Together for the End of the Year

It's that time of year again. Throughout the world, nations and cultures and religions observe their respective end-of-year celebrations. The motivations for these run the gamut from expressing gratitude for the friends in families in our lives, to congratulations for having survived another year and best wishes for the future.

Few others than those with their head deeply in the sand can sleep peacefully at night, with no concerns on their heart at all. Public consciousness is inundated with news stories about the rise of this tyrannical ruler and the devastation of that unnatural weather disaster, with the vagaries of this government or the cruelty of that population. It is not unusual or faulty to want to block out the world for the sake of one's sanity.

But if you have the energy, this is the time of year to reach out one more time. While political parties demand fealty and religious groups beg increasing funds for spurious causes, this is the time to reach out as a human to another human. It entails no greater cost than 20 minutes of writing and the price of a first-class postage stamp, with no further obligation beyond touching a heart.

This is a pastiche list of people who could use a holiday card or postcard, to feel less alone. I'm building it haphazardly, as I happen to see articles on this topic, and will expand it without a schedule.

Safyre is a 5-year-old girl who lost her parents to arson and suffered significant physical damage. She would like holiday cards.

Aron Anderson is the only student of the only school on a remote Scottish island. There is a drive to provide him holiday cards. (Background on Ars Technica.)

If you know of any other needful recipients, comment here or email me.

Good Neighbor Day

I can't send this postcard out to anyone. I only have the one and its message is too precious to me.

While traveling in Singapore I found several great promotional postcards for local events and services. I don't recall where I found this one, maybe a museum or other cultural center, but I saw the value in it immediately. The message is simply that of tolerance and community.

These values are unpopular today. In my own nation, the U.S., people buy guns and wait for a legal excuse to use them on other people. Individuality and isolationism are upheld as the greatest values. I'm not calling for the breakdown of the individual, and I don't believe in groupthink, but there is tremendous value in feeling close ties to your local community.

For one, you might not be so perpetually frightened as to need to stock up on firearms and ammo. Right now in my neighborhood, it's the norm to stare at the ground or stare into the distance when passing another person—anything to avoid making eye contact. My neighbors, even the people I live in the same building with, are profoundly averse to acknowledging me. How would that serve them in an emergency? Doesn't that make their house or apartment little more than a bunker where they hide from the rest of the world?

Being part of a community does entail some work. You don't just fall into it and expect it to work out: you have to think about people other than yourself and work to build those relationships, like any friendship. It's different, because you choose your friendships, and here you're working to build connections with people you merely live near, but there's still value in that. This is the list of commitments listed on the back of this postcard. I will...

• Smile and have a chat whenever we meet.
• Be considerate, keep the noise level low in our home.
• Keep our vicinity clean and tidy.
• Do marketing with them or buy groceries for them.
• Encourage my kids to play and have fun with theirs.
• Enjoy my latest DVD movie together at either of our homes.
• Be equipped and ready to help prevent crimes and promote safety in our neighborhood.
• Be trained and prepared to help my neighbors in times of emergencies.
• Invite them to have a meal together or have a pot-luck party during public holidays.
• Appreciate them for their friendship with little gifts on Good Neighbor Day.

It's not easy to practice all of these, of course. I have tried to strike up conversations with one neighbor in my building, who would rather slink away unseen. There's a group of people kitty-corner behind us, who like loud outdoor parties until 3 a.m. during the work week, and I don't feel very friendly toward them. But these things take work, and I have to believe they're worth the effort.

Anyway, this is one of my favorite postcards. I look at it and think about how life should be.

Thanks for Being My Local Business

This isn't the one I sent, but I do love making postcards.

This is an idea that's been building in me for a while: write a postcard to thank your local businesses.

A few years ago, I went to a kind of interactive arts performance/display at the Walker Art Museum. My friend Jenni, owner of Lunalux, custom letterpress print shop and stationery store, was running a project where people creatively designed postcards. Jenni had brought all sorts of fun materials—washi tape, old maps, cardstock, &c.—for participants to glue and reassemble in interesting displays. (I made one and thought I had a picture of it, but can't find it right now.)

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.

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.

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.

The Best of the Worst Postcards

I've been keeping this news article open in my browser for about a week. It's high time I shared it with everyone else (so I can close and refresh my freakin' browser).

Bad Postcard of the Week sounds maybe a little mean-spirited, if you have an underdoggish view of the postal system, but the writer isn't deriding postal transmissions. He's simply acknowledging that alongside the quaint, gorgeous, and touching postcards flying around the world for over a century, there are also some really bad examples too. There are postcards so ugly, they transgress the border of surrealism.

It is not the postcard's fault. Nobody's saying that.

What I like is that he accepts submissions, so his collection has got to look like the fabric from which nightmares are cut. Can you imagine? In Postcrossing, participants commonly ask for themed postcards: one girl collects black-and-white images, another retiree would like pictures of lighthouses, and some young guy is asking for anything porn-like that can legally be sent through the mail. Everyone has their preferences.

Now, imagine what would happen if you asked everyone for the most garish, confusing postcards anyone could get their hands on. Try to imagine what would show up in your mailbox each week. I'll give you a hint: you can't possibly imagine. The images that would enter your home have the advantage, in that they represent the end-product of someone else's lifetime of poor judgment and damaged aesthetics. You can't sit there for ten whole minutes and guess what otherworldly creations have been orchestrated and set to print.

But it's intriguing, isn't it? Even if you asked for something particular, like "a woman holding a candle" or "a young man in a hat," you would receive the entire world's creative interpretation of those themes. You could conceivably end up with over a hundred different images of a young man in a hat. Isn't that intriguing?

Minesweeper Postcards

Image: Ubergizmo

Retro-tech, ahoy!

No, even more retro than playing your first game of Minesweeper on your first (office) computer. The design of these Minesweeper postcards uses the very simple occlusion technology so favored by lottery tickets around the world.

Myself, I used to get all excited about the scratch-off Pac-Man cards that came with sticker and a token piece of bubble gum. You had to uncover dots and power pellets to get all around the board without uncovering a ghost.

So while everyone else dwells in fear of which video game will next be converted into a movie, I'm wondering which could possibly be reinterpreted as a scratch-off game. Hopefully on a postcard, of course.

Minneapolis Postcard Collections

Once in a while, I discover something interesting embedded in the details of my city. I hope that such is the case with everyone, that I'm not the only one learning new things about their hometown, or that everyone lives somewhere with interesting things to uncover.

Image: Old Minneapolis Postcards

I learned a new word, for instance, when I discovered the Twin City Postcard Club of Minnesota. They describe themselves as deltiologists, "deltion" being Greek for writing tablet or letter. While I have two boxes of new postcards waiting to go out and twice that in cards I've received from around the world, I wouldn't classify myself as a deltiologist: my own collection is haphazard and byzantine, while these guys seem disciplined and focused on accruing a thematically consistent collection.

Here is an online gallery of vintage Minneapolis postcards, but if you're in the Minneapolis area, you must visit the Central Library. It's a beautiful structure in itself—one cool feature is the digital display of books being returned, broadcast on the sides of the elevators as they rise and lower—but here you will find the historic Minneapolis postcard collection in the Special Collections department. It's my intention to set up an appointment and bring some friends to check it out, because now I'm curious to learn what treasures are stored.

UPS is Bad For Postage

Quick announcement: Do not use UPS for international postcards.


U.S. postage rates went up not too long ago, so an oversized postcard needs $1.05 to go overseas.

I thought I'd save myself a bus trip and walk down to the local UPS outlet for stamps, much closer than any of the three post offices in my area. They carry first class Forever stamps, but they don't have them for international rate. However, the clerk offered to run them through their postage processor and I didn't know what the difference was.

The difference is, UPS marks this service up 86¢! What should have been $13.65 for 13 postcards came out eleven dollars more! I'm embarrassed by my poor judgment, but I went through with the transaction to teach myself a lesson. My wife may be upset with me for this needless expenditure, but I'll deserve her resentment, and hopefully this negative association will keep me away from UPS in the future.

I hope you'll learn from my lesson: you can buy Forever stamps at UPS, but for any other mail they are a terrible idea.

Gifts From the Business Class

Do you ever run a search on a topic and uncover some really relevant information on a blog or commentary page? And then you look at the date and it's the same day as your search? That, I confess, makes me suspicious. Other, more mystically minded people might say the Universe was pulling them toward that topic, or the author sent up a psychic beacon that you keyed into. I'm not averse to metaphysics, but I'm also keenly sensitive to online manipulation, so I wonder if there's some kind of program that spoofs the date or something... not that it's better to be paranoid than New Agey...

Photo: The Guardian

Anyway. Last night I was searching for topics on postcards in general and I found this really sweet little instructional guide, A Postcard A Day, written  (the same day I was searching, mind) for business travelers with families. It is touching for two reasons: it's touted as a more emotional connection with the people you leave behind. You can call, you can Skype, but it's something entirely different for a child to receive a colorful postcard of another city or some beautiful landscape, on the back of which the traveling parent has written a personal note or drawn a couple silly doodles. And to get one of these every day becomes an exciting ritual, itself a palliative to missing one's parent on a trip.

The other reason is that the author really believes in this. In this Business Insider column, Brad Feld mentions he has written about this three other times. You know what it's like, how it feels when you find a personal solution to something in your life. Through trial-and-error you discover an elegant pattern that amply satisfies a number of needs or conditions, and its not enough to implement it yourself but you have to share it with everyone. Because this is the fourth article Feld has written about this, I get the sense his heart is bursting with this simple technique of happy-making and, on some level, he feels a drive to hammer away at crustier, stodgier hearts with it. "You've got to trust me and just try this simple, effortless little thing," he's saying, "it really will make things better."

I can totally relate to that. And as a deltiologist and a postalater, I value that he is boosting for postcards.

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.

Hand-Written Letters and Motivation

Oh man, oh man, I wish I'd heard of this a month ago.

While perusing Facebook (the blessing and curse to all our lives), I found mention by Postcrossing, which I subscribe to, about a blog entry centering on letter-writing. Well, I love writing letters! or, I did before I got lazy, and I also like to blame it on how other people don't write back but, really, if you're dedicated to writing letters, others' responses should not matter. Yes, it'd be nice to hear from other people, but my values are not theirs, and apparently I'm not worth 20 minutes and the latest Forever stamp.

So the above blog-author (or blauthor) touched on how difficult it was to get into, the letter-writing process, but after diligent application and persistence she gathered momentum. Indeed, she came to enjoy it as an exercise and a pastime, and her letters got longer and longer. That's wonderful, I thought, but why is an average citizen so driven to pour time and effort into a hand-written letter? I did it because the electricity in my building went out for two days. I sent out 40 postcards and letters to everyone in my address book, that's how restless I got.

Friends and Dining Abroad

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:

My Postal Carrier is a Donkey Penis

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.

Yes, Virginia, Lists are Freakin' Awesome

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.

Calculating the Cost of My Postcard Habit

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.)

How to Get Off a Mailing List

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.