Stamps, mail and the post office
Jul. 31st, 2004 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thrihyrneI spent the day at home yesterday, so I was a bit irked when I went to get the mail and saw I had a card indicating I had to go to the post office to pick up an oversized package. I didn’t know why the carrier hadn’t simply rung the doorbell. But whatever. So I went to the Woodbine Post Office mere moments ago with two cards and a letter to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
licia_north in hand (sorry fungus_files, I didn’t get your aerogramme written yet), ready to be mailed, and, irony of ironies, discovered that what I was picking up was the stamp order I had placed with the U. S. Philatelic Catalogue. So I was at the post office, picking up stamps I had ordered over the phone. I got turned on to the Philatelic Catalogue because it’s the only place where I can buy international aerogrammes. Apparently I am the only soul left in the U.S. who uses them. They haven’t updated them in several years, and you have to put an additional 10 cents in postage on them. No regular post offices keep them anymore.
Yes, I’m a stamp collector. Of sorts. I’ve collected stamps (mostly foreign) for years now, and even have a scrapbook with probably a dozen pages of stamps rubber cemented in them. It helped when I worked in the Financial Aid office in college- I got to keep the stamps I liked for countries I’ve never visited. This probably all starts from back in elementary school when I was desperate to have an international penpal. I’ve had a few, over time, including a young man in Ireland (my country of choice at the time) who I kept up with through early college. But I do care about what stamps I put on my letters and cards, because I write a lot of them, and by golly, I just hate the stupid/boring flag stamps, and flowers don’t do much for me either.
My stepdaughter says that I write more letters than anyone she knows. At this point in my life, I write more letters than anyone else I know, as well. We started moving around a lot when I was in 6th grade, and always loath to lose a friend, I wrote letters. I moved to Australia at age 16 and wrote heaps of letters back to my friends in Richmond, while writing equal numbers of notes during school (fungus_files, I discovered two bags’ worth while in NJ. I’ll have to share some with you, since so many are from you!). When I came back, I wrote even more letters back to Australia. Even with the advent and subsequent entrenching of email, I much prefer to hand write (or even type for legibility purposes) letters. The only people I regularly call on the phone are my mother and sister, and even that is fairly infrequent. I prefer to write. Big shock that is to you, my readers, I’m sure. But making envelope art, making my own stationery, collecting notecards and envelopes- it’s a lifelong habit. Even today, I bought $9.75 worth of joy in getting a set of 20 pre-stamped postcards that have the “southeastern lighthouses” stamp design that came out earlier this year. The set was taped to the wall, but I didn’t care- it’s so handy sometimes to simply drop a postcard rather than a whole letter, and these already have the postage taken care of. The lighthouse stamps themselves were so popular that they sold out pretty quickly, as in sold out across the nation. I am an uber-geek when it comes to stamps; I can tell you that I’m really looking forward to two sets in particular, one with Native American art, and another of cloudscapes.
*shakes head* Welcome to my Saturday. In case you wondered which sets of stamps I ordered (which I’m sure you don’t), I got:
~ one set of Reptiles and Amphibians
~ one set of the bicentennial celebration Lewis and Clark expedition
~ one set commemorating the sculptures of Isamu Noguchi. I especially love these, featuring 5 of his sculptures, and the stamps themselves are black and white
I also have never thrown away a letter. There were a couple I burned (ex boyfriends, as you can imagine), but I have probably 10 boxes worth of correspondence going back to my middle school years up in my attic. Every once in awhile I think how cool it would be if I got famous somehow, and somebody managed to track down all of my friends and I could see just how many letters I’d written to various friends and family members through my life. I suspect it would be staggering, even to me. There is just nothing like going to the mailbox and holding an actual piece of correspondence from someone you know in your hand, able to think that the person was sitting down at some point prior in time, choosing paper and ink, or pencil, and thinking of you, or absorbed in themselves and needing you to “listen” on the other end, and the fact that you can reread it, again and again. Sometimes that’s a burden.
Two years and some ago when I found out about my friend’s suicide, that morning before going into work I had written her an apologetic letter, “I’m sorry I’m late with your birthday card yet again, but I was at my sister’s wedding, blah blah, [referenced letter from her], hope you’re doing well and that you had a good birthday.” The odd thing was that I took it into work, but chose not to post it. I held onto it. This struck me later, as I am probably the least premonition-savvy person on the planet. Two hours later I was slogging through dozens of emails and had one from another friend who said I was to call her, any time of day or night (you can imagine the possibilities with a 14-hour time difference), and I knew something had gone terribly wrong. Knowing this, I waited until noon my time to go home and call, because I figured it was going to be pretty catastrophic and I probably wouldn’t be going back into the office. I called and found out the friend I had written had killed herself. I ended up mailing the unsent letter to her mother, a while later, with a photocopy of the last letter she had sent to me. It’s not like there’s closure, but it does bring home to me how written correspondence is always going to be more special - more permanent, unless burned or soaked or whatever - than the transience of phone calls, or email.
Whoops. That ended up being a lot longer than I expected. Consider this letter-writing day, friends!
p.s. this probably also ties in with the fact that I started writing on the Aldarion/cleric story, and the joy of discovering old letters that haven't been read for hundreds of years. Will post just the first bit for jollies in another entry.
licia_north in hand (sorry fungus_files, I didn’t get your aerogramme written yet), ready to be mailed, and, irony of ironies, discovered that what I was picking up was the stamp order I had placed with the U. S. Philatelic Catalogue. So I was at the post office, picking up stamps I had ordered over the phone. I got turned on to the Philatelic Catalogue because it’s the only place where I can buy international aerogrammes. Apparently I am the only soul left in the U.S. who uses them. They haven’t updated them in several years, and you have to put an additional 10 cents in postage on them. No regular post offices keep them anymore.Yes, I’m a stamp collector. Of sorts. I’ve collected stamps (mostly foreign) for years now, and even have a scrapbook with probably a dozen pages of stamps rubber cemented in them. It helped when I worked in the Financial Aid office in college- I got to keep the stamps I liked for countries I’ve never visited. This probably all starts from back in elementary school when I was desperate to have an international penpal. I’ve had a few, over time, including a young man in Ireland (my country of choice at the time) who I kept up with through early college. But I do care about what stamps I put on my letters and cards, because I write a lot of them, and by golly, I just hate the stupid/boring flag stamps, and flowers don’t do much for me either.
My stepdaughter says that I write more letters than anyone she knows. At this point in my life, I write more letters than anyone else I know, as well. We started moving around a lot when I was in 6th grade, and always loath to lose a friend, I wrote letters. I moved to Australia at age 16 and wrote heaps of letters back to my friends in Richmond, while writing equal numbers of notes during school (
fungus_files, I discovered two bags’ worth while in NJ. I’ll have to share some with you, since so many are from you!). When I came back, I wrote even more letters back to Australia. Even with the advent and subsequent entrenching of email, I much prefer to hand write (or even type for legibility purposes) letters. The only people I regularly call on the phone are my mother and sister, and even that is fairly infrequent. I prefer to write. Big shock that is to you, my readers, I’m sure. But making envelope art, making my own stationery, collecting notecards and envelopes- it’s a lifelong habit. Even today, I bought $9.75 worth of joy in getting a set of 20 pre-stamped postcards that have the “southeastern lighthouses” stamp design that came out earlier this year. The set was taped to the wall, but I didn’t care- it’s so handy sometimes to simply drop a postcard rather than a whole letter, and these already have the postage taken care of. The lighthouse stamps themselves were so popular that they sold out pretty quickly, as in sold out across the nation. I am an uber-geek when it comes to stamps; I can tell you that I’m really looking forward to two sets in particular, one with Native American art, and another of cloudscapes. *shakes head* Welcome to my Saturday. In case you wondered which sets of stamps I ordered (which I’m sure you don’t), I got:
~ one set of Reptiles and Amphibians
~ one set of the bicentennial celebration Lewis and Clark expedition
~ one set commemorating the sculptures of Isamu Noguchi. I especially love these, featuring 5 of his sculptures, and the stamps themselves are black and white
I also have never thrown away a letter. There were a couple I burned (ex boyfriends, as you can imagine), but I have probably 10 boxes worth of correspondence going back to my middle school years up in my attic. Every once in awhile I think how cool it would be if I got famous somehow, and somebody managed to track down all of my friends and I could see just how many letters I’d written to various friends and family members through my life. I suspect it would be staggering, even to me. There is just nothing like going to the mailbox and holding an actual piece of correspondence from someone you know in your hand, able to think that the person was sitting down at some point prior in time, choosing paper and ink, or pencil, and thinking of you, or absorbed in themselves and needing you to “listen” on the other end, and the fact that you can reread it, again and again. Sometimes that’s a burden.
Two years and some ago when I found out about my friend’s suicide, that morning before going into work I had written her an apologetic letter, “I’m sorry I’m late with your birthday card yet again, but I was at my sister’s wedding, blah blah, [referenced letter from her], hope you’re doing well and that you had a good birthday.” The odd thing was that I took it into work, but chose not to post it. I held onto it. This struck me later, as I am probably the least premonition-savvy person on the planet. Two hours later I was slogging through dozens of emails and had one from another friend who said I was to call her, any time of day or night (you can imagine the possibilities with a 14-hour time difference), and I knew something had gone terribly wrong. Knowing this, I waited until noon my time to go home and call, because I figured it was going to be pretty catastrophic and I probably wouldn’t be going back into the office. I called and found out the friend I had written had killed herself. I ended up mailing the unsent letter to her mother, a while later, with a photocopy of the last letter she had sent to me. It’s not like there’s closure, but it does bring home to me how written correspondence is always going to be more special - more permanent, unless burned or soaked or whatever - than the transience of phone calls, or email.
Whoops. That ended up being a lot longer than I expected. Consider this letter-writing day, friends!
p.s. this probably also ties in with the fact that I started writing on the Aldarion/cleric story, and the joy of discovering old letters that haven't been read for hundreds of years. Will post just the first bit for jollies in another entry.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-07-31 07:52 pm (UTC)My standard stamp of choice is the breast cancer stamp. It costs a few pennies a stamp more, but that money goes to support breast cancer research. My grandmother, and her mother, died of breast cancer, and when I frank a letter with those stamps, I remember them and feel like I'm doing something positive. For my daughter, whom I'm teaching to write letters (though at age 9, she'd rather IM her friends), I bought the Disney stamps, and I too bought the Isamu Noguchi ones.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-01 05:48 pm (UTC)That's a very good point. My sister is a doctor, and she tends to get those.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I'm sorry to hear about the hand tremors, though. My mother-in-law has them, and I know it makes her incredibly frustrated, as she did cross-stitch through her life and she hates the fact that her hands shake.
I too bought the Isamu Noguchi ones.
They are gorgeous, aren't they?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-01 07:53 am (UTC)And I'll bet I can't remember most of the incredibly nifty nicknames we came up with for our possible beaus.
I have done one significant cull of all my letters/cards - when we moved house about three years ago. It was a nostalgic distillation that also meant I had a more manageable study (and a floor again)!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-01 05:53 pm (UTC)Frighteningly, I was looking at some of those ridiculous nicknames (Saint Christopher was one for one of mine at some point, I think, or maybe he was yours), and for a few of them, I couldn't even remember who the actual blokes were!! And neither you nor I were interested in that many people. I think the Bruce had an interesting nickname, and Philip Finlayson. You probably haven't noticed this, but the name of the now-absent roommate for Fred/George/Kenneth/Lee was gratuitously for yours and my humor (in "Countdown," the never-ending twinfic): Muggeridge Finlayson.
*laughs*
I have done one significant cull of all my letters/cards - when we moved house about three years ago.
I just couldn't do it. I did go through and chuck some Christmas cards, though I did keep a lot, thinking I'd use them for art and whatnot, but I am unable to throw away letters. Unless they're awful ones from exboyfriends. I really did burn a few, especially post-Gene. Sheesh.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-02 11:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-02 07:44 pm (UTC)i love letters too, had a trunk full when i went to move here, and ended up doing a ritual in which i looked through them, thanked the people and the universe for them and burned them all in an attempt to set free all the love contained therein...
What a wonderful ritual!! I don't know that I could do it, but symbolically that's such a lovely thing to do. Setting the love free. What a gorgeous image.