I feel sorta bad that most of the contact I have with people is through mass produced e-mail fodder, so I decided on a mass produced real mail fodder. It'd have a year long summary of my life (the form letter of "what ____ _____ did in 19__" is acceptable among the Christmas card community, from what I hear) plus a little note to each person, and hopefully I'd find something meaningful and heartfelt to say to each person. Otherwise, do the term paper trick and write 'Merry Christmas' in a 14 point font, triple spaced.
I was gunning for the hokiest card imaginable, which by coincidence would also be the cheapest. Something so Osmond-esque that it would obviously be seen as a joke. I found a doosy; a little eight year old girl holding a bundle of snowballs. But it wasn't quite hokey enough; people could think I was sending her out on purpose. So I made little word balloons to stick on her, none of which would pass approval from even Tony Osmond, the black sheep of the family who runs a cock fighting ring.
I wrote the form letter a week before Christmas. I'd write the personal greetings right after I did my Christmas shopping. My Christmas shopping plan was for magical pixies to find perfect gifts and leave them at the foot of my bed in return for a forwarded e-mail about Star Wars and pants. The pixies must not have liked it, since the shopping didn't get done. I'm beginning to doubt the existence of pixies, since who doesn't like that Star Wars pants forward?
Downside of the pixie strike was, I didn't have time to do all the personal greetings. Priority shifted to visited New Jersey's over-hyped malls, which get their mystique from their quantity, not quality. The letters got put on the back burner. Then I realized that a burner wasn't the place for paper, so I put them on a writing board.
That board got put on the bed every day, as a reminder that I had to do these or else drop the board on the knee high pile of clothes that I had instead of a floor at the time. The board soon got shoved to the far end of my bed, and I slept in a thin line on the near end. With my cat sleeping at the foot of the bed, the area I could move without disturbing something turned into a fetal position around my pillow.
Eventually I hit the do or die wall. I got it writing term papers, after a long and healthy procrastination. Around two in the morning my mind would shift to "Hey, I get this done, I can go to bed" mode, and I'd be able to focus singularly on something. And do some good work, too. I don't know how to get there without a looming deadline, but it's surprising how often you can find a looming deadline in your life. So they all got written, and only occasionally did I use the set written greeting that I used when I didn't know anyone at all (which I ain't saying, just in case you were one of them).
I needed stamps for these, and the only time I could get stamps would be on Saturdays. But that's a very small sliver of time for someone to remember, and if they don't, it's another week on the clothes heap.
Christmas came, Christmas went. Those letters were still there. Well, so long as they were in December, it was still the Christmas season.
December came, December went. Wasn't very fair, really, since the post office was only open one Saturday inbetween. So it rolled over into 1999. My resolution was to watch TV for long uninterrupted stretches (pick a resolution you can keep) so getting those letters out had to take second priority for a while.
Finally I found some stamps lost in the waste paper explosion of my bed table. It was a personal Studio 54 as I picked which ones to send and which ones to abandon until I got the rest of the stamps. OK, I grabbed the cards on top and stamped them. No rhyme or reason. But if yours was postmarked early January of last year, pretend that 54 thing's not a crock.
I took a huge chunk of letters (OK, four, but I only had four stamps), stamped them, and threw them in the mailbox. Technically, it wasn't a mailbox, because our neighborhood didn't have those. It was more of a mail slot. Actually, our door didn't have that either, since we had a new screen door for the front. So the mail just goes in the half inch barrier between the screen door and the big front door, and falls at your feet if you open either, for instance if you're the mailman dropping off the mail. But nobody gives a raccoon crap about this, so let's move on.
That was Monday, January 11. I got to work without incident (or with incident which I've forgotten by this point because all train rides slush together twenty minutes after you leave them) and promptly read there was a postal increase of a penny effective today. D'oh.
This was the ultimate cheap nightmare. Losing a chance to save money by the smallest of margins. Yeah, it was just a penny, but I'm talking about forty letters here! This is ... OK, it was forty cents. Forty lousy cents that I wanted to save and now I couldn't. And the stinker was that those four I put in that morning would have to be resent with new postage because I was a total of four cents short on them.
Luckily my dad caught them as he was leaving for work, and he had heard of the rate hike, so he held onto them. Somehow the rate change got me to the post office that Saturday. It was like someone who just found out they got lung cancer quitting smoking; just a tad too late to do any good, but it might as well be done.
I have no opposition to the post office raising its rates. It's amazingly cheap for what it does. Ever wonder why there's no business competing with the Post Office for mail delivery? Because it doesn't make any money. The only money comes from moronic corporations who use Fed Ex and UPS to Next Day a memo to the building next to them of an e-mail that's already outdated by the time it reaches them. Sadly, these are the people in the world with money.
The letters all went out late January, except for those whose addressed I didn't have and whom some of are still sitting lost in my paper file (two giant bins labels pre-1994 and post-1994).
So what have I learned from this?
pidly mention it, since I have to use the word 'disgruntled', which counts as using it even though it's simply in the context of saying I didn't use it.
6. I just used 'disgruntled' three times in trying to say I didn't use it. Now it's four. Damn.
7. The list of people's addressed I collected last year are largely out of date because people move from dorm room to dorm room, from dorm room back home, from home to apartment, from dorm to apartment, and occasionally from apartment to home (sorry, whoever you are).