Letter of Recommendation: Make Mail Fun Again
thinking of you in Minnesota
Hi, it’s Tuesday, and we’re all gay!
That’s something to be happy about, I think, when the day is packed full of things you can’t control and you’re a little hungry and it’s not time for Second Coffee yet and people need information and updates from you and someone scheduled a pointless meeting at 8:30!!! AM!!! and one of your coworkers always, always signs her emails like this:
Smiles,
Ashley
and there is nothing you can do about any of it.
The New York Times runs a column I love called Letter of Recommendation, and each column is always just a short opinion piece where someone goes off about something small they love.
And because it’s Tuesday, and we gotta choose our joys on Tuesdays, I’m copying the format. Here is mine, right now.
Letter of Recommendation: Send Someone a Weird Postcard
You know what’s fun? Getting stuff in the mail. Especially things that you're not expecting. Things that are not bills or ads or cards sent by relatives who write greetings like “Wish we could have seen you at Christmas, but I know you’re busy.”
It’s fun to get nice mail – mail that wants nothing from you, mail that shows you’ve been thought about, mail that just wants to say howdy. Everybody loves it!
And no one is getting it!
And that is so sad, because do you know what the best thing to buy at an antique store is? An old blank postcard.
Not only is an old postcard always the cheapest possible thing to purchase in a store that thinks you might be willing to cough up $85 for the same set of matching Pyrex mixing bowls that your mom donated to Goodwill in 1997, but you get to pay the person working behind the counter using the change rolling around in the bottom of your bag, and it is fun, in 2024, to use coins to pay for anything, because they are basically worthless in this economy!!
As an added bonus, old postcards are also frequently… unsettling.
Hoo baby, yeah. Some old postcards are normal, but the vast majority of them feature something creepy (like the inside of a threateningly-maroon-painted Wichita, Kansas hotel room photographed in 1959), or in shocking poor taste (like a naked woman sitting on the back of a donkey with her tiddies out under the words “I saw the sights in Missouri!”). Or they are badly lit (like a postcard that has a photograph of someone’s antique rifle collection shining greasily under overhead lighting), or they’re religious in a way that is very, very frightening, or they feature a cheery photograph of children playing in the sun at a beach resort in the 60s, except for there’s one child in the shadows staring directly at the camera, unsmiling.
You know who deserves that strange antique postcard? One of your friends. Maybe one who’s going through a hard time, but also maybe not. Maybe just someone you want to poke a little bit. Remember Facebook poking? Like that.
It is fun to choose the postcard, and there is room to write maybe two sentences, and then you’re done and you pop it in the mail and it arrives in your friend’s mailbox. And they will be delighted! You will make their day! And they will put your unsettling postcard on their fridge, and think of you every time they open the fridge to see if the contents inside have changed in the last 20 minutes!
You must already be sold on this (how could you not be), but did you know they also make special, cheaper postcard stamps? THEY DO. You can get a whole-ass roll of them for like $14, and have enough postcard stamps to last you years and years of clowning!
What are you waiting for? The pleasures in this world of Tuesdays are so sparse, and there are so few ways to invade your friends’ homes as much as you’d like to!
Why not demand your loved ones’ updated addresses in a bossy way that makes them nervously text back “sure, haha why?”
Why not send your best friend a postcard of the Virgin Mary clutching a wooden sailing ship and making direct eye contact for no reason?
Miss you, bitch! you can write. And POOF – for under a dollar, you’ve made someone’s day and freaked them (and their postal carrier) out a little bit.
Miss you, bitch!
A friend and I once co-wrote an entire book via postcards— the weirder the picture the better. It took like 2500 cards.
But what I like best about this idea is that a different friend recently convinced me that I should really be sending out thank you cards (and I really do like the practice much to my surprise). But now I'm wondering if instead of sending heartfelt thank yous on stupidly expensive letter press cards from Etsy… Maybe I should send them on bizarre antique postcards? Cheaper cards, cheaper stamps and way more fun to receive. Maybe not as classy as letterpress cards, but way more punk rock. Thanks for the idea.
We definitely have a similar sense of humor and delight.