EvilJulie.com

Every year that I have had a grownup job instead of working as a retail wage slave or a part time office drone while I was in school, I have taken my birthday off. I have become accustomed to this, and while I don’t always do earth-shaking things with my day off, I like my routine. My routine was smacked down this semester by a 5 PM Thursday class. Because I am already skipping this class once this semester to go to SAFF, and because said class only meets once a week, skipping on my birthday was not an option. And because if I’m going to have to be on campus at 5 anyway, there really didn’t seem to be a point in skipping work, I came to work and am taking tomorrow off instead.

I would like to stress at this point that I’ve been having a very good birthday. Charlie decided to unleash his full purring potential when I petted him at 6 AM, and in addition to pretending he’s a snuggly cat and cuddling up to me, he purred up and down the musical scale loudly enough to wake Rick up. This was a first from our generally hands-off littlest cat, and I welcomed it. At 7:30, I woke up to find a birthday card and $33 in the scratch-off lotto tickets I’ve become addicted to in the past week on the nightstand beside my head, and when I went to the living room to scratch them off (that sounds dirty), there was Rick waiting with a kiss, a Barnes & Noble gift card, and another birthday card. (For the record, I won $24 from the lotto tickets.)

I came to work to find my boss had gotten me a red velvet cake to celebrate, and then later in the morning, my mother had a fruit arrangement sent to the office, so we’ve had plenty of birthday goodies to nosh on today. And people have been wishing me happy birthday left, right, and center in person, on the phone, via email, and on Facebook. The book we’re discussing in class tonight was amazing, and I love this class anyway, so I am looking forward to it. And yet, at the same time…

I really wish I could have taken today off. I’m bored and want to go do something fun. As it’s supposed to start pouring again any minute now, something fun will be tamer than some years, and tonight will involve the loom, no homework, a couple of videos, some wine, the cats, and when he gets home from a work outing, Rick. It will be good.

When I was in the 5th grade, our teachers decided that as part of our English class, we should all get international penpals. They had us all register with a penpal service, and for the bargain price of about $1.00, we got a penpal from a foreign country. As I recall, it was set up like a dating system: basically, we chose the top three countries we would like a penpal from, we wrote down a few of our hobbies, our age, whether we wanted a boy or a girl penpal, and sent it all in. Six weeks later, we were all matched up with someone, and boy was that a happy day in English class. We were given slips of paper with our new penpal’s name, address, age, and hobbies, and I remember spending that class comparing slips with my friends. Some of us, myself included, had registered for two penpals, because oh my god, how could you choose just one country you wanted a penpal from???

My original penpals were a girl from England and a boy from Egypt, both my age. Over the years, I exchanged a lot of letters with them (I kept them all in a shoebox). I got some more penpals as well, some by sending away, some as surprises when the company would find a match for me and send my address to them, and then suddenly I would get that first awkward letter from someone saying “Hi, my name is Such and Such, I’m __ years old, and I’m your new penpal!” I think by my senior year in college, I had penpals in Greece, Wales, Japan, Egypt (multiple), France, and England (multiple) – all countries I hoped to visit someday. We exchanged letters, gifts, and one of them even came over and stayed with me for a week on three separate occasions. I was always so jazzed to get another letter would arrive in the mail from one of them, and I could have bought stock in stationery companies. Then we all went to college, email was invented, and I lost touch with all of them.

I thought of them when I was on a stationery search last week so that I could write Amelia longer letters than would fit on notecards. Did you know that it is damned hard to find stationery these days? I mean, for letter writing, not just thank you notes. It took me a long time to find some (at Barnes & Noble, incidentally, although I guess I could have checked Hallmark, that’s where I used to get all my airmail supplies back in the day), and I wondered if letter writing has truly been replaced. It’s kind of sad to think about – how often to we get something in the mail these days that isn’t junk mail or a bill? Or, in an increasingly paperless society, how often do we get something in the mail at all? I correspond with five people via email on a daily basis, and while I value those emails for my sanity, there is nothing that compares with getting a letter in the mail.

I wonder where all my penpals from junior high and high school are today? I wonder if I could track them down somehow through the internet (I’ve been unsuccessful so far), and if they got a letter from me, how would they respond?