It’s another Sunday. The first full week of “LetterMo” is over. I’m feeling pretty good. I had a bit of a setback–not concretely, but mentally–last Monday when I tried to send a letter in an elaborate envelope, which I will probably post a picture of soon, as I assume it’s arrived by now. Anyway, I put it in the mailbox, but when the mailman came the doorbell rang. “I love this, but it will never go through,” he said. “It’s unmachineable. You’ve got to take it to the post office and mail it as a package. I saw that one you made with the map the other day, really cool! But this, I know they’ll send it back.” It was really great to hear his enthusiasm, but I was surprised, because it was really not that weird. It was the size and shape of a regular envelope. Back in college, I sent (and, especially, recieved) much more strange items, for standard postage, as far as I remember.
The worst part was that at the post office the ugly postage printout thing wouldn’t stick where it was supposed to, so they had to stick it on in such a way as to completely uglify my beautiful envelope :( Hopefully it just peels right off and the recipient can see what it was meant to look like. Anyway, the whole thing was a bit of a momentum-breaker, right at the beginning of the week. I also had very little resources in terms of art supplies–I’ve just moved, and all the various papery bits, half-exhausted markers, stickers, worn-down crayons, and so on, got left behind. So my intention to make the letters, and particularly the envelopes, beautiful was really putting me to the test. I cannibalized everything I could find, and hopefully the results were OK, but I was really getting worried that I would have to recycle envelope ideas, whcih I didn’t want to do. Especially since the mailman was noticing!
Luckily this weekend I got to go to the craft store and I got some stuff, and in writing my first letter to a relative stranger I came up with a ‘format’ which will hopefully get me through all of those while still being entertaining. It’s a little weird, but that’s fine. I didn’t expect to write anyone I didn’t know this month, so I had to wing it!
John deBoer Custom 