Dear Blogland,
I am once again preparing to move vast distances in order to finish up my extremely expensive and possibly useless degree. I'm leaving behind a few friends scattered in the West and a few who have temporarily defected to Asia. Now, I've got to figure out how I'm going to stay in touch with all of these people.
No one likes finding out important personal information about a close friend through Facebook. Facebook puts your best friend on about the same importance scale as that random chick who friended your entire class during New Student Orientation. It's insulting, and depressing, but it's also so damn easy, which is why people just change their relationship status instead of picking up a phone and saying, "By the way, I'm getting hitched."
The problem is that I hate my cell phone. It's heavy and gets too hot and I can hear my own strange laugh in it. Deep down, I'm also afraid it's going to give me brain cancer. I also have a problem with emails, mostly that I never write them. In the deluge of mass list-serve messages and emails from professors I always forget to reply to anything that isn't urgent.
The one form of long-distance communication I love but am also bad at are letters. Also postcards, but I am so bad at sending those that I've been known to step off the plane and hand my friends the postcards, written out months ago, that I'd meant to send them.
I have a distinctive memory of one letter I received, which is more than I can say for any message or email. I was a freshman in the middle of my first semester. I came back from class exhausted and went to check my mail if only to delay when I had to go back up to my room and see my roommate, a slim girl who drank yogurt smoothies for meals and told me that, "everything bothered" her.
In the mail slot was a clutter of junk mail and letters for former occupants that I just let sit there. That day, however, a new letter had been slipped in the little aluminum slot. I opened the little door and found that the letter was from a friend from high school. When I turned the envelope around, I was greeted by a cartoon drawing of ghosts chasing a dragon across mountains, with little speech bubbles that said, "RAWR RAWR."
Just the drawing on the letter eclipsed all the dull tired crapiness of the day and is one of my favorite memories of that friendship. I took one small step towards being a happier person because of that letter.
Everyone likes mail, except probably mailmen. Maybe it's not the most "green" thing ever, but I'm slowly filling my address book and gathering together my freedom Liberty Bell stamps. I have some elephant stationary a friend gave me and some nice ink pens, good for drawing ghost cartoons. I'm ready for the new school year.
Sincerely,
Alyssa
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