Monday, October 3, 2011

Postcards

I want to be perfectly clear about this: postcards ruin vacations.

No one likes them, even if you thought you did, and here's why...

Say you're planning a big vacation. You'll be gone for awhile and decide you should send a reminder to those friends and family at home who obviously weren't cool enough to get invited, but you want them to know that despite this you still like them. There you are, honorably making a list of names and addresses. You make a mental note to also find your passport.

Days later, you're in sunny ____________ (or if you have absolutely no sense of traveling when the season is good, you're in jesuschristthatbugwashugeandthatwasmylastumbrella _____________). After a tour of something touristy you thought was important to see but really was a huge waste of time, you get dumped into the gift shop. Great opportunity to shake off the disappointment and pick up some postcards. 

"I'll write a note on each of them and address them tonight at the hotel!" you say to yourself smugly. What a great friend/daughter/brother-in-law you are. WRONG. You'll definitely be too tired that night. Writing gets put off but it still looms over you, a slight damper on the remaining days of your trip. 

Maybe you are a better person than I am and you diligently sat down and spent time telling your loved ones interesting tidbits about your travels. I can tell you're feeling smug again. Now you are faced with the problem of finding stamps. 

In this hypothetical situation, you're in a foreign country and it's your first time visiting. So clearly you are unfamiliar with the postal service and have to figure out where to buy stamps, how many you need, and where the post office or post box is. All this is happening while you could be doing way more awesome things like enjoying your trip.

If you're like me, and because I don't know you I have to assume you are, then you return home with a bunch of postcards (some of them already written or half addressed) that you didn't have time to mail or were too incompetent/lazy to figure out how to mail. Maybe you can just send them from home and hope that no one notices where it was mailed from? Obviously that would make you a terrible person, and even you would judge yourself, so you don't do that.

You are now left with a stack of postcards that remind you of your secret shame every time you open that junk drawer you keep meaning to clean out.

This may be semi-autobiographical and I possibly use postcards that were meant for friends and family to decorate the walls of my office. I might be a bad friend/daughter/brother-in-law.

I hate postcards.

3 comments:

  1. October 3rd, WOW! you apparently hate postcards so much that you are able to send your contempt to the future. Jessica's hate, so powerful that not even the laws of physics can contain it

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  2. Dead on how I feel about postcards!

    It looms over you and ruins half of your trip, beginning with who you send them to (i.e. who won't get mad if he/she doesn't get one if found out someone else got one). Continuing with what motif and what to write - since you hate those impersonal "Hello from sunny Icantevenspellitbutthedrinksaregreat" yourself. And last but not least: how (and when!) to send them...

    So, you end up with 15 individually composed (you can't risk them seeing each others cards and finding out you wrote each and every one the same) postcards you write in the nick of time. Thus messing up half of them (good you came prepared and bought 25 just in case) that are hopelessly over-stamped and get delivered 2 weeks after you returned from your vacation...

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  3. I found this post particularly enlightening. I have a bunch of postcard (not even from vacation!) that I have been meaning to send to family members across the country.

    They've been sitting on my desk for a year and a half now.

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