Letters

When it comes to stationary, I must say my aunt has the most beautiful stationary ever. Beautiful postcards and letter paper, and envelopes. If you have received letters from me, you'd know that I tend to move across the scope going from the beige paper with ivy design, to the personalized printed one to green, pink, red coloured and recicled, but usually all my envelopes are the standard red-and-blue stripped edge standard envelopes. I love colored ones, though, and sometimes, specially if my letter doesn't go outside the country (and it has been so long since the last time it did), I love dark colored, or bright colored envelopes.

You may start to wonder where's the begining of the entry. Well, here it is: since at the office we have the internet blocked here and there, and the Twitter is one of those blocked sites(they don't want people wasting valuable corporative time in microblogging), I had to resource to other ways to do so. Luckily I found out that I can tweet by sending e-mails with pictures to twitpic, so that's my medium of choice. (As soon as I find another way, I'll probably will take advantage of it.) Today's first tweet was about a small tragedy I suffered recently at the hands of a rather incompetent technician. He erased all my second-half-June, July and August e-mails. Yep, all of 'em. Sad story. The worst of the case was that the August e-mails are the first one's from my new boss and my new department, SO they contained very important data. The techie tried to "find" my e-mails, but truth to be told, unless he expected them to pop up back where they used to be, there was no way that opening the same folder more than onces would make them come back.

So, he lost me my e-mails, which I regreted so much for not saving, I requested my coworkers to send me back the e-mails they've sent to me and I've sent to them, so that I can rebuild my e-mail base. This also meant that today I devoted a good part of my day to save e-mails and properly sort them into newly made folders. The process is lenghty, for I don't know a single way to pick all emails and save them all at once in Outlook format, savable mail by mail in the computer or on a pendrive. Add to it that in order to keep track of them I rename them adding the date and the sender (for the mails received) or the receiver (for the mails sent). Now, you must understand here that I haven't received all my mails yet, but had around 30 mails to save and file from Sept.2nd and around 59 I sent to one of my coworkers. Yeah, I had it cut out for the day.

In order to tweet this glorious activity, I looked up the picture of envelopes and that was what brought me down to Memory Lane. I remembered the time, before the Internet and before the e-mails caught up so fast, when you wrote down your letters, when you poured your thoughts out on paper with the help of a pen or a pencil, and you had to put your thoughts in an envelope, write down the address and go tp the post office to send it. The time when waiting for an answer could take at least 6 weeks, when it was all about waiting, all about writing, all about finding your voice in a different media.

Did you had penpals? I did. A few kids my age, some from Hungary, some from other provices in here. You knew their handwriting before you met them, if you ever got to. Their parfume was the scent of the envelope, the paper in which they wrote, into which they crammed their letters. In a metal trunk I keep a lot of letters I received later, when I was in Hungary in the 90's. Letters from my friends, my Mom, my cousins. The flare of them was different. They were so great and so different from what they usually were when we were together goofing around. A girl I met at a camp, Seidy, used to page-compete with me, reaching outrageous lenghts (22 pages... written on both sides) filled with thoughts, gossip, jokes, secrets and so on. My cousin Szilvi (not that, I wish) who seemed to pick up on the lenghty letter-dare, writing part in English, part in Hungarian... to practice. Then there was Ale, who's handwriting requieres, up to today a PhD degree in cryptology. Her first words about what married life was like, her pregnancy, the decoration of her first home...

Then there are the letters from Jules, many, many letters dedicated to philosophy flowing between friends. Love, Life, Freedom, Independency, Beauty... his women, my men, his thoughts, mine... our bonding reaching deep into the soul, there where family is formed.

What people see when they see an envelope? Some expect it to be filled with money, or include a check. Others expect pictures, and others all kinds of presents, but all I want in an envelope is a letter from someone I love and I care about for.