Postcards Into the Void

I'm reviewing my travel journal and, after a few nations' worth of notes, I've started to notice something. I notice it more and more, the further back in time I go.

Any time I land in a nation, or when I'm about to leave one, I purchase a dozen postcards and take an hour in a coffee shop to write them all out and address them to friends. I was about to say "my friends in the States" but I have at various times had penpals in other nations. At the very least, a few people who collected postcards and traded them with me.

This gets to the core of what I realized: I'm not in touch with most of these people anymore. I look at the names of people I wrote in late 2010, when my wife and I toured SE Asia. I'm still friends with a few of those, but some of those relationships have petered out and veered to the wayside. In early 2009, when our families went on a cruise, I wrote postcards in France to people I struggle to recall. They were significant enough for me to note in my travel journal, but now they've crumbled to dust and have no property in my life.

Postcards for Humanity

Postcards, my friends of the pen. What are postcards? It's a small rectangle of cardboard with a short note and address on one side and a picture or even more note on the other side. They've taken many forms: you could write on a clean slice of cardstock and slip it into an envelope, and that was a postcard. In the late 1800s, in the U.S., it was not uncommon at all to bring your family to a portrait studio, have a photograph taken of your ensemble, and receive prints of your images in the form of postcards to distribute to family and friends.

Postcards were printed up for hotels, to distribute as mementos of your overseas vacation; postcards are the stock souvenir merchandise in every major metropolis, city, museum and gas station wherever you go. You can even make your own, if you want; find an interesting picture (or a lot, for a collage) and paste it to a stout piece of paper, writing all the usual stuff on the back. Make sure the destination address is lower than any other address on the card, if you're sharing your new address with friends, for example, and leave enough room at the bottom for the processing label.

Vintage Postcards for Creative Correspondence

One thing I've noticed lately on Tumblr is that a lot of youth are getting interested in "old-fashioned" correspondence. One user I follow regularly posts ads from girls aged 16-24 looking for pen pals. They're so anxious to reach out and connect, exploring postcards and hand-written letters as the vehicle.

I think this is marvelous and would do anything to encourage this. Obviously it's inappropriate for so many reasons for me to offer to write with them, but what can I do to foster this? If anything, I need to embody this practice by actually writing to the people I'm supposed to be writing to. I have excuses, but I would rather sit down and make time to cultivate these postal relationships.

But at least there is room to let people know where to go for resources. If you have someone to write to (or several someones, hopefully), you can pick up good pens at an art store, and maybe Barnes & Noble or Paper Source will have interesting letter sets. This is only a step up from the most rudimentary and basic form: using whatever pen/pencil you have lying around the house and filling up a couple pages of notebook paper. You can get as fancy or as minimalist as you like.

For people who are looking for something more interesting than a dozen souvenir postcards had from any gas station or gift shop, think about this: antique stores. If you're not too precious about marring a token of history, think about it as fulfilling an old postcard's Zen purpose. Seriously, many antique shops will have a selection of vintage cards somehow unused for the past several decades! Most of the time you'll find them neat and orderly, grouped by theme or geography, but today at Hunt & Gather (in my new neighborhood) I found, in the corner of the sprawling basement space, a disheveled bin of vintage postcards, marked down from what you can usually expect to pay for these things. It was a dream! If I didn't already have a small mountain of postcard books and vintage cards salvaged from cleaning out my wife's former childhood home, I would've just stuck two fists in and hauled my catch up, sight unseen, to the cash register.

So think about that. Find a nice pen, hit up the post office for interesting stamps, and haunt your local antique stores for amazing postcards. Every one loves receiving personal mail, and there are so many little ways to heighten the experience.

Postcards Maintain Friendship

"The postcard maintains the friendship."


I have nothing more to add to this.

Taiwan Loves Postcrossing!

A cute Taiwanese video on how to participate in Postcrossing.

PeoPo 公民新聞

I don't speak Chinese, but I just like watching this.

More Postcards, Less Stationery

I did it! I finally crested 13 postcards at Postcrossing. Not that that's a major achievement, just a personal one. See, the maximum number of postcards you can send at one time is determined by how many you have sent. I was capped at 12 for a long time, but finally my sent postcards totaled 250, so now my limit is 13.

Well, I think it's neat.

Currently my project is to use up all of my present stationery. Have I mentioned that before? I've selected a felt tip pen as an arbitrary starting place, and I've been using up these Snoopy & Woodstock cards we found at my wife's house. I've been sending those to friends to apprise them of my new mailing address. We finally finished the contract with that horrific sublet and are finishing unpacking in our lovely Uptown apartment. I even have a few overseas pen pals who should know about the change, and when I send them a postcard I'm able to write tiny enough with a Slicci to insert my new address in the median or gutter. The downside to that, I suppose, would be if the reader were not expecting it or interested in the card in general, therefore not looking very closely, so I'm essentially tossing cards into the void with no hope of response.

Not that that would be unfamiliar!

Anyway. I'm trying to get back into blogging more. I don't have much to add here, though I will endeavor to continue to do so. I suppose I could profile some of the interesting postcards I receive? Lots of people do that, it's a popular tack. If any itinerant reader here had a request for something stationery- or language-related, I'd certainly be open to attempting to satisfy such a query.

There's No More Work at the Post Office

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.

Today We Mourn An Address Book

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.

Post Office in Luang Prabang, Laos

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.

Universal Letter Writing Week: Helpful Advice

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

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?

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.

A Pile of Out-Going Mail

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.

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.

A Blast of Stamps From the Past

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.)

Letter Writers Alliance

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.

Overtly Complete

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.

Envelope Assembly

I've had reason, recently, to get back into making envelopes. I'm quite pleased to do so: I have a number of pen pals--some of whom are feeling quite neglected lately and so I thought I'd produce something a little special to begin to make up for my inattention.

Several years ago I picked up a packet of envelope templates from a local store, Lunalux, who in turn informed me they were made by another local crafts-person. I won't expound upon the potential environmental benefit yielded by purchasing locally produced craft supplies, but I was pleased to be part of an insular crafts-sphere, of sorts. The envelopes I made from these templates were so admired by one of my pen pals, a DJ in Madison, that she requested a kit of her own, which request I fulfilled.

The templates come in many sizes for different functions. Many are suitable for posting in the mail and may handily travel around the world, depending on the quality of paper you use. Others are a little more intricate or awkwardly sized for postal mail and would better accompany a gift or else might be handed off in person. I prefer those envelopes which lend themselves to being mailed, and I'm careful to outfit them for optimal postal travel: stout paper, all flaps and corners sealed flat, judicious application of stickers, &c.

These pictures are of my personal favorite template, a capacious accordion-sided envelope. I love it because it looks fairly elaborate, hearkens to the classic accordion folder, and permits quite a bit of storage. Also, as pictured, the broad front has enough room for these particular Red Horseshoe address labels as well as postage--not every envelope can say that, not until you start talking to large business envelopes. (Note: lovely though the labels are, their adhesive gum is weak and useless on its own; with the application of Elmer's glue stick, however, it becomes a sovereign bond.)

With this iteration, just as a little quelque chose, I tried out a manual airbrush/paint spatter, I guess you'd call it. It's a simple little device, basically a long, thin metal tube you dip into ink or thin paint/dye, then blow in the other end to spray it upon your paper/canvas/surface. I've never used it before but bought it several years ago with the desire to practice at it. Now I've finally used it and I'm not sure what caused the large globs of ink (I had the foresight to choose a grey ink rather than something darker and less forgiving), whether a finer spray might be achieved with a thicker--or thinner--liquid or whether I'm just doing it wrong, somehow.

So, there we are. I've made four of these bad boys: one will stay in Minneapolis, one will fly out to Turkey, and the other two? I'm not sure now what will happen to them, where they will end up.

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?

My Korean Journal

I kept a journal while stationed in South Korea, in the Army. I'm not a great journal-writer: I had a large, ragged paper-cover three-ring notebook in high school that I used during my senior year. I recorded various confrontations with a certain bully one or two years younger than myself (that's how pathetic I was: little kids felt safe in picking on me) and my depressive personal thoughts. I tried to get a girl to read it, this beautiful woman home from college and performing with me over the summer in a community theater troupe. She described my journal as something Holden Caulfield might have penned. I was flattered, but I got nowhere with the girl.

So I graduated from high school, went straight into the Army, spent 19 months in Fort Ord, CA, and finally transferred to Camp Carroll, South Korea. I felt pretty lucky: I'd requested getting stationed in Germany and got California, which I'd been given to understand was a highly desirable assignment. I put in for Germany again and got S. Korea, which I learned was one of those "best-kept secrets" places. I wasn't up on the border, no, not on the DMZ. I was a couple hours south of that. I saw no action and only trained in the field for two weeks out of my entire year there.

Out of curiosity, I just looked up my barracks on BEQ Hill, outside of Camp Carroll. Strong nostalgic sense, going back to how I used to skateboard down from the barracks, running along Happy Mountain, down to base and past it into the ville. All the bars, the tailors, souvenir vendors, all the women working to earn their freedom...

I befriended those women. Where other soldiers were looking to get drunk and get laid, I was still at the stage of looking for friends. Shy and socially awkward, I was best suited to practice social skills on a woman working at the bar, someone working to get money out of me. Her job required her to be patient with me, so I could be myself and she couldn't run away. Eventually I made very good friends with her and all of her "sisters" in the bar. They all liked me because I was gentle and sweet and respectful, and mamasan who ran the bar came to value me for that as well. Once they hid me after bar close so I could hang out with them at a soju tent and get drunk all night. Mamasan gave me a farewell gift when I outprocessed: a little ceramic vase with a blossom painted on the side. Unlike most treasures from the first half of my life, I still have this.

It must've happened that I brought my journal to the bar one night, purely with the intent to write a few thoughts down, and the girls wanted to know what this was. They immediately took it over, writing poetry in Korean, drawing romantic anime-style women and nature scenes. Everyone took a turn, from the naughty, flirty girl to the usually reserved and sedate "big sister." They wrote on several pages, little doodles or entire songs they liked. I was honored with the gesture and still take this journal out to look at once in a while.

It wasn't designed to be a formal journal, but rather a business planner. It has a black plastic tri-fold cover and reads "PROCESS TODAY," embossed on the front in gold ink. Inside are skinny folders for business cards and notes and a thick notepad of paper. The paper is warmed and blotched in places, so it must've sustained some water damage, probably when it was stored with a box of random crap in my mom's garage. And it's not a complete journal: I bought it after I was well into socializing with the locals, some of whom brought me out for a day on the town in Taegu. It has recorded the latter portion of my stay, the adventures toward the end of my assignment overseas. It also has notes from the start of my college career at Anoka-Ramsey Community College, friends I was making, women I was struggling with dating. Socialization was so much harder with people who had the option to walk away and pursue other interests.  Harder for me, anyway.

I also kept a sketchpad around, this obtained in California. For an exercise I used to bus out to Monterey and Cannery Row, hang out in cafes and sketch the interior. I wasn't a diligent artist but at one point I had a bug up my ass to practice scenic sketches.  I resumed it in South Korea, hanging out in the countryside around my barracks (the area was much, much less developed in 1991 than it appears now in Google Maps). This picture was a half-hearted doodle to study a vilager's house out in the country.  I was practicing my technique as much as I was trying to preserve my impression of the area. I wish I'd done more sketches like this, actually, since my photos were pretty much of my AD&D gaming group and a few women I had short-lived crushes on. I really didn't do much scenic photography, recording the downtown infrastructure or preserving the landscape as I passed through it.

I've had a long, long relationship with paper. I maintained a number of pen pals while I was in S. Korea, and I used to sketch little moments from my days for their benefit, too. One friend even reports she has saved all my letters and asked if I'd like to rifle through them. I think I would be hideously embarrassed by who I was back then and what I found suitable to talk about, but it might be worthwhile to scan in some of the illustrations.