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.

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.

DIY Deco: Moleskine Notebooks

Now, anyone who's read EVERYTHING I'VE EVER WRITTEN EVERYWHERE may have detected by this point that I'm favorably inclined toward Moleskine (MOLL-eh-SKEEN-eh: I correct myself whenever I say it). And I have found there are two Moleskine websites: Moleskine (Europe) and MoleskineUS. Why are there two? I dunno, maybe it's just easier to have a European headquarters that takes care of all nations outside of the U.S.

The Euro Moleskine site has what they call an Artists Marketplace: users are invited to buy Moleskine notebooks, decorate them inside and/or out, and sell them here to a global market. I decided to try my hand and take the plunge, but so far there have been no takers. None from other countries, anyway: my friend Kate met me and, over ice cream, perused my selection and decided which (of the three I'd produced) she wanted.

Let me tell you about these notebooks. I purchased the pack-o-three "large" unlined Moleskine Cahiers with kraft covers. Among my statio is a file of old maps, so the notebooks are covered in a 1965 National Geographic world map. Their covers feature the South Atlantic Ocean (pictured), the North American continent, and the Scandinavian nations and northern Europe.

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.

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:

The Ecologically Minded Correspondent

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

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

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

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

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

1. Choose recycled postcards or postcards made with fibre that comes from sustainable forests. For instance, FSC certified postcards.
2. Reuse/Recycle envelopes (it can be fun!)
3. Use envelopes/writing pads made of 100% unbleached recycled paper.
4. Walk, or ride your bike to take your mail to the Post Office.
5. Write your postcards during daylight, or outside in the fresh air, and save on energy.
6. When soaking off your stamps do them all at the same time and reuse the water as much as possible.
7. Use refillable pens/highlighters etc.
8. Print on both sides of the paper or reuse old study courses etc. to print things for personal use.
9. When wrapping things, reuse gift paper. Be creative! You can use old maps, newspapers, pages from magazines etc.
10. Get your electricity from a company that provides it from sustainable energy sources such as wind farms, solar energy, hydro energy, etc.
11. Support an environmental organisation such as Climate care, WWF, Greenpeace etc.

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

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

The Battle Rages On

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post Office in Narita, Japan

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

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

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

Post Office in Melaka, Malaysia

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

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

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

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

Post Office in Tanah Rata, Cameron Highlands, Malaysia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post Office in 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.

Post Office in Pai, Thailand

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

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

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

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

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

Sweet relief: greetings from Pai, Thailand!

Selamat Malam! Broadcasting from Bali!

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

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

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

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

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

When Things Will Pick Up

Namsan Tower, Seoul, South Korea

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illustrating the Distances

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, Such Notions as I Receive!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagining Someone Else's Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Traveling Scholar

Ugh. Somehow the first half of my post was actually deleted or overwritten at some point, so my narrative seemed to have jumped into the middle of the action without prelude. I'll try to sum it up again, in that I was only going on about my bag fetish. Ever since getting out of the military, I've had a separate radar in my consciousness for increasingly efficient bag systems. It's good to have specialized bags, satchels, &c. for specialized purposes, but the holy grail of this is of course the grand go-to, the catch-all, the bag of all seasons. Have I found it? Will I ever? I can only leave this for the philosophers to debate.

I'm brand loyal to Swissgear for their many, many fine products. I can't seem to find my own purchases available on their main Web site, but instead I found many other items to enthuse and lust after. Lust? Absolutely: they don't instigate a biological response but I crave the efficient, multifunctional, sturdy design that is the hallmark of Swissgear. Why, just today I lapsed into a fugue state, pontificating over what it would be like if Swissgear actually designed a coat...

I used the courier bag to carry my laptop and for travel, but the problem with it is that it holds an awful lot and has a zipper to expand its content, so I can really overload it with a lot of heavy books and technology, contributing to cramped shoulders and imbalanced muscular strain. That's all my fault, though, I'm just being irresponsible. I loved that it seriously could hold all my crap, though: the main body had plenty of room for my laptop, which is an oversized model due to its wide screen, as well as folders and books for my college classes, and an array of handy, secure pouches and pockets. Into these went all my fountain pens and ink cartridges, plus letters and small notebooks to be accessed rapidly. I tried storing my cellphone in there but wound up forgetting about it more often than not.

I also found a handy satchel they call a boarding bag, suggesting its use for plane travel. I doubt I'll ever live in a society so sophisticated they would opt to travel with a small satchel rather than lugging their entire household in three oversized suitcases to be crammed in the overhead compartments, but the idea is appealing. I used to call this bag my "traveling office" because of everything it held: perfectly sized for my Kindle (with case), multiple Moleskine notebooks (hardcover and paperback), a robust pen collection, separate pouches for filing stationery, letters, and paperwork, and still more pockets than I needed. That is a desirable feature, to me. It even had a little pocket for my iPod Nano and a hole to run the headphones through, now a standard feature on all backpacks and such.

Most recently I picked up the Synergy notebook-carrying backpack. I was torn between my desire for its absolute utility--sheer volume of stowage and balanced weight on my back/shoulders--versus its perceived stigma: I only saw real geeks using it, apparent social retards. I'm quite geekish myself, I fully acknowledge and proclaim this, but I do shower a few times a week, I can state my position in a discussion without alienating everyone around me, and I can maintain eye contact during conversation. That is, I hope, what sets me apart. At length I finally got over myself and bought it and have been trying it out. Reflexively I want to adore it, but I'm still in a process of getting to know it, familiarizing myself with its physics as boys will.

It has two large compartments and two smaller front pouches, plus an unusual design for bottle holders on either side--they stretch to hold the whole bottle and enclose it entirely in a zippered mesh pouch. The very front pouch is small and I use it to hold bike maps and occasionally a breakfast bar; the larger one is my stationery repository (see pictured) and it holds more than I have labeled in the photo. Next is the first large compartment, holding two folders, the Kindle, a series of Moleskine notebooks, and still has considerable room for more--occasionally I stash my thermal lunch bag here. There's also a hanging pouch not just for my iPod Touch but also my headphones! Even more convenient. And the compartment behind that, up against my back, is where the laptop would go--my oversized laptop just fits in there, with a mesh pouch for power cords, laser mouse, and peripherals.

There is no question this is a very handy bag to have, and I'm sure I will overload it also with books, computer, and everything else, but at least it's built to distribute that weight more evenly. Already this advantage has manifest: yesterday I was about to miss my bus but was able to sprint a block to catch it, something I might not have pulled off if I had to secure an over-the-shoulder bag like a fully loaded courier bag.

I have a large Chinese (in style if not in origin) stationery chest at home, which comes with folding iron legs to support it about a foot off the ground. Something like that is how people used to transport their papers/parchment, inks, quills, pens, sealing wax, cinnabar and chop, &c. Now I've got the same thing, but a more compact containment system that in turn holds more compact instrumentation and supplies. In some abstruse way I'm continuing the tradition of the traveling scholar/scribe, hauling a small library on my back with all my writing accoutrement. I think that's what I like best about all this, feeling like a contemporary interpretation of an ancient tradition. That's how I romanticize it, anyway.