Moving Day and Blank Vintage Postcards

Once again I'm moving from apartment to apartment. It seems I can't stay anywhere longer than two years. But here are a few things that have come out of my semimigratory condition.

I now have a full list of everywhere I've lived since 1996, when I moved from St. Cloud State Unversity campus to Minneapolis. This is important because occasionally some stupid insurance form or credit card or whatever else needs an excruciatingly complete background of all the places I've lived. In the course of moving I tend to discover heaps of paper that have not been touched in years, and these may include junk mail or official mail that it turns out I don't need to save. On these, of course, are all my old addresses, so in the last three or four pages of my Moleskine address book I have recorded all of my past addresses in chronological order, for my own reference. This has proven to be handy on several occasions.

As well, among the long-neglected property I'm turning up are boxes and envelopes of antique documentation and photos. These are material my mother asked if I would scan and preserve digitally, as once upon a time I attempted to break into genealogy and that's who she thinks I am now (which is cool, because now I have a lot of military certificates from the Civil War). Also, I salvaged a box of old photos my wife's family was going to throw away, when we moved her parents out of their Wisconsin home and emptied the house for resale. In this lot I'm finding amazing old photographs of Russian and Polish immigrants, mounted on dense cardboard or particle board squares. I can't understand how her family would be so cavalier about these treasures!

This latter thing has turned into a small project, into which I've plunged all my energy as a time-killer and a distraction from packing. I'm terrible, but at the same time, observe: blank postcard backs. Through the miracle of Picasa I've digitally removed any writing and produced an empty postcard, upon which anyone who cares to may write over through their own graphics program, for purposes of novelty over social media. I'm not explaining myself very well, so here: when you upload an image of writing to Twitter, you can use way more than 140 characters:

Scanning in vintage postcards means I get to screw around with new tweets/status updates, &c. pic.twitter.com/WQncqWk4eM
— Christian Wilkie (@CWWilkie) May 11, 2014

 Alton Brown turned to this format when fans criticized his typos, and he instead hand-wrote notes on Post-Its®.

So if you'd like, here are five blank postcard backs from vintage postcards, from (as far as I can tell) three different nations. Fun, eh? I hope so.

Geographical Philatelists Are Vicious

My original post on some stamps I found, from the Republic of South Moluccas, has received some negative press! (If one snotty know-it-all and one offensive L2 learner over the course of three years is "negative press.")

You can read about the drama here, on my other blog, Sweven Volant. Why'd I update this story there and not here? Well, I wrote the original post in 2009 so updating that entry would guarantee no one would ever see it. This way, I can share the love between that blog and this one (and I haven't had anything really startling to post in that other blog).

It's not necessary to read either of these posts to fully enjoy one's life experience. This is just a funny thing that happened. Not uproariously funny, but... funny enough.

There's More Work at the Post Office

Hmm. Out of all the organizations that could misspell "receive," I'd rather the United States Postal Service weren't one of them.

I was notified one of my change-of-address orders was about to expire. It was from an address where I was having my mail sent while I was overseas, to an address my wife and I stayed at temporarily until we could find a more permanent place to stay. Obviously I didn't need that forwarding anymore, but this typo on the confirmation screen caught my eye.

Hardships of the USPS

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.

Merriam-Webster's Vocabulary Quiz

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.

One Acceptable Replacement for Mail

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.

Searching for Mailboxes!

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

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.

Reverting to Original URL

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.

An Extended History of Personal Correspondence

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!

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.

How To: Map Your Postcards Online

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.

Cigars and Pens, All in One

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.

Int'l Girl Aerogrammes

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.

DIY Challenge

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.

Straightening Things Out

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.

To Slice, Glue, and Rearrange

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.

Lost in the Mail

Bad news: one of my letters was lost in the mail. This is always discouraging when it happens, and it's one of the inherent risks of postal service.

I was using some address labels from Red Horseshoe, and they're very attractive but not entirely practical. They place the return address directly atop the destination address, and my concern was that an automated scanner might interpret the whole thing as one big address. When my recipient e-mailed me to ask whether I'd written her, I knew something was wrong because anything I send from the Central Loop Station usually shows up within 48 hours, in the contiguous U.S.

Sure enough, she e-mailed again to inform me that only the address label made it to her, accompanied by a boilerplate apology from her local post office. I knew the adhesive that came with these Red Horseshoe address labels was weak and ineffectual in all cases, so I attempted to bolster it with glue stick, which is usually pretty secure. But perhaps the paper I used was too smooth or not porous enough to give the glue some hold, and the label still flaked off the homemade envelope.

While e-mail has none of the romance or hands-on appeal of penning a letter and handcrafting an envelope for it to ride in, it is still exponentially more reliable than postal mail. And I'm not advocating a switch from postal mail, no, for I've had many successes and relatively few failures using this system. (The failures have been pretty dramatic, however.) It's just that I'm not a gambling man, and sending something via postal service is always a gamble, no matter how good the odds, and sometimes I lose.

Information Tends to be Freed

Here's something funny: I was dinking around online last night and found, through nebulous contrivance, a Web site new to me, Is This Your Name. You type your name in and it does a multi-platform Web search for you, turning up all sorts of results ranging from the practical to the amusing. From there, you can see who else shares your name, where you've implanted yourself... and who's borrowing stuff from you.

Inspired by a class I took at Metro State, one focusing on children's literature, I dug out some old books from my childhood and scanned in their endpapers.


End papers for McCall's Giant Golden Make-It Book, Simon and Schuster, 1953.

Without being conscious of it, the decorative endpapers were as dear to me as anything else inside or outside the book. I smiled to see them again, this capricious little design meant to serve as nothing but filler and perhaps some foreshadowing to the book's contents. Endpapers also help establish an atmosphere for the reader, and especially in children's literature their design is a strategic deliberation.

What Is This You showed me was that there were a couple of admirers of my scanned-in endpapers that I didn't know about. They each credited me, and if they hadn't I'm sure I wouldn't have heard of this at all.

The blog Yara Kono, in Portuguese, found it and cited me as "Christian Wilkie" (the surname I will be changing to soon). But the Babelfish program is inadequate to translate the author's caption into anything comprehensible.

Similarly, Kelly Rakowski, who maintains a very interesting archive at Nothing is New, has an account with vi.sualize.us (a "social bookmarking" site I've never heard of) and kept track of the endpapers here. She credits me as "Christian Fredrickson" and it's interesting to me to see who chose what name for me.

Not that interesting, I guess. And I'm not upset that they posted the image: it wasn't mine to begin with, it was only my uncommon find, and each did credit me appropriately. I would've liked a linkback and an e-mail notification, but those are just my druthers. They did everything just fine. And the issue is quite moot anyway: these posts are well over 15 months old, so it's been going on for a while. In all likelihood there are many other places also referencing this picture that I know nothing about. The discovery of Is This Your Name only reinforces how large the Internet is, to the point where sections of it are practically inaccessible (barring luck and chance).

Writing to Other People

Okay, so, basically I just like to send out mail. I like to write recreational mail and send it out to friends. I'm a little disappointed when they don't write back, which is frequently, but there is a brassy core that is my delight at distributing interesting postcards and stationery, and it is dented and a little burnished but otherwise uncompromised.

When I graduated from high school and was about to go into the Army, I very shyly asked a close friend if she wouldn't mind exchanging letters with me. To my delight and confusion, she readily agreed, and she became my first serious pen pal. She introduced me to other media that provided networks of pen pals and correspondents, and when I was stationed in South Korea I was actively writing to no less than thirty individuals. Mainly these were gothchicks around my own age, scattered throughout the U.S. I'm in touch with none of them now.

I got out of active duty in '91 and went into the National Guard until '95. During that time I secured my AA degree at a community college and started further schooling up in St. Cloud, MN. That university provided me with my first e-mail account and I spent a lot of time figuring that thing out. The mail program was PINE, text-only, and when you printed out your e-mail it got sent to a room across the hall where a chamber of large dot-matrix machines cranked out tractor-fed sheets of paper, maybe 11" x 17". They were huge, I remember that, and they took up a lot of space as I explored the Internet through Magellan, printing out all my interesting findings. I happened to find a Usenet group dedicated to pen pals and quickly made a few: it seemed people were very anxious to meet and talk to other people around my nation, around the world.

I'm only in touch with one of them, a lady in South Africa. We're not in regular correspondence, but we do touch base every now and then. I've also sent her regular mail, and she has to me, but it's quickest and most secure to fire off an e-mail to her. I still have our dot-matrix, tractor-feed printed-out conversations, a thick ream folded in half and stored safely away. The one thing that always impressed me in our chats was how indolent and spoiled I felt after listening to her talk about her life. She never actively made me feel that way, no, this was a compare-and-contrast I did on my own. I thought things were hard with school and having to go into the Army for college money, but her personal anecdotes blew me out of the water and I think that's when I started to learn to shut up about my petty gripes.

But anyway... I love writing letters. Not so you'd know: I've dropped the ball on a number of conversations. A friend in Madison, WI had to hammer away at me to get me to write back, and once I did we had a flourishing exchange, it was great, but why did it take so much effort for me to get in the habit of something I tell myself I love to do?