's my fault for extending my identity schema too far into an online program.

2) When the card is registered, you are taken to a page that sums up the sender's profile and yours. If you've scanned the postcard, you can upload it here to add to your (and their) online gallery.

3) Click on the sender's name/handle--this takes you to the sender's profile. There's a little Google map labeled "Mailbox Location," click on Open in Google Maps beneath that image. This opens up a larger map with some detail as to the sender's registered location. At no time can you see their address through their profile, but if you visited the part of town indicated on this map, you probably wouldn't be far away from them.

4) In the Google Maps search bar (below the address bar in which you type URLs) you'll find a pair of coordinates. Highlight and copy this pair of coordinates. These are, of course, the latitude and longitude of the sender's registered location.

5) In Picasa, find the postcard in your collection and click on it once. Click on the Places button in the lower right of the Picasa window. Paste the coordinates into the search bar, at the bottom of the Places table. Click the magnifying glass icon to search, click OK to confirm the location.

When you view your online gallery, the right column will feature a world map with little red pegs indicating the locations of your postcards. Click on View Map beneath that image for a much larger map with little pictures of your postcards all around the world!

Zoom in, examine the postcards, cycle through your collection: this map is quite navigable and fun to play with. I know I get a little rush when I look at the sheer bulk of postcards from hundreds of nations.

Decisions, Decisions

2010-04-26T12:49:00.002-05:00

Oh, the dilemma: two dashing suitors vying for her attention, each a world of pleasure and thrills in his own right, yet so diametrically opposed... and there was only room in her life for one.

Elegant and irresistibly demure, Audrey truly had the luxury of selecting any man she chose from a broad and teeming pool of options. Not wishing to crush any hearts, yet knowing she had to look out for her own best interests, she nevertheless whittled the roster down to the two most appealing candidates.

Cary, oh, Cary! Those eyes, that voice, the subtly amused smile that played about the corners of his lips while the rest of his expression gave away nothing... Cary! He melted her over cappuccino in that tiny bistro on Calle Larga San Marco, so near the action yet easily overlooked unless one were thoroughly familiar with Venice. It was his worldliness that won her over, this cosmopolite with the seductive purr who, admittedly, was old enough to be one of her father's younger friends.

And his spectral opposite, James: brash, unpolished, heady with restlessness and aimlessness. He almost put her off with his diffidence--after all, she knew her worth and was accustomed to being treated with an amount of deference. But the fact that he wasn't entirely available to her somehow enticed her, and it was on their symbolic trip from Independence (Missouri) to Junction City (Kansas) on a '41 Indian Chief that she started to fall for this unruly boy. It was one thing to have the world handed to you on a platter but quite another thing to have a small bundle of the Unknown dangled just out of reach. Especially when the Unknown hid behind lips like James'.

What was a girl to do?

The Office Outfit

2010-04-25T20:27:00.001-05:00

Can you imagine owning your own "office outfit?" I'm not talking about a nice tweed suit with Oxfords and a tasteful silk tie. I'm talking about this little thing: brown cardboard box and electric blue lid containing an entire set of stamps for making your own customizable rubber stamp. Multiples of each letter, upper and lower case, stored in a nice wooden rack, waiting to be arrayed in a wide, thin handle for printing.

What would you use it for? When would you use this thing instead of a typewriter? When would it be more economical to assemble your own line or two of typeset rather than contacting a professional printer?

I suppose it would be handy to confirm receipt of certain documents, though it doesn't strike me as the pinnacle of convenience to throw "Received by" into a rack and stamp it out for a few pages, then replace all the letters--and I'd put them back in alphabetical order, though some people would just put them back into storage and call it done.

It would also be handy for printing on unconventional surfaces, like, a label on a bottle or anything else that couldn't easily be fed into a typewriter. It could be handier to print on a porous surface rather than feed a sheet of labels into a typewriter or something, I suppose.

This was an artifact of my grandparents', when I went to visit grandpa's house in Idaho (grandma has been deceased for several years). In my last trip two years ago, it was very important for me to go through their office supplies and see what were the accoutrement of their day, what they found necessary or handy to have around. My grandmother was a high school teacher and my grandfather dealt in real estate, and they must've done some considerable business at home, based on two rooms that have been sequestered for an office and storage for office supplies.

Cigars and Pens, All in One

2010-04-24T15:58:00.000-05:00

Sorry about the prolonged absence from this place. I've run into a string of technical errors--not the least of which has been my laptop literally burning out (you'd call burning plastic and ozone a "warning flag," neh?) and developing workarounds for it (it will accept an external monitor, for one thing).

And now Blogger (or Blogger in Draft) won't let me upload photos! Each attempt yields a "Server Rejected": errormsg, so I'm not trying anymore. Workaround: I can upload images directly from Picasa on my hard drive to Picasaweb online, and then link to the photos from there.

That's what I've done. I'm listening to All Irish Radio (few things gladden and inflame my heart like Internet radio access) and backing up another blog with a separate online album--I truly enjoy online/computer geek-out campaigns like this one. But now I'm going to update this blog because I've been so remiss in my duties.

This is a pen case that was salvaged from my in-laws' former house. Rebecca's sister Rachel found it and asked me if I wanted it. When my face lit up and my voice failed, Rebecca said, "I told you, you should've saved it for his birthday." What is it? It's a nice brass letter opener with a wood handle, but the really cunning thing is the ballpoint pen disguised as a cigar. It has a great textural feel and the coloration is superb. The ink? Well, maybe I can modify a Mont Blanc refill to go in there or something, but it is a great-looking pen. Rachel associated it with me not just because of my predilection for stationery but my interest in cigars as well.

My History With Pipe Tobacco

2010-04-20T22:00:00.003-05:00

The Volume Library, 1927

Lately I've rekindled my interest in a couple smoking varieties, namely, pipes and pipe tobacco. I started with pipes a few years ago because I had some money burning a hole in my pocket and happened to be walking by a tobacconist, Lewis Pipe & Tobacco, Mpls. The sight of a cabinet full of pipes took me back to walks with my great-grandfather, Dzia Romanski. Our family would converge on my grandparents' house in Olympia, WA, and at some point "JaJa" would take me for a stroll through the woods. He paused to light up an old, old pipe, pick up a twig, and we'd set out. I thought the twig was part of a magic trick: as we walked and talked, he would start whittling the end of it and when he had finished, there would be a huge, fat slug in the middle of the path. He would stoop to stab it with the sharpened twig and hurl it into the woods. That was just his way. (Years later, I realized that woods was thickly crawling with slugs and it wasn't a trick of timing the carving of his stick to coincide with conjuring a slug for impalement.)

tobacco
Altered from Sp. tabaco, according to Oviedo, the name in the Carib of Haiti of the Y-shaped tube or pipe through which the Indians inhaled the smoke; but according to Las Casas, 1552, applied to a roll of dried leaves which was kindled at the end and used by the Indians like a rude cigar. Even before Oviedo's date the name had been taken by the Spaniards as that of the herb or its leaf, in which sense it passed from Sp. into the other European langs.: Pg. tabaco, It. tabaco (1578), tabacco (Florio, 1598), F. tabac, whence Du., Ger., Boh. tabak, Du. (17th c.) taback; Pol. tabaka, Russ. tabaku. The original forms tabaco, tabacco, were retained in Eng. to the 18th c., but gradually driven out by tobacco. Da. and Sw., and many Ger. dialects, have also tobak, Ger. 18th c. toback.

(Oxford English Dictionary)

Decades later, as I was wrapping up my Creative Writing degree at Metro State, I was in a design class that tasked us to create a PowerPoint presentation on any topic we wished. I chose the structure of a pipe and felt pretty proud of learning all the bits and pieces to the pipe, arranging them for convenient dissemination in a little lecture. I only gave the lecture to one other student, however, as we were paired up to evaluate each other's presentations. Hers was on female castration, replete with photos: this was still a practice in her homeland and a matter of some concern to her. By the end of it I was almost too humbled to bring up my frivolous presentation of an idle pastime.

tobacco
1588, from Sp. tabaco, in part from an Arawakan (probably Taino) language of the Caribbean, said to mean "a roll of tobacco leaves" (according to Las Casas, 1552) or "a kind of pipe for smoking tobacco" (according to Oviedo, 1535). Scholars of Caribbean languages lean toward Las Casas' explanation. But Sp. tabaco (also It. tabacco) was a name of medicinal herbs from c.1410, from Arabic tabbaq, attested since 9c. as the name of various herbs. So the word may be a European one transferred to an American plant. Cultivation in France began 1556 with an importation of seed by Andre Thevet; introduced in Spain 1558 by Francisco Fernandes. Tobacco Road as a mythical place representative of rural Southern U.S. poverty is from the title of Erskine Caldwell's 1932 novel.

(Online Etymology Dictionary)

As a child, it never occurred to me that pipes had parts to them, that these parts had names, nor that tobacco could come in different flavors. Had I a little more wherewithal, I would have thought to ask JaJa what flavor tobacco he was smoking, though in likelihood he would have told me it was a terrible habit I should avoid. We never had that conversation, though, and I picked it up almost four years ago. I find it a very meditative practice, and I will sit with a book and enjoy a pipe on our porch or simply smoke on the front steps, focusing on nothing but the flavor of the cool smoke sliding over my tongue. I've got five different pipes for different purposes, including one bought from an antique sale and a long, thin, white clay pipe replicating what American soldiers were using at Fort Snelling over 200 years ago. Some pipes are reserved for the dark and bitter tobaccos and others for the more sweetly flavored classes. What intrigues me about the pipe is that it gets better with more use: layers and layers of smokings "season" it, in a way, like a cast iron skillet, until you're not only smoking the tobacco you just packed into it but also a little portion of every bit you've enjoyed throughout the pipe's life. On so many levels, this is a meditative practice.

Travel Stationery Mini-Portfolio

2010-04-13T21:20:00.001-05:00

For my birthday, a friend made me a special gift. By "made" I do mean this thing was meticulously hand-crafted, as she is a very crafty person. She enjoys sewing and stitching with creativity and precision, and she has gifted my wife and I with her craft before. Prior to this, she made some super-strong grocery bags with two sets of handles: large loops that can go over a shoulder for large loads, or small handles for lighter trips. She chose especially attractive fabric for these, going for a travel/international theme.

This time, she made me something that blew me out of the water. It's a cute little travel portfolio for correspondence--she stitched "Correspondence" on the cover--that ties on one side or opens into three panels. The panels hold a medium-small Moleskine notebook, then a pocket for paper/cards and envelopes, a loop for a favorite pen, and then a smaller pouch for business cards.

I enjoy going over the details of this design, and I'm blown out of the water that someone would take so much time to construct such a device. I'll use it a lot, but for anyone else it might be quaintly archaic, and a more suitable gift would be an iPhone pouch. But this is perfect for me (she monogrammed the back to personalize it) and I'm still marveling over it. It's perfect, of course, and I haven't found anything in my online perambulations that could suffice with all this function. I've shopped online, see, and haunted the local art and office supply stores, but this travel portfolio (I don't know what else to call it) couldn't have been more suitable if I'd laid down the specifications myself.

So maybe some of my friends don't enjoy taking out the time to write a letter, like I do, and laugh at my need for postage stamps while they knock out e-mails that flash instantly across the globe. But this gesture shows me that someone appreciates my interest and supports it. My response, of course, is to plan something creative and demanding with which to rejoin. That's not a bad trend.

Milestone Ink

2010-04-03T19:19:00.003-05:00

Does this look strange? A picture of me getting a tattoo in this blog?

Note the tattoo: typographer's marks. I saw this image, arranged like a little man taking up sword in hand against the vagaries of those who would misuse and abuse our language, last year when I was made aware of National Grammar Day. This is a function of SPOGG, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar. Sounds light-hearted, but this is a cause in which I believe, so I got the tattoo on my right arm to guide my writing hand in the course of linguistic and typographic discipline. (My first choice was on the side of my neck, to underscore my dedication, but I wondered whether future employers would appreciate this.)

I thought it was a cool image and had toyed with the idea of getting such a tattoo but made no solid plans. Rebecca, my wife, had all along encouraged me to follow through but recently planned to surprise me with an appointment with The Ink Lab in Uptown. Ink Lab doesn't take appointments over the phone, so we did a walk-in instead. The gesture is intended to "mark" my 40th birthday, in four days.

But here we go! I've announced my dedication to defending the language, after four decades of life on this ball of mud, hurtling through the irradiated vacuum of space. Pardon my muddled and racing thoughts, I'm still on an adrenalin high (plus a lot of coffee).

Update: I brought this to the attention of Martha Brockenbrough, founder of SPOGG, thinking she should be cognizant of the homage. She surprised me with a prompt response, no few compliments, and extra special birthday wishes, plus a link to this site and a mention on her own blog! Rebecca may attest to the bout of giggling (in the style or manner of a little girl) this has induced in me.

Int'l Girl Aerogrammes

2010-04-03T12:37:00.001-05:00

Just added a new link: International Girl aerogrammes. Check 'em out!

These are the fold-and-seal letters of which I'm so enamored. I've seen them in various styles and alternate themes, like the very fun Mr. Lunch series as well as Gumby & Friends, and then there was a crappy set that featured a talented French photographer, but when you folded them they never came out even and overlapped their edges or folds.

These look fantastic, and they come in various international themes, such as Chinese deco, Japanese kanji, Arabic birds, &c. You order them in packs of ten, which includes five motifs and two of each motif, and it comes down to US$16 (incl. shipping & handling). These look so interesting and exciting, I anticipate picking some up very soon.

I heard about these through the Postcrossing Web site: they've recently hit 4,000,000 postcards exchanged. I went back through their blog and discovered that Int'l Girl aerogrammes were the prize for the 3,000,000 postcard contest--users had to guess which countries would be the sending and receiving nations. Layers upon layers of fascinating information, for me.

Knisper! Knasper! Knusper!

2010-03-31T18:28:00.001-05:00

More plundering of the in-laws' house has turned up this gem:

Amazingly, it fell out of a book I had intended to read. No sooner did I open the hard cover than it came sliding out, into my palm. On the back is stamped: "© 1970 KELLOGG CO." and it feels like it's made of a very soft plastic. Not quite rubber and not dissimilar to today's silicon products, it's at once sturdy and flexible.

This thing was manufactured the year I was born! (And yes, my 40th birthday's coming up and I'm pretty displeased about that.) Look at the difference between the toy surprise of yesteryear and the crap we get today. Four decades ago, a kids' cereal company thought nothing of crafting a complex stencil of its own breakfast mascots for the entertainment of children! Today, you get some doodle on a piece of cardboard or an injection-molded animal on wheels that don't work. (And let's not even bring Cracker Jack's inglorious fall into this.)

This stencil, being made the year of my birth and having survived twoscore years intact--indeed, nigh-pristine--I had no other choice than to mark an impression with the stencil onto paper. I found a nice, dark gel pen and tried to put it into the first sluice of Crackle's hat... and was blocked. The slits were far too narrow for a pen. I selected a long, thin pencil with a very slender tip and discovered this, too, was still too thick for the stencil. Any child who first attempted to utilize this "toy" doubtlessly met with the same mounting frustration and irritation I began to experience.

However, I have an unreasonable and desultory collection of writing implements. It was no effort to find a mechanical pencil and extend the lead too far for writing but just perfect for this stencil. When I completed Crackle's head, however, I decided this was too demanding an effort with too little kickback to merit completing the trio. Making sure every last tiny space and dot was filled up was tedious, and compressing the stencil rigidly in place with my other hand developed a burning cramp in my forearm. In the end I had a seat on the porch--our weather is currently lovely--and discovered the necessity for more than adequate lighting for this activity: many of the slits are so small and thin they cannot be detected in light any degree of dim.

My cat hopped up into the chair beside me and kept me company while I traced out these three friends. I heard an anecdote that these elfin figures represented three Depression-era immigrant groups, revealed by their costumes: Snap was some form of Scand (my memory is leaky on this point, and what nation wears both chef's hats and neckerchiefs?), Crackle was French, and Pop was German. However, I was completely unable to find anything to corroborate this theory online, the past having been rewritten. Anyway, ten minutes later I had my tableau.

It seems that the succession of faces degenerated, purely the fault of the stencil. I had some fun coloring in Crackle's hat, but coloring in Pop's entire eye made me wonder what had gone wrong. Perhaps nothing is meant to be colored in by the pencil: you simply trace the outline and then color it in? That sounds reasonable, though those lines are so freakin' thin, there's very little coloring to be done.

And, of course, they look nothing like their contemporary interpretation:

DIY Challenge

2010-03-12T19:19:00.000-06:00

How exciting: one of my collage postcards has reached its destination! Well, all three of those I've sent have, but this is the first online documentation of receipt. I'm unfamiliar with the Multiply Web site, but I'm unwilling to start an account there: I already have online image storing facility and am part of too many communities as it is.

I'm on Facebook, and a friend of mine posted a little online challenge, I suppose one might call it. The friend in question manages Lunalux and the challenge was this: the next five people who respond to this will receive something handmade from me. Further, the respondents must post the challenge on their own profile and entice five more people to respond. I signed up for this and reposted on my profile, thinking no one would see it: I think most people have me blocked because I post so much crap with games there.

But five (technically six) did respond, and now I'm dreaming up what I'll send them. Stationery for sure: maybe some collage or personalized postcards, maybe some writing paper and envelopes, and maybe linocutting will be involved. I think the deadline is that these things have to be out by the end of April of this year. I'm encouraged by who responded and look forward to producing something for these people.

Christian's Gold Cross

2010-03-11T08:00:00.003-06:00

Today I'd like to highlight one of my favorite writing implements, a Cross fountain pen.

I don't know what model it is, and I can only guess it's around ten years old. It has survived considerable damage and wear-and-tear over the years, as evidenced by the picture on the left: the end of the pen just tore and pried off, right under that metal ring at the end, and I had to reaffix it with Super Glue. I don't know that it really affected the working of the pen, but it looks nicer with that smooth nub rather than a jagged maw of torn plastic.

Likewise, the pocket clip became bent--that is, bent away from the cap--and when I tried to reform it, it simply broke off. This isn't a cheap pen, I'm not saying that, I'm just saying that I've put it through quite a lot and yet it still functions as a reliable pen. Perhaps I'm so willing to keep it because it was my first really expensive pen ($80), or maybe it's just the emotional value it has for me now.

I bought this fountain pen as a replacement for another one. When I was in high school we hosted a German exchange student, Markus Meister, who was a senior when I was a junior. He was quite popular and I was quite unpopular: my schoolmates would wave hello to me as they came in to the room we were sharing and took him away to some party or another. I didn't hold their thoughtlessness against him, however, and he taught me a lot about not being such a social retard. When his parents received him at the end of the year, they gifted me with a very nice desk set: a pad of paper with personalized letterhead, a stack of similarly embossed envelopes, and a lovely fountain pen with my name engraved on the side. I believe it was a Parker, with an arrow for the pen clip, and it was a medium nib with cartridges. And the German ink cartridges were so clever: when you thought you ran out, you'd unscrew the body of the pen and simply tap the end of the cartridge wherein a reserve of ink was stored. This way you could finish whatever you were writing and knew you had to replace the ink soon! So clever. That was over 20 years ago and I've never seen this ingenious system replicated in today's ink cartridges.

Did I bring this nice pen with me when I left for the Army? I don't think so. I think I discovered it among my stored stuff when I returned home in 1991 and started taking classes at Anoka-Ramsey Community College. Desperate for a touch of class in my formless life, I used this fountain pen whenever possible. And it was at ARCC where I was first introduced to the Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pen, in fact, which quickly became a favorite sidearm in my stationery arsenal. Bold lines of deep, deep black ink prompted me to buy a box of this pen all for myself.

But as it happened, I left my Parker behind in a Nutrition class one day. I don't think I forgot my books, but I was without my pen for the next class and I ran back to look for it and it had disappeared. Whoever found it didn't bother to return it to the name engraved on the side, and I imagine they just got frustrated with trying to make it work and threw it away: I stored it in my pocket and this caused it to snap in half. I could still use it, but I had to hold it a certain way to keep it from jack-knifing in my grasp, on top of the special way you hold a fountain pen anyway.

Years later, when I was temping in downtown Minneapolis--we can guess circa 2000--I passed a watch store in the skyway. On display was a rack of fountain pens. Having reached my third decade of age, I decided I should start behaving like an adult and part of that meant attracting the accoutrement of adulthood: I would have a nice, new fountain pen. Among those models, however, I was driven to select the least expensive and so I came away with this Cross. I call it my "Gold Cross" because of the tip, and with this pen I learned that I prefer a gold nib for smooth writing. Steel has too much drag for my liking, and the verdict's out on iridium.

I have other fountain pens: Kaweko, Lamy, Retro 51, another Parker. The Cross remains my go-to pen. I don't use cartridges anymore: I use the screw plunger to refill it with Noodler's or Mont Blanc ink. I read an article where the refillable fountain pen is a "green" solution over disposable pens, so I'm pleased to do my little part to reduce my carbon footprint with this lovely pen.

Straightening Things Out

2010-03-10T00:15:00.002-06:00

I'm spending a happy evening updating my online postcard collection. I'm listening to Cocteau Twins, going through my Postcrossing postcard wall, and geotagging all the postcards in Picasaweb. Sounds tedious to most people, I'm sure, but I derive an amount of pleasure from it.

For one thing, I'm discovering that the collection of postcards on my hard drive is incomplete: my Postcrossing wall shows several cards that I never scanned in. Those were scanned in and uploaded to Postcrossing by the people who sent them, so when I registered the card, the image of it just showed up and I had no need to scan it in. Now I'm going through my postcard album and a large black box filled with old postcards, digging out the missing pieces of my collection and scanning those in appropriately.

I deleted my collection of postcards in Picasa because I just couldn't get the folder renamed appropriately. It was one thing online and another name on my computer, so that made it tricky to upload and keep in sync. I just did away with it by deleting all online albums, renaming the folder on my hard drive, and reuploading it all over again. Fortunately, geotagging the postcards in Picasa on my machine automatically geotags them in the online Picasaweb album. This is important because it cuts down on a step: when I go into Postcrossing and look up the postcards I've received and the users who sent them, there's a link to the users' hometown in Google Maps, and clicking on that provides me coordinates that I can feed right into Picasa. Now I can see a map of the world and an array of postcards from their nation and town of origin, and that's all I really wanted.

Next, I'll see how difficult it would be to link this to Google Earth, however it does that.

A Blast of Stamps From the Past

2010-03-08T12:03:00.001-06:00

Oh, my Postalators! I have to tell you something I'm very excited about, though the circumstances around it are unfortunate.

My wife and her sisters find themselves in the position of needing to clean out their childhood home (Green Bay, WI) and prep it for sale: their parents now live in Minneapolis due to certain medical conditions. They love being closer to their family--everyone else lives in or around Minneapolis--but they are faced with the daunting task of cleaning out the house and keeping it maintained while trying to move it in this profoundly lugubrious housing market.

This weekend Rebecca made a second trip out to Green Bay with her sisters and they dove into picking through their old property, salvaging clothes and artifacts from their teenage years, going through furniture and household supplies, all that stuff. But my wife, my beautiful and clever wife, look what she's come back with.

After each of her two trips, she returned with entire sheets of brand-new (or at least unused) stamps from the previous decade--some of these stamps are 20 years old! Some of these stamps could drink, vote, go into the military, and do stuff with girls. I even remember buying some of these postage stamps (the Classic Comics in particular) when I used to more heavily correspond through the postal venue with friends around the nation. I used to look for interesting stamps and they were easily had, and now I've got them all over again.

They're in smaller denominations, of course, First Class isn't what it used to be. But they still work: one American Illustrators (34¢), one Big Band Leaders (32¢) and one James Dean (32¢) will carry a birthday card to Oisa, Japan, regardless of chronology. What a gift! Rebecca was so excited to turn these over to me, knowing quite accurately how thrilled I'd be with their discovery.

Consequently, the new correspondents I connect with over Postcrossing are going to receive a very interesting selection of stamps unlikely to come from any other source. Heads up, Finland! Keep your eyes peeled, Ukraine! Puerto Rico, I'm talkin' to you! I'd even like to extend the invitation to anyone reading this. E-mail me your street address (put "Old Stamps" in the subject header so I can filter for spam) and I'll send you a postcard or even a short note with these vintage stamps. One way or another, I expect they will go very quickly.

(The only exception is the Mars Pathfinder stamp: that will be preserved and prized, never placed on an envelope and sent away.)

Postcards to the Edge

2010-03-05T09:26:00.000-06:00

I sent out a couple postcards upon request. When I donated to Postcrossing and became recognized as a supporting member, a lot of people suddenly contacted me to exchange cards or begin correspondence. I don't know whether this is because now I'm considered part of some elite cadre or just because the announcement of my status raised me to the community's consciousness.

A woman in Russia asked if I could please send her a postcard of a jazz/rock musician or an actor. I asked my wife to pick up some suitable cards from the downtown Barnes & Noble, as the B&N I went to in Edina doesn't carry postcards, apparently. She selected images of Bob Dylan and Prince, as they are representative of my city, Minneapolis, and I applauded her decision.

Dylan used to live in Dinkytown, the campus town outside the U of M campus. I saw the building where his apartment once was, but of course there are no longer apartments there. Minneapolis manifests some attention deficit disorder when it comes to buildings and businesses, you see, and someone may point out exceptions like such-and-such farm that was preserved, but the fact is this: if you lived here, went around town for a couple months, then hid in your apartment for a year, when you came back out you would barely recognize the city. Not only would the businesses you knew have changed hands, they would have done so three times.

Uh, anyway. I never met Bob Dylan. I know he's popular to emulate at karaoke, for some people. I think there's an album of his, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, whose cover photo features a familiar location.

Then there's Prince. When I was in the Army, a fellow soldier asked me if I ever met Prince, because he idolized him (pronouns here are intentionally ambiguous as Prince idolized himself). He explained how Prince taught himself 28 instruments, and this soldier endeavored to do the same but started out with the tambourine, which he would play, rhythmlessly, all night long, prompting him to take naps all the next day when he should've been working. As a punishment to me, my sergeants used to pair me up with him for chores. He sucked and I hated him.

But Prince is just a huge ego trip on wheels. I worked with a former hairdresser to his entourage and she confirmed he hated to pay his musicians. They would barge into his office, demanding their back pay from however long ago, and he would sulk and order his guards to throw the bum out. He had a club in Minneapolis, Glam Slam, which I never went to until it was sold and became Quest. The pillars in that place make it difficult to get a good view of the stage, but the bartenders were exceedingly professional. I never met Prince, either.

Troubles with Postal Calculation

2010-03-04T22:47:00.000-06:00

Ugh, sorry about not posting anything in here for a week and a half. I haven't been terribly active, postally.

I wanted to tune in briefly to warn people away from using the postage stamp calculator I had formerly linked to. It's shite. It sounds like a good idea but it's shite. Here's the sitch: I'm sending a square postcard to Russia, and that entails one 98¢ stamp (int't rate) plus 13¢ (square card = manual processing), so, $1.11 in total. (Note: the post office does not print 13¢ stamps.)

I have stamps in these denominations: 10¢, 28¢, 37¢, 42¢, and 44¢. I entered all these into the postage calculator, and it's supposed to find the minimum number of stamps in combination to satisfy the postage requirements. It suggested two 44¢ stamps and three 10¢ stamps, coming to $1.18.

Except I put two 37¢ stamps on by accident, then realized that a 10¢ stamp and a 28¢ stamp would come to $1.12--only one cent over! The postage calculator would have made me waste six more cents beyond that. And you might scoff at the difference of six cents, but why would you spend any money you didn't have to?

So don't bother with that postage stamp calculator. Actually, it's probably better for my mind (in terms of Alzheimer's prevention) to just figure out my own postage solutions. It could be a riddle, and I like riddles.

Postcrossing Supporter

2010-02-23T22:27:00.000-06:00

That's right, I took the plunge. I donated to Postcrossing. I believe in throwing money at services I use.

Postcrossing's ordinarily a free service, and they subsist at least in part by the graces of their donors. I think that's amazing: they offer such an excellent service, and their Web site looks very nice! I've been to other pen pal organizations that run on low budgets and they look crappy. Poor Web design, poor graphic design, terrible site infrastructure and support. Some of them only serve as virtual ghost towns, haunted by Nigerian scammers and Russian brides-to-be.

But Postcrossing is a top-shelf service, and as much as I crow about it, I'm always finding someone new to get interested in it. Once again: you submit your address to their database. You click on "Send a Postcard" and receive an address for some random person anywhere on Earth; you write a little note, affix the appropriate postage and an ID code; send it off. In about two to four weeks you get an e-mail update saying that some grateful person has received your card, and you get a little map of the postcard's trajectory.

And at some point in the future, suddenly you receive a cute little postcard from some other random person, anywhere on Earth. It could be someone from Ohio or someone from Australia's exterior islands. (More than likely it'll be someone from Finland, and it'll be a card of a river, a mountain, some trees, and a superimposed flower graphic.)

It's fun. If you can stand to write a couple sentences and can spare 40 cents for a postcard and 98 cents for a stamp, it's more than worth it to receive cards from all over the world.

Oh, Such Notions as I Receive!

2010-02-22T00:37:00.000-06:00

It's late on a Sunday night, and perhaps I've availed myself of a certain supplement to aid one's slumber; yet while one does not bed down, reality appears to get a little carmelly around the edges, yes, fringed by long and supple ropes of warm sugar...

No more on't. I have ideas, not the least of which is a series of road trips or flights out of the country, for whose destinations are themed along the lines of postal offices and stationery. For did we not ourselves haul our silly butts across Iowa at break-neck speed, hurling ourselves into Fort Madison, IA, and tumbling up to the doorstep of Pendemonium with half an hour to spare? True, true!

Did we not, in fact, scrape through traffic and family drama to observe, at our leisure, the Museum of Russian Art in our own fair city? Ah yes, and after the primer as to what the hell was going through those enlightened and suppressed minds, we made our way to the basement, at least the lowest level of this structure, and followed a canal of political upheaval and social editing as envisioned and reflected by judiciously arrayed Soviet postage stamps. It was a particularly edifying night, giving us a strange dark faith that durstn't speak its name.

To extrapolate upon the idea, why may not two reasonable, sensible adults of wisdom further pitch out to our nation's capital, say, and visit the National Postal Museum? No reason, sir, none at all to keep us planted and stationary, none save that of our own procrastinative proclivity. Being a new year and all, let us thence resolve not to succumb so very much to this restive effect of potential motion and, at the cost of one slim carbon footprint, touch down upon Washington D.C., hail our acquaintances, and traverse forthwith to this delightful museum of special interest.

And then before this cake rises perilously high, may we consider its icing? Blists Hill Post Office, in Ironbridge Gorge Museum, England. Is it too much to dream of, to set foot inside this hallowed chamber, to beseech a stationer that we may hear of his wares?

Too much, too much for the likes of I! I can do many small amazing things, many small but unbelievable acts bordering the supernatural, but this is too much for one such as I. And, as such, turn I my eye inward to the nation and begin to design what may be one here, within my borders, within my reach...

Letter Writers Alliance

2010-02-21T18:17:00.001-06:00

Here's something I'm very excited about: dusting off my Cross and Retro 51 pens, filling them up with Noodler's and Mont Blanc, and sitting down to write on this lovely stationery from Letter Writers Alliance.

Last weekend I went to visit my favorite stationery store, Lunalux, because my friend and its manager, Jenni, was producing customized stationery to promote her new Stationery Saturdays event. For $29 I got six pocket notebooks with my wife's name printed on them (I kept one for myself but gifted her with the rest), having selected the cover and the paper within. Very nice stuff, and then I hung around for conversation.

Jenni asked me if I'd heard about the Letter Writers Alliance and I had not. I had just finished telling her about my standby, Postcrossing, and that's why she mentioned this group. Part DIY store, part pen pal group, and more than those, LWA is a branch of 16 Sparrows which has a broad range of interests in crafting, retro aesthetic, photography, just a lot of very creative stuff. Not the highest, cutting-edge creativity because that's too inaccessible: this place is a study of how people can bring creativity into their own lives, how they can compel it out of themselves. That's what makes it dear and sweet: it encourages everyone to do their best and assures them that it will be great.

But the LWA! I'm excited about this. I got my brown-paper-and-string package in the mail, broke into it to check out my stationery, immediately put my LWA pin on my label, filled out my membership card, logged onto the members-only area of their Web site, and dwelt in a geeked-out haze for a while. I'm trying to think of any other discrete event in recent past that has made my writing-hand itch so badly to begin reaching out to my friends. This afternoon I've written two notes on this paper and will write more. I'm going to write to the people who have been most important in supporting my need and custom for correspondence (e-mail inclusive), so I had to get a photo of this paper before I sent it all out.

Now I want to do more with Postalatry, dress this place up and try to appear a little more relevant just in case anyone from LWA happens to swing their eyes my way. I'm just thrilled to be part of this very nice-looking creative group, excited to be writing letters again (I never stopped writing postcards, but it's easier to do that when you do not expect anyone to write back, as per Postcrossing), and feeling more than a little validated in my interests. Some of my friends like to poke fun at the antiquity of some of my pastimes, the... I lost the word, I had a great word that specifically centered around the interest in things that are old, specifically for its oldness. And that's not me, but it's useful when representing the crap I take from people whose values lie with the latest technological breaking news.

So I'm glad to be part of the Letter Writers Alliance.

Postcrossing Self-Spotlight

2010-02-17T08:00:00.044-06:00

On the Postcrossing blog they occasionally feature one lucky participant for a brief interview of four set questions. It's interesting to see who else is doing this stuff, and I like the general concept of the spotlight because it makes a user feel special.

However, never in a hundred years will I be selected for this spotlight--one of my superpowers is the passive ability to disappear from lists, which really hurt me in elementary school but served me well in the military (only had to pull KP twice in seven years). So I'm going to profile myself in an extraneous off-site spotlight.

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

I was looking for pen pals on Facebook and I found a postcard exchange group. It wasn't working very well, as people would show up demanding cards but never responded to anyone else's ads, and when I tried to write to them they failed to respond to me. Eventually a couple avid collectors (Davide in Italy, Katrin in Germany) suggested I try out Postcrossing. I signed up immediately and have been thrilled with the service it provides.

Do you have any other interesting hobbies?

I used to be very into drinking, which isn't a very interesting hobby to other people until I got to scotch. The story of where scotch is brewed, the history behind each distillery, the conflict of copyright, royalty, politics, and family intrigue is just fascinating! I've also been practicing calligraphy just to help me tidy up my own handwriting. I don't know when or why they stopped teaching penmanship in school, but now we have college graduates and business owners whose handscript looks like the scrawl of a child. Finally, I (intermittently) run several blogs dedicated to photography, fiction, memoir, and stationery.

Show us your mailbox, your mailman/mailwoman, your postoffice or the place where you post or keep your postcards!

The first shot is of a postal clerk with whom I've done much business. I would have liked to have gotten a shot of my three or four favorite workers, since the guys who work at this station are just a pack of cards, but they were working and such a request was impractical. They joke around and keep each other upbeat, and even if they're having a bad day they are always at very least polite.

The second picture is my favorite post office, the Loop Station. We have a main post office in Downtown, too, but I can't speak to its efficiency. All I know is that this place delivers mail faster than I would've thought possible. If I can drop off a Netflix selection in the mail here before noon, it will arrive at its destination and be processed within 20 hours. When I write to my friend in Madison, WI, she gets my letter the next day.

Finally, this is one of the postal carriers who delivers to my apartment (I estimate at least three carriers share this neighborhood). I don't know much about him, I just wanted to include his picture. He's relatively good-humored and patient, as I tried to take his picture before but my battery had died, so this is the only successful shot after a few false starts. Also, it's no treat to deliver snow in sub-zero weather with a couple feet of snow on the ground, so kudos to him for his hard work in difficult conditions.

Here are some of the postcards I've received.

Show and tell us about your favorite received postcard to date, and what makes it special.

I've received many fantastic postcards, but this is among my favorites; indeed, this is what leaps to mind when I start to think of my best loved postcards. It's a profile of a castle overlooking the Yellow River in Shenzhen, China. The landscape is rugged, vast and breathtaking, and the castle on the cliff is incredibly romantic. This image touches on the grandeur affected by so many Hong Kong directors in their period dramas and action films. They're so in love with their own nation, it's beautiful to witness their testimony to their pride and affection. When I look at an image like this, I can easily understand that level of passion.

My Reading Habits, Currently

2010-02-16T13:49:00.001-06:00

I'm very fond of reading. Lately I've been getting back into it on three fronts: print (we moved a couch into the kitchen, since everyone hangs out there anyway, and there's a very cozy place to read); Amazon Kindle (whatever you say about the transition to e-books, reading in any form is better than not reading at all); audiobooks (just finished listening to Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them). No matter where I am or what I'm doing--audiobooks can be listened to from my laptop or iPod Touch--I have access and exposure to books.

It's a good life.

When I was in high school I used to read two or three books at a time. I don't know if my mind was especially active and needed that kind of switch-up, or maybe I had an inability to focus, but I found it gratifying and could follow each story. Sometimes it felt like each book was simply a different plot line in one much larger, byzantine text. The time I read Mark Twain's "The Innocents Abroad" and Memoirs of a Medieval Woman simultaneously was very satisfying, as they each documented their travels through the very same valley in the Middle East, separated by several centuries. How cool would it be to make a reading list of stories written all throughout the 19th and 20th centuries about one specific city?

I wonder what it would take for me to write my own book. I love writing short stories, but I've written a few and presented them to my writers group, and their reaction was that they wanted more. They liked the characters, they wanted to know more about their backgrounds, they wanted better explanations for behaviors whose rationalization I only hinted at. But could I expand these short stories into a book? I can't imagine I could justify that: one story was simply a character exercise in which a mother (aging, overweight, naive) quarrels with her son (pear-shaped, unkempt, arrogant) and that's all I wanted it to be, but my group felt very strongly that the story could have been doubled or tripled in length. I really don't have a grander message to share and I feel I'd need one to justify a book.

Mystery (Partially) Solved

2010-02-14T14:19:00.001-06:00

The astute reader may recall how proud I was of constructing these accordion-sided envelopes for distribution, how I'd labeled them with these address labels from Red Horseshoe, and how one fell off of the envelope in the mail, so the letter was lost but the post office delivered the address label (bereft of envelope and missive) to the intended destination.

Sounds silly, doesn't it? The post office's behavior? "Sorry about your letter, it's gone and trashed, but we thought you would value this address label."

But how does an address label fall off of an envelope? The paper of the envelope I chose is stout and porous, any adhesive should hold to it. Except the Red Horseshoe adhesive does not: with a liberal soaking, it can't get up enough gumminess to adhere to anything, though a sticky paste is formed so it's clear that this is the intent. I finally did get the label to hold to the envelope by gluing it down with glue stick, and when the label fell off I was afraid the cheap-ass glue stick had failed. The astute reader will recall my rejoicing at having found an "extra strength" glue stick.

It wasn't the glue stick at all. It was the address label.

I dug out the other envelopes I made and tried to pry off the address label, expecting to find a dry, crusty bed of failed glue stick. Instead, the paper address label lifted clean away to reveal a plastic backing, as though the address label were a sticker to be peeled off of its backing and affixed to an envelope! There were no instructions with this book of address labels (they're bound together on one side and you tear them off as you use them), and the process seemed fairly intuitive. I mean, the apparent back did have an adhesive on it that responded to moisture. But I was entirely unaware of this plastic backing to the label until ten minutes ago!

The back of the address label is slightly sticky, so it sticks slightly to the plastic backing but not to the paper of the envelope. Even if it was intended that you peel off the backing and apply it to the envelope, it would just fall off anyway! Does it need to be further moistened and adhered to the envelope, or do you peel it away from the plastic backing in order to have a clean surface for yet more glue sticking? I'm trying to find the pad of Red Horseshoe address labels so I can determine whether they are supposed to be stickers you peel off and use, but I can't find the pad anywhere so I may have thrown it away in a huff.

Oh, and mind: the plastic backing also flakes uselessly away from the front of the envelope. There is no part of this address label that is prepared to stick to the envelope, in summary. I love the retro restorative look to Red Horseshoe's products, but I'd much rather they work properly. (Note: I can't find these address labels anywhere on their Web site. I'm guessing they called it a wash.)

Imagining Someone Else's Life

2010-01-29T01:13:00.001-06:00

This is a picture of a worker with Amar Touring Cinema, in India. The card describes that he is respooling the film between showings of whatever movie was in circulation at the time.

This is from a set of Bollywood postcards I picked up at World Market, way back when they still had a brick-and-mortar outlet around my city. There were two, in Roseville and Bloomington and I think we went to one in Spring Lake Park or further out, but they weren't doing well here so all their outlets shut down. This was heartbreaking for me because I used to love to just wander around in there and look at everything, dreaming of where it came from, dreaming of how it would look in my crappy little apartment if only I had a substantially greater income.

But they closed, and one of my parting gestures was to pick up a square, tin box of these Bollywood postcards. I like the trend that suggested nicer postcards should be packaged in little metal boxes, you know? Nicer than shrink-wrap, though they're doing some cool things with cardboard boxes and Velcro/rare earth magnets, lately.

These postcards are themselves square, which means they incur a 13¢ additional handling fee, regardless of domestic or foreign postage. Being that I don't have any 13¢ stamps--indeed, they are not printed in this country--the best that the Postage Stamp Calculator can suggest is one 98¢ stamp and two 10¢ stamps. That's fine, that's only a little over, it's not going to drive me into ruin. (No, two months of joblessness would drive me almost up to the front door of ruin--and still require a tip.)

One of the cards featured a man sitting on the bonnet of his pick-up truck, on which had been mounted large wooden-case speakers and a couple placards. He was also part of a traveling cinema display troupe, like the guy in this picture, driving from village to village and showing movies out of the back of his truck, throwing the image up against a bed sheet or the side of a building, depending upon resources and size of crowd. That sounds like a fun life to me: I could do it for a couple months. In fact, I was so inspired by the other card (not pictured here) that I wrote a short story about it. Not knowing much about India, of course, I was careful not to make any distinct cultural references. I only made vague references to environment and appearances, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks or simply accept the story in its own context.

The Bollywood cards I'm sending this time around (my Postcrossing limit has gone up to 10 cards at one time!) are headed to China and Finland. I made sure to clarify that the scenes depicted did not occur in Minnesota, though there's probably no confusion over the matter.

To Slice, Glue, and Rearrange

2010-01-25T16:13:00.003-06:00

I first read about this form of collage as "Victorian collage," probably in The Surrealist's Handbook or something. Victorian women used to amuse themselves by cutting out pictures from newspapers and magazines and gluing them together in whimsical, imaginative rearrangements. You can imagine how appealing a group like the Surrealists would have found this and soon it was the rage. Even today, when someone wishes to represent the jumbled thoughts of insanity, an artist may find it convenient to fall back on Victorian imagery for a somewhat nightmarish effect.

I have no such imagery. Well, I do, but it's in its original form and I'm not going to savage it just to make tawdry, half-conceived artistic stabs. I do, however, have other magazines with beautiful, stylized photography. For this card I used an old map of Tokyo, recreated by Cavallini Papers & Co., and then cut out pictures of arms from an old issue of Flaunt Magazine. The hand with the compass was from a Hennessey ad, the girl's hand from an ad for Bioshock, and the jack-all-points arm from some tedious photo shoot for a clothing designer. You know how those go. Well, they're not entirely without worth, as you can slit out a limb or maybe an intact garment for superimposition.

I had an X-acto knife on hand and recently purchased extra-strength glue stick. I glued the blank postcards onto the back of the map first and then cut them out, to ensure they would lay flush to the edges. I had no vision for the imagery to start with, just cut out an arm and then found two more. I lucked out with the "tomorrow calls," though, also unplanned.

And many people on Postcrossing object to homemade cards (for reasons unknown to me) but I still think cards like this will come in handy in special occasions. And I can scan them in for my own portfolio, and even upload them to any of the dozens of online postcard-printing operations (I've had success with Zazzle in the past) that have sprung up in recent years.

Update: Made some more cards. Expanding collection will be archived here.

Scanning the Stamp Collection

2010-01-18T22:58:00.000-06:00

I've got a free evening to myself, so what do I do?

1) Get drunk and watch Jackie Chan movies.
2) Go out with friends to a local bar I've always been curious about.
3) Take a long bath and read in bed.
4) None of the above.

That's right: I went through the stack of postcards I've accrued from a year with Postcrossing and scanned in a couple dozen stamps. I'm very prompt about scanning the fronts of the postcards in, yes, but for some reason I let the stamps accumulate over great periods of time.

Well, tonight Rebecca was off at her book club so I sealed myself in the office, played They Might Be Giants at a modest volume, arranged a dozen postcards on my flatbed scanner, and carefully picked apart and cropped the stamps in Picasa's very handy photo editor. And it's not enough for me to crop and retouch the stamps, but once they're in my online album, Philately, I label each one by its country of origin, type in some appropriate tags, and then affix each stamp to its respective location on the globe.

That's right: through the magic of Google Maps, I get a special little thrill in seeing the thumbnails of these stamps floating over the Earth itself! I enjoy seeing how widespread my little collection is, and I'm curious about the nations I've never heard from. For instance, I have a dozen postage stamps from Finland and Germany each, but out of all of Africa I only have five stamps in South Africa. I even have three stamps from the South Moluccas, which isn't a nation and never legally produced postage stamps, and yet I don't have one single stamp from Norway, Iran, or Argentina, among many other nations.

Okay, I guess I don't expect to collect stamps from Iran or North Korea, but still. You can still see the other stamps I've got now.

Making Your Own Cardstock Envelopes

2010-01-18T00:50:00.001-06:00

Okay, here's a little something: when sending the holiday cards, we ran out of envelopes. I had to make my own, a process to which I am no stranger, but the cards themselves were almost square. When compensating for a little room beyond the card's edges, the envelopes were almost completely square. The bad thing about that is, square envelopes and postcards incur a 13-cent penalty. Granted, thirteen cents isn't going to bust the bank, and room for stamps isn't an issue since you can put stamps anywhere you like on the face of the envelope (they told me so at the post office), but... call me a traditionalist and a stingy bastard: I didn't want to spring for the extra postage.

So I designed an envelope. I'll update this post with a nicer PDF copy of it, that will be my gift to you, my four readers, but here are the photos of the process.

Okay, in the first picture, what are we looking at? The envelope itself is two separate pieces of paper: the front is a nice decorative piece of cardstock, and the back is a very simple, very plain monochromatic piece. The top line drawing is the back and the bottom cutout will be the template for the front piece. I chose those angles for the tables completely arbitrarily: I'm guessing it's about 30º. You could use a 45º angle or whatever you like, actually. The important thing to understand is that the front piece has two side tabs that will be pasted on the inside of the body of the envelope and one large tab on top that will be folded down on the outside of the back. The back piece only has one bottom tab that will be folded up into the inside. I think you can see where I'm going with this.

The second picture represents each piece cut out in the desired materials. My wife found an excellent book of patterned cardstock, available at any scrapbook place for certain. Should be available in any craft store or some stationery outlets, perhaps.

The third picture is how you will lie the bottom tab of the back piece onto the low edge of the front piece. I made that flap extra big on purpose because I'm using that double-sided window insulator tape. Actually, I should've made all the flaps that big. No reason to give myself less surface area to work with, when using that double-sided tape, which I actually had to slice in half lengthwise for this project! That's ludicrous, no one should have to go through that.

But yeah, you tape (or glue, if you have an excellent glue you're comfortable with; I do not recommend glue stick unless you're very confident of its affixing properties) the large tab from the bottom of the envelope back to inside the bottom of the envelope front.

Now, the left picture shows the beauty of double-sided window insulator tape: you just leave that waxed strip on there until the last second. Were it not for that, you'd be stuck eyeballing how the two pieces will line up before you slap them together and clamp them down, praying to your deity of choice that you didn't miscalculate anything in this imperfect analog world. This way, you can line, align, and realign to your heart's content. When everything's perfect, just lift one corner of that waxed paper backing and whip it away. I think it's fantastic.

I'm not sure what the second picture represents. I took it about a month ago and its meaning is lost on me. I think I was just trying to represent how you shouldn't be afraid to shave off an edge if your measurements are slightly off. I'm definitely glad I invested in a self-healing cutting mat and a metal ruler (though sometimes that Xacto knife actually shaves slivers off the metal ruler, no joke).

With the large tab on the bottom of the envl. back affixed in place, it's nothing to tape/glue the side tabs of the front piece into place. Really, all the work of lining up the two pieces lies in that bottom tab. This is when it's invaluable to use that double-sided tape: line up the two pieces, pinch the right end of the tab, start peeling from the left, compress it there and peel the rest of the way. Simplicity itself.

All you need to assemble are the three sides of the envelope, and leave that fourth tab alone until you fill the envelope. Or, if you're giving a pack of these envelopes to a friend, leave that waxed paper strip on the fourth flap for a handy touch. Like I said, I'll draw up a PDF of the proper measurements. The two most important things are:

Find a strong cardstock that won't crumple in processing, and
Make tabs large enough to accept a strip of double-sided tape, and then some.

Update, Such As It Is

2010-01-15T10:50:00.000-06:00

Uploaded new postcards from Postcrossing.

Not much else going on, I'm afraid. You'd think with only too much time on my hands (due to unemployment) that I'd be exploring all my creative projects. Not so: a portion of my day goes to job hunting and the rest is frittered away on Facebook games. I'm not proud of that but I've got to be honest about it.

I started a new blog where I take one picture of myself every day, 365 XN in 2010, and I've resumed writing one short story a day, but I've fallen off the wagon on that last bit. Einstein knew what he spoke of when he suggested the best job for a brilliant, creative mind was mindless drudgery. Under that yoke you would seek out and pursue creative projects to relieve your mind, but left with too much free time--as I am--I just become doughy and sluggish.

Overtly Complete

2009-12-31T11:44:00.003-06:00

Further proof that everything you can think of is already old news on the Internet: the Postage Stamp Calculator.

I'm in a postcard exchange network, Postcrossing, and so I'm sending postcards out to all nations of the world. Currently my sending limit is up to nine cards out there at once--everyone starts with a limit of five cards and you prove your devotion over time. Sometimes I have the appropriate postage and sometimes I've got a random assortment of stamps.

And sometimes I want to send a nice postcard that happens to be square. Square letters and postcards incur an additional 13¢ because they have to be hand-cancelled. Postal processing machines can't right the card/envelope into an appropriate position if it's not rectangular, so the post office has to tack on a little fee for the manual processing, yet the post office does not sell 13¢ stamps.

Enter the postage calculator. Type in all the denominations of postage stamps you have, type in your required postage, and it easily figures out how many of which stamps you need to meet the postage requirements. Sometimes you'll go over the amount, sure, but it's usually by only a few cents and it's still easier than driving to the nearest post office and buying the exact amount of stamps.

Or maybe it's not. If it's not, you should definitely patronize your local post office. If it's an inconvenience (like for me, between the holiday crowds and all the streets being coated in glare ice), go ahead and use up some of the extra stamps you have lying around.

Q: Is it easier to type in all the denominations of postage you have or to do the simple math and figure it out for yourself?

A: Go away.

Print Gocco and Holiday Cards 5

2009-12-22T08:00:00.001-06:00

This is a clothes-rack of printed holiday cards drying, waiting for use. We have big plans for these, and we purposely made too many because I suspect that will not even be enough. Having collaborated on a fairly intricate and involved project like this, we're going to want to share the results with as many people as possible.

Personally, I was exceedingly pleased with how clean this print came out, how precisely the black print went upon the colored background without skootching over to the side or anything. I aligned both templates to the lower right corner of the foam waffle-surfaced pad of the Print Gocco, and that proved (in this instance, at least) a sufficient guide to line up the two prints. You can see how it could've gone wrong, right? The colors slightly to the right, the black lines slightly to the left, and it looks like a factory over-run. Bracing ourselves for that kind of disaster, we simply insisted that it would add to the homespun appeal of an amateur, homemade project.

"Homespun!" was my rallying cry throughout, every time a blob of ink smeared on the back of a card, or when colors of ink found ways to transgress their borders or when ink ran dry in an area. "Homespun!" represented the quaint, one-of-a-kind quality that a mass-production factory would throw out and chalk up to losses. Not so with us: some lucky recipient will come into possession of a flawed, sloppy (read: homespun) printing.

But actually, the cards came out great. I was impressed with how well they lined up and how clear the illustration came out. Even the worst of the batch still looked great! And I'd like to point out my wife's experiments with non-white backgrounds. Green paper wasn't ideal, and black paper was of course completely useless, but the grey cardstock is an interesting relief from the monotony of white. My favorite was the off-beige paper, like cheap elementary school drawing paper, and if I'd known how affectionate I would be for this effect I might have done the entire run with that paper. It creates a humble yet precious atmosphere with the image.

Oh, but we're not done yet.

Print Gocco and Holiday Cards 4

2009-12-21T08:00:00.000-06:00

Here you can see what the first print looks like: large, amorphic shapes of color on a white background. You get the general suggestion of what the finished image is going to look like, which will really come to life once the black outlines are printed. Oh yes, I'm going to outline everything in black. That's something I haven't tried before.

The question there is, how thick should the outline be? Thick enough to cover the broad white gutters between the colored shapes? I opted not to do that but just to encapsulate the brown fur of the sock monkey ("fur" used in its loosest sense, of course) and draw eyes and mouth over the face, literally superimposing these over those features heretofore represented by large, vague colored areas.

Note this triptych: it is the progression of experience, application, and discovery.

When I printed the large colored shapes, ink ran over the entire stencil (between the protective layer and the mesh screen), going far beyond the areas I'd designated. That sprawl didn't print onto the paper, of course, but it represented a hell of a lot of wasted ink. "Gunk it up with lots of ink" is fine advice, but within reason: you're also throwing a lot of ink away unless you take pains to contain it.

And I did, as shown in the first photo. I readily availed myself of that adhesive grey foam and built narrow chambers for almost every single black line on the stencil. That ink was going to stay put and serve me only to goosh out through the mesh and onto the paper--no more of this broad spread of wasted resources!

The second picture shows you what I mean, and this is what it looked right before printing. Every tortuous alley is fully loaded with black ink. And it's not a lot of ink, either: a thin distribution proved sufficient for 20 prints before reloading!

The third photo reveals what I couldn't have foreseen. The broad spread of ink in the lower left is where the ink actually gooshed up over the foam wall and into terra incognito. That was doubtlessly the result of too much ink in one area, so a thinner strip would have served me. You can also see a couple joints bleeding with black ink where the seal wasn't secure. That's fine, it was still minimal spread and most of the ink stayed where I wanted it. Bonus: I only needed to refill the stencil once in the whole run, and when the cards were done I printed eight sheets of stationery with the black sock monkey outline as well as a stack of cards leftover from our wedding invitations. Now we have a supply of all-purpose sock monkey greeting cards waiting to be colored in.

Next: the finished product.