The Postcard Project

Posted on October 20, 2011 by lisafindley

I’ve been a packrat for as long as I’ve had possessions. Mom made increasingly futile attempts over the years to get me to throw out illegible scribblings, broken toys, once-treasured stuffed animals long left in dust. It was a holiday in the Findley family when I moved just about the last of my boxes out of the basement and into my Chicago apartment. I’ve gotten a lot better over the years, but I still keep more than I should.

My penmanship will be just as fancy-looking but illegible.

So it was not too surprising when, cleaning up my desk at work a few weeks ago, I found a stack of paper three years old. It was the remains of one of those page-a-day calendars, the theme of this one being “1,001 Places to See Before You Die” (a morbid way of looking at it, and clunkier than “The Bucket List,” but it sure did have a lot of pretty pictures). I’d torn off the pages and kept them in a stack because they might come in handy someday. When? What day would a stack of frayed-edge color landscape photos from 2008 come in handy for anything?

I found a use for them. I decided, in the tradition of the marvelous Mlle. O’Leary, I needed to step up my non-electronic communication, so I’m making postcards out of the old calendar and sending them to friends all over the world. It’s not a hard thing to do, or a skilled one, but it’s fun to sit in front of the latest Parks & Rec pasting photos on cardstock and writing affectionate messages on the back. It’s a good time to pause and think about the person I’m writing and ogle the scenery on the postcard.

I’m sending at least one postcard a week from now until next September when I leave on my trip, so if you want one, just let me know. Don’t put your address in the comments, because don’t put your address on the Internet, good grief I hope you know that, but do drop a note if you’d like a postcard and you can email me your postal address. I can’t promise when or what stunning vista you’ll receive, but I will promise that sometime in the next year, you’ll get a handmade postcard in the mail from me. Here we go!

Image from here.

Scripts For Your Consideration

Posted on April 26, 2011 by lisafindley

Idea #1: Cashing in on the Wedding Movie Trend

Mlle. O’Leary and I were discussing the many weddings we are both attending this year, and we decided we could totally make money off the Hollywood wedding movie trend by borrowing liberally from real life and hokey clichés alike. Girl has ten weddings to attend in one year, and they’re all her close friends and cousins, so she’s a bridesmaid in each. Girl is an Etsy maven, so rather than buy a new dress for each occasion (which she can’t possibly afford, and which she wouldn’t want to anyway because she is Independent and Quirky), she makes over the same dress for each wedding. Of course, she keeps running into the same Boy at all the weddings, and he is always wearing ties that look really familiar but Girl can’t figure out why. There is much malarkey over mistaken identities, wardrobe malfunctions, etc., and in the end Girl’s dress can’t handle any more reworking and it falls apart at the last wedding in a dramatic fashion.

I'm gonna rock that green dress, once it's made into a miniskirt and the sleeves disappear

Image from http://www.ioffer.com/i/McCalls-7847-Wedding-Bridesmaid-Dress-Sewing-Pattern-14898800

In the Hollywood version, Boy helps Girl get to a David’s Bridal, where she realizes she just wants to be like everyone else anyway, and she buys the dress. In the indie version, Boy reveals that he comes from a long line of tailors, and works some magic that makes her dress more beautiful than it ever was before. (Even indie movies have to let the boy save the day, after all.) Boy and Girl realize that the ties he’s been sporting at all these events are from her Etsy shop, so it was Totally Meant to Be.

Hollywood title: Sew in Love. Indie title: Fitting In.

Idea #2: Punking the MBAEs

I saw an ad on the train for an MBAE program — a Master’s of Business Administration for Executives. So instead of just getting a post-graduate degree in how to make more money than everybody else, you can get a post-grad degree in how to make way too much more money than everybody else. Yay?

it ain't good

Image from http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/james-quinn/the-age-of-mammon

Script goes like this: A fresh batch of MBAE students, eager to learn how to make hard deals, screw over their workers, and buy ten yachts in the process, enters the class of Teacher. Teacher is actually a plant from the unions (evil unions!) sent to fix the American Dream from the top down, but passing as a billionaire coming out from retirement to share his pearls of wisdom (it has to be a he, or they won’t listen) with this generation of CEOs. So eager are they to learn Teacher’s secrets, the MBAEs take all sorts of lessons in ethics, collaborative work, and diversity. They’re transformed from evil future CEOs into decent people, and they wield their power for good, bringing the pay disparity back down to a reasonable level and redistributing wealth across the land.

Hmm, that is perhaps less a great movie idea than a utopian fantasy, but I’m seeing it as a comedy, with all these middle-aged men doing homework on collective bargaining, first certain that this will help them learn how to crush such bargaining, and then looking bewildered as they realize they don’t want to. “What is happening to me?” they’ll cry, as tears stream down their faces and they don’t even call each other homos for crying like a little girl. They’ll all be too busy hugging and setting up universal health care.

Investors interested in making these ideas a reality, please apply within.

Guest Post: 3 Easy Steps to Becoming a World-Class Postcard Correspondent

Posted on June 28, 2010 by lisafindley

Dearest fellow travelers, please join me in welcoming to these pages one of the great comic writers of our time, a dear friend of mine and world traveler in her own right, Mlle. O’Leary. She has lived in Venice, New York, Seoul, and northern Ohio, and she’s traveled all over, from Dublin to Tibet. She’s a skilled postcard writer and the perfect person to guide you all in that dying art. Here we go!

Postcards: mini works of art

You’ve set the itinerary, you’ve broken in the backpack, you’ve burned any necessary bridges and left for adventures in greener pastures. You’re doing amazing, interesting things every day. Or maybe you’re doing the same old shit only now you’re doing it abroad! There is one thing you should seriously do when you travel and rarely does anyone think to do it. You should send postcards. You don’t, do you. But you buy them right? Ask yourself this: do you hand your written postcards over to your friends after coming back home, maybe with their first name written in the address column? If you answered yes, you are a terrible person. Yes, you are. Your friends hate this and they just put up with three weeks of your mass-emails. Stop it.

This post is part appeal, part advice on the plight of the postcard. It is easier and easier to send an email out to everyone at once telling them that you are still alive, now broke and loving life. So with the internet in a growing stage of ubiquity, postcards seem more and more like an afterthought. A hassle. But they aren’t. Postcards are fun. They are timeless. More to the point: they are quick, or at least they should be. There are five things you need to write and to send a postcard: a postcard, a stamp, a pen, an address, and a message. Of these five things, three hinder sending the most. Here is some troubleshooting advice:

1. I don’t have stamps/didn’t get them/don’t know where the post office is (and similar iterations)

Get your stamps immediately. Even if you’re going on a huge hike or a crazy long train ride you will be in a major city before and after. Yes, this will take a little effort on your part but that’s part of the fun (see below). Many airports have post offices within or just outside customs (I believe this is the case with Greece’s airport). Other countries have dual Bank & Post Offices, making it a great catch-all: grab some currency, buy some stamps, spend the rest on beer. Kiosks are a great place to inquire for stamps, if you really have an aversion to post offices after your cousin was shot by a mail carrier. By picking up stamps ASAP you can write and send your postcards out at whim, which is the whole essence of the postcard.

2. I forgot your address

You planned the trip, right? Make ‘addresses’ part of that to-do list. Get the ones you need and keep them handy at all times. Some write them all in the back of a travel journal. Others fold up loose-leaf paper and stash it in pockets or carry-on. Tattoo street names and zip codes on your partner’s arm (always ask first). I used the Contacts feature on my iPod while traveling. Find a method that works best for you. If this falls through, depending on your country of choice, you are bound to have internet access at some point. Send an email to your desired recipient. I would much rather receive that email than another link to your Flickr account (a photo’s worth a thousand words but that don’t mean I can cash in on it).

3. I don’t know what to write

It’s the size of an index card. What did you eat today? Cobb Salad? Was it good? Did you find it weird they serve Cobb Salad in Bangkok? There, you’ve used up all of the space without even remarking that maybe you should have ordered Pad Thai. Focus on one cool/weird thing and you’ll send your friends postcards without sentences like “the weather’s really great!” or “I’m really enjoying seeing everything.” Which means you’ll be sending your friends really wonderful postcards! See? Easy.

It all boils down to accessibility. Keep everything in reach, always: stamps, postcards, addresses, pens. This makes it easier, which makes it stress free, which makes it fun, which makes you do it more frequently, which makes it easier. And then your friends won’t think you’re a dick. They will know you’re a good person.

The fact is that postcards – and sending postcards from their place of origin – are invaluable to the travel experience. Postcards can be your MacGuffin to hilarious antics. They can force you to learn more than “Hello!” and “Bathroom?” They can push you off the major tourist circuits: rather than stopping by the souvenir stores around major sites, seek postcards out in old bookstores, quirky shops, even grocery stores. And then look around. Chat up the proprietor. You might make a friend. You might find your newest favorite place in the world. You might even walk out with better postcards. If you’re taking any excuse to seek out undiscovered places, why not the excuse to write to your friends?

Maybe you’re somewhere without a recognizable writing system. Or maybe you’re in a land that missed out on the Indo-European fad (Magyar, I’m looking at you!). “How much are stamps?” isn’t the first thing you’re going to learn in a new country, which will make you seem that much more impressive. Ask a local to teach you some phrases. Hell, go all out:

“Are those the most interesting stamps you have?”

“Who is that man? Why are you honoring him? Oh that isn’t an honor?”

Sure, you’re bound to screw up but you only stared learning the language at the airport. Give yourself a break and keep at it. Remember: English is becoming the dominant language across the world. These exchanges might be a dying breed if you don’t make the effort. Take advantage of every opportunity. Even by asking for postcards.

You will also LOOK COOL writing postcards. There is only so long you can spend looking pensive in front of your Moleskine and that’s twenty minutes. This is a great way to unwind, take some deserved downtime. If you’re traveling alone, bring them to dinner. And yes, you will look cooler with a stack of postcards in front of your meal than your diary. Come on.

There used to be a tactile sense to our correspondence. Now, hardly anyone writes letters. People write postcards if they write at all and as more people forget to write postcards, the intimacy that comes with physical mail becomes more endangered. But the postcard comes with its own type of intimacy: with its limited space, the postcard asks for a snapshot of the writer’s feelings and for that moment, that second, the writer thinks only of the recipient, with no expectation of receiving anything in return. Unlike a letter, a postcard is not expected to have a return address. There’s no room for it. There’s no immediate way to respond in kind. The postcard exists solely for the recipient’s pleasure. That is what makes postcard sending so beautiful. Go send a few today.

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Keen to start writing postcards? Not going anywhere for a while? Maxed out your friends’ patience? Try www.postcrossing.com. Get mail from strangers, but not like that.