The Pseudo Abbreviated Tale of a Paused Philatelist

Sadly, it’s not just the US Postal Service that’s been a trashcan fire…

Disclosure: It’s clearly been a long time since I’ve posted on here about mail related things. I know it. There’s been a lot happening as I’ve alluded to in other blog chapters here. Admittedly at 11 pm PST on the last day of the month, this is not the post that I had thought I was going to be going into as it probably seems like a bit of a lowball thing to aim a last minute post in this section which is often abbreviated. This post is a bit of a copout to meet my monthly objective goal as the last week I’ve been literally in bed dealing with health issues & this is the first day I’ve felt functional enough to be at a desk. At the same time, I promise that it won’t just be about the piece of mail that arrived late but unpacking a bit more about my journey through mail stuff which is also overdue. More below:

Some things have happened over the years since this section and series initially went live.

Life.
Death.
A mix of blurred pieces of both pieces and simultaneously across a colorful non-linear (although debatably linear) series of… pieces of life that exists on levels that I’m not even going to completely unpack now, partially because of the irony of a limited amount of time (we are now at 11:19 PM and the deadline is approaching) but also because, well some of it has been unpacked in the other chapters here in this series of connected blogs.

I guess that’s maybe some incentive to read other chapters to learn more about the stories even if you are not a philatelist!

So ok, we are in a time machine and have a little bit of time still so I’m going to jam what I can out here in a more abbreviated form to an extent. You knew this getting into this time machine though so if you’re reading still, you have the idea. Let’s go into a bit of it finally if I haven’t lost you already in a lengthy prologue…

I love collecting postcards. Mail has always been fascinating to me. As a kid who didn’t always have the best life experiences at home, I found myself buried in books to safety and dreamed of a world far from where I was in my tiny hometown of suburbia Illinois. Postcards were something I’ve found cool personally for practically ever. Stamps and postmarks also connected me to history, physicality, and a simple pleasure that I don’t feel is enjoyed as much in modern day life as it once was in previous generations.

Mail was and is art to me. It’s also, as I mentioned in that initial much shorter post, a poor person’s travel… which, oh goodness i do have some stuff to tell you about on a joyful note later potentially but let’s continue trying to get to things faster here because it is now 11:29 and the clock is ticking.

A new friend of mine went to Japan recently & while they were away, I asked them if they could potentially send me a postcard. Several friends of a long time have given me the joy of this lost art. When this new friend stated their openness to it and said they would send me a card, I was all sorts of a nerdy kid dreaming about other places and being considered in someone else’s experience in any way. Did I mention mail is joyful sometimes? I don’t understand why we don’t do this for others as much anymore, but as someone who also does a lot of digital stuff, like this recent piece I did for an outlet talking about riding in a robocar, I also get how technology changes things with the way that people interact with the world often at the expense of this specific curation I nerd out on.

The friend asked me after they’d gotten back if I’d received the postcard they’d sent me.

I said that I had not and disclosed that I knew about some potential tourist stamp things where that could potentially have been a reason why the card went lost. Did they send it with a potential “faux tourist stamp thing” potentially not knowing if it applied to places outside of the UK where I learned about this from a postal worker I met when I was abroad in 2019. (See, I told you some life had happened & there was stuff to be unpacked here!)

The friend said they had sent it from a direct mail spot in Japan, so that didn’t apply. I waited to receive their card but have no idea what happened to it. My brother told me that he’d sent me a card when he’d gone to Japan that I never received either, so I didn’t know if it was an issue with the Japanese postal service or some other nuance. (As I write this, I think my brother might have sent it to an address I no longer have connected to a PO Box, which I let expire which, again, I’ll get into another time but will ask my brother about it at some point in the future to inquire.)

Sometimes, mail doesn’t get to us even on the best of terms. Some postal services are not great with their mail. It’s not just an American issue. I know this now as I’ve been outside the US and Mexico, which, again, happened after I paused updates on here.

I digress.

All of this comes from the fact that I got a card on March 12th from my friend Pegs, who sent me a postcard from London last year… on December 5th, 2023. That card did not arrive until March 12, 2024.

I’m super thankful for the card. It feels like it came in a time machine. Generally speaking, it does not take 4 months for a postcard to arrive somewhere (I’d have to check to compare it with a card from Italy I sent myself in 2022—more spoilers), but it’s not a common thing I’ve encountered like this.

I’m happy that it arrived. My friend's card from Japan did, in fact, arrive soon after, too—with cherry blossoms on it that I might discuss in a post for April because cherry blossoms are something special to me since I literally named my daughter after them.

Postcards are art and a form of beautifully handcrafted interactions that I wish more people did. I am remiss that I have not updated on here as much about… but I should change that with posts that are not written literally a few minutes before the end of the monthly bell.

That said, that’s it for this post, but I encourage you to hang in here with me. I’ll unpack more (hopefully with less of a time crunch) as I can.

There have been a few tales that this paused philatelist has experienced since this last post… and more to come! Stay tuned, and thanks for reading!

Edit notes admittedly after the deadline has passed at 1218AM on April Fool’s Day: apologies for the potential weird formatting in this post. Squarespace and I generally get along but not always with stuff let alone on a rushed job. Hopefully, in April, I will budget more time before these fun items, but this is what folks are getting for the month of March!

Picture of the front of the card from Pegs below-