Reminscing Pen & Paper Days

The past few days I’ve had pictures from my recent NYC & San Francisco travels printed, so that I could mail them off to my friends abroad, and I’ve also handwritten 6 letters to accompany the photos. In doing so, I got a little nostalgic for the pen-and-paper days, when instead of just turning on your computer and sending of a quick email that would take 2 seconds to get to the other side of the world, people sat down and painstakingly wrote out thoughts and feelings with pen on paper.

My high school ex-boyfriend and I recently became friends again after years of sporadic contact when I was visiting in NYC, and I dug out a few letters and postcards he had written me when we were sophomores in high school. I teased him a little about the things that he had written, and he groaned, “I am never going to record anything I say anymore!“

That, I think, is the sad part. I love that I can dig out these letters and see the person’s handwriting, because so much of a letter can be told by handwriting – you can tell whether the person was happy or sad, in a rush or calm, drunk or sober, even. (The latter is evidenced by a few drunken journal entries I’ve written in the past.) It just isn’t the same thing through email or iChat or whatever chat client you use, even if you print it out and have a hardcopy.

Sometimes I wish we were still back in the day when people wrote letters willingly; these days it seems to be too much of a chore for anyone to bother (at least regularly).

Anyway. To redeem HS ex-bf, he said he’d be my pen pal, and we agreed to write a few letters – I even jokingly (or not) said I’d send him stickers.