A few months ago, in my desperate attempts to drag myself out of my own misery from working in the teaching fellowship, I decided I was going to start writing letters. It has always been my belief that the now ancient art of letter writing is a much better system of communication than the myriad of technology that now controls us. Now, when I say that letter writing is a "better system" by that I mean that it feels a lot more personalized and less disconnected. There's something romantic about taking your time to craft a hand-written letter rather than limit yourself to 40 or so characters of incorrect grammar and abbreviations. So, I started writing letters to two of my close friends. One of them is currently a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay. The other friend, is a college roommate whom I need to reconnect with that lives in New York. I also wrote one letter to my college Chaplain - to which I received a reply that was as wonderful as she is. In any event....
I was writing back to my friend in Paraguay today and it felt so great to take pen to paper. Sigh...as I wrote I just felt a great deal of satisfaction in carefully crafting my sentences. Although my letter was admittingly disjointed, I simply loved how each letter became a word. I was finally using my intelligence and eloquence that I so long thought I had lost. (Okay, so that was exaggerating, but seriously, it felt good). For a long time I've thought about bringing back what now seems like an ancient art, but my feeling is that not many share my sentiments. Sure, my friend in the Peace Corps likes it because she sometimes has limited access to internet and my New Yorker friend and I are just old souls who were born in the wrong decade, but who else has the time to write a letter when the convenience of email exists?
I have long sought to exile myself from uber technological things (says the one writing the blog) for the sake of my "old soul." For years I have declined an interest in text messaging and whenever I post my "updates" to facebook, I make sure that my grammar is somewhat impeccable - no abbreviations and much less using numbers for letters, ugh. BUT! I simply cannot escape it. Google has a wonderfully free thing called "Google Voice" which, yes, allows me to text for free. So, once in a while I take advantage of it and text message my brother or my boyfriend. Nonetheless, my quest is to communicate more frequently through hand-written letters. It would be awkward to hand-write a letter to my brother since I call him often and he lives rather close, but to my friends across the country, I should definitely make a better attempt to do what I say I love to do.
