The Lost Art

Way before social media, way before the internet, people used to write letters. Actual pen to paper folded in an envelope and sent to people.

I was in middle school when I had my first official pen pal. Across the world. His name was Enrique and he lived in Spain. Then I had an Italian boy named Luca surprise me. After that I had my friend hook me up with a girl in Sweden. Oh, aren't you cute with your head in the gutter. Shut up, it was sweet. We lost touch after a while but I was hooked on letters from that point on. This may be where my mail obsession comes from. And by obsession, I mean it was my self-assigned duty to check the mail every day. When I started dating, I checked his family's mail. I was set on having my own PO box.

Once I started dating Ryan (hellooooooo internet!) I got in contact with a girl in Japan, Megumi. We wrote for quite some time! This was during my Asian interest era. And thus began my "dark years" as a letter-writing fiend. I built a pen pal database on (gasp!) Angelfire. I had upwards of 50 pen pals and more people with whom I was exchanging postcards. Oh and of course I have lost touch with these folks too. Except one. And somehow, along the way, I stumbled across friendship books.

Education!
A friendship book (FB to those of us in the biz) is a little handmade booklet of about 5 pages. Some of those little fuckers got artsy-fartsy with those things. Anyway, you put your address on it. It's yours. You also put your info in it like a tiny-assed bio and the type of friend you're looking for and weren't looking for *ahem*prisoners*ahem*. Excuse me there. Then you'd mail it off to one of your awesome pen pals, they'd add their info and pass  it along. Wash-rinse-repeat. If there wasn't any space left, it made it's way back home if you were lucky. I have a few that have come back! And to make things more ridiculous, there were mutations of these things too. This shit was a hobby.

Welcome back to present day!
I'm not quite sure how Ivy picked up on it but she is about as obsessed as I am about the mail. It's almost a beat-down, drag-out, contest to see who gets to the mailbox first. Ha-HA! I have the upper hand. I'm still taller than her and can get the mail easier than she can. And she has started asking if she has any mail. So I threw out a plea on Facebook for my friends and family to send the kid some mail and it has been steadily trickling in. And look who is happy.

And see who is not... Because of Pinterest and Instagram, I am seeing all this cute mail that people are sending and getting and I'm pouting over here. I want that correspondence. I want to connect with people around the world the old fashioned way. Send me mail, damnit!

And I remember I did this at one point.