Snail Mail Epiphany

This afternoon, I mailed my first real letter in years (real, in the sense that it wasn’t just a note accompanying documents or a package like “Dear [ex-boyfriend’s name], Here’s your stuff back. Shove it up your you-know-what. Haha, but seriously, let’s stay friends.”). It was just a birthday card for my sister, but it made me realize that sending letters to family and friends by post might be better than sending them by e-mail. And I mean better in a more practical than sentimental sense, I’m not really one of those people who scrapbook all my correspondences and notice little details in letters like impeccable handwriting done in swan quill or tear stains on the paper (evidence of the considerable effort exerted by the author to write without a spellchecker).

One of the reasons that practically nobody sends letters by post (to family or friends who live far away, I’m not talking about work related letters, or just-for-giggles forwards to that person in the next cubicle) is that e-mail is so much faster; you send an e-mail and your friends halfway around the world get it in a second. What I’ve noticed though, is that e-mail is too fast for the slow pace of my life. My life is so uneventful that one month’s worth of stories will barely be enough content for one letter (of course this isn’t true for everyone, I know people who average three one-night-stands a day and/or have so much drama in their lives that each of the hourly e-mails they send are as intriguing as the last). But e-mail puts so much pressure on me to write people more times than I have stories to tell, partly because I always think people will consider me unsympathetic if I wait a week or even a day to reply. As a result, my usual letters are something along the lines of:

Hi [friend or family member's name], Thank you for your letter, I’m glad your week is going well, just like last week. This morning, I forgot to clean the washing machine lint filter before washing my colored clothes. As a result all my dark clothes are covered in white fuzz of questionable origin. Hahaha,*sigh*, lesson learned. Luvya, Tetaw

With snail mail, there’s always necessary waiting time for my letter to reach the recipient, for the recipient to write the letter (without a spellchecker), and for the reply to reach me. Meanwhile, I get ample time allowance to wait for something eventful to happen in my life… and/or enough time for me to cook up stories that are both interesting and believable (it’s a lot harder than it seems). And if times are hard and my life is duller than usual, or if a creative drought is inhibiting my ability to invent stories, I can always say that the letters got lost in the mail, thus buying myself more time.