pen pals
11/07/2010
all swirley inside
My niece finally got herself an email address. She’s been writing to me for about a month now, I got the first email a couple of weeks after I got back from Singapore.
It’s totally cute, cos she’s been trying out different fonts, background colours, sign-offs. She offers small snippets on the latest at home and school.
It totally takes me back more than 20 years – I used to write to my baby cousin. It was always a treat getting physical mail in the box. Alas my cousin is a baby no longer, she’s now a mother of a toddler, with another on the way. And yet I still lead a relatively low responsibility, low obligation life. I do enjoy a life lived untethered.
Later in school I used to correspond with a couple of friends by mail. Some of it still sit in boxes in my room at my parents. Unfortunately I did have to make a call and discard some, difficult as it might have been. Email, however, is a different creature. No one writes on email the way they do in a letter. Not really. For some reason, letters read more earnestly.
Maybe it’s just me. Or maybe there’s just a little more honesty when you put pen to paper. After all, it’s so much easier to backspace, ctrl-backspace your way to perfection.
