Good art is supposed to inflict emotion
I was really tired of rowing all the way in to go check my PO Box for mail only to discover a pile of bills and the occasional Netflix (when I remember to watch them). Luckily I stumbled across PostCrossing and am now eagerly awaiting postcards from random strangers. While their slogan isn't very catchy “send a postcard and receive a postcard back from a random person somewhere in the world!” it caught my attention and I signed right up.
You have to send them to get them and two of the five I've sent have already arrived and been logged. I got a nice email from a girl in Finland and another from a lady in Estonia. Apparently Estonia is 5,763 miles from San Diego. Pretty cool for a whoppin $0.98 in postage and $1 tourist postcard.
I did fancy the card up a bit with a sharpie I used to circle the approximate little blue spot on the bay where my boat floats. I wrote a little bit about life aboard a sailboat and highlighted a sea lion sighting and the benefits to your arms of rowing in and out and in and out and ...
Since two were received, I could send two more. This time around I decided to be a little more creative and make my postcards (yes, in my spare time). You get to have a little profile on the site so when they give you an address you can learn a bit about the person you are sending a card to. Mostly they write that they like pictures of bunnies or butterflys or cemeteries. Sometimes they will specifically request something like the kid from China that is collecting a card from all 50 states and is for some reason just missing Washington. I thought about collaging a card of a random Washington tourist traps, but it didn't seem right with a California postmark.
My next card is going out to a 50 yr old woman in the Netherlands named Tilly that likes "Fairytale-figures like elves, dragons, witches". I thought it wouldn't be too hard to whip up a cute postcard with some of my left over scrapbooking bits. Boy was I wrong. That just isn't my style. I beat my head against the cutesy crap for a while before I gave up and started cutting out half naked Givenchy girls and collaging giant lips into the sky.
I didn't think much as I was doing it, I just let myself cut out stuff I thought was cool and as I layed it all out it just started coming together. I think that's why I like this kind of hobby, it's one of the few that really turn off my brain and let me relax.
After creating two pretty wacky postcards I realized that they both had something to say. I wrote a bit on the back and decided I'd send them when I got someone kind of "edgy". But as I struggled with what to send Tilly I had a thought, and that thought was - What the hell?! So I sent this one to her:
Text: I've felt trapped in San Diego for over two years, but this August I'm finally free and moving to San Francisco. I've done nothing but dream of this day, but now that it's almost here I'm terrified of what I'm going to miss. So terrified that I already miss it while it's still in my hands.
When I showed it to my friend that joined at the same time I did and is religiously sending out roller derby fliers turned into postcards, she said it looked like I had created the bastard child of PostCrossing and PostSecret and she didn't think poor miss Tilly was going to appreciate it. Meh. She should just be glad I didn't send her this one:
Text: My hair was past my waist for over 10 years. Just last week I tied it up in a thick braid and chopped it off. Now I feel naked. I never realized how much of my identity was tangled up in those messy locks.