Mourning Mail

The problem with living in a heavily electronic age is that many things are now virtual, rather than actual.

This thought occurred to me today as I checked my mail and all I had was a circular ad for Lowes, a Steak and Shake page of coupons and a leaflet for DirecTV. Yesterday, I had a coupon from Bed, Bath and Beyond. The day before that…I got no mail.

Even a few years ago, I used to get more mail. Even though it was mostly bills, there was something satisfying in opening up the mailbox and seeing a wad of envelopes in there. You never quite knew what you were going to get. Those were the days where I had files folders for my bills, each labeled with the name of the company who was sending the bill. Then, on payday, I’d get my newest bills, my checkbook and my stamps and I’d make an evening of paying bills. Yes, this sounds rather dull but, oddly, I quite liked it. I never liked the spending of the money part of it but there was something satisfying about sitting down, immersed in paperwork, half-watching something on TV and then maybe having a glass of wine as a reward. Then again, I am someone who quite likes to do my taxes too. Yes, I’m weird. However, I liked homework too when I was in school. We could discuss my giant case of pre-college nerdiness but I’ve made no secret of the fact that I was a nerd.

Nowadays, most of my bills are delivered electronically to me. Not only is this easier but it does save trees. I’m not exactly Captain Greenpeace-let’s-live-in-a-tree-to-protest-them-chopping-them-down. I’m not even someone who necessarily buys the green version of cleaning products. Frankly, while I salute the attempt, vinegar and lemon do NOT clean my toilet as well as Lysol Bathroom Cleaner and I’m not going to mess with bathroom germs. However, I do try to be green when I can and if I can save a tree by having my mortgage statements sent to me electronically, I will.

On a side note, I do wish that the credit card companies who are trying to solicit my business were more green. Chase Manhattan, I am TALKING TO YOU. I do NOT need at least three pieces of junk mail in my mailbox per week asking me to become a) a member of your bank, b) a holder of your credit card or c) a low balance transfer. By all means, if you HAVE to, send me one piece of mail sporadically to remind me that you’re out there but your bulk mailing campaigns are ridiculous. Discover card? You’re not far behind. And Citibank? I already have one of your damn credit cards, I don’t want another. I don’t want to swap my reward card for a Disney reward card or a Barnes and Noble reward card. Here’s the thing: By having a general rewards card that gives me cash back, I can spend it anywhere! A novel concept, I know but this means I can use it for Disneyland or Barnes and Noble if I want! I don’t need a specific card!

(please note, I’m making up the Disney/Barnes and Noble thing. I do get these type of offers from Citibank but it may not be those specific companies. Those may come from Chase Manhattan. CHASE? STOP KILLING TREES!).

Back to my original point and, yes, again- I do have one. The actual real mail that’s directed to me personally rather than “Captain Monkeypants or current resident” has declined dramatically in recent years because of technology, particularly the rapid growth of the internet and the ease of paying bills online.

(That last sentence, right there- THESIS STATEMENT! Yup, I learned something in high school English and it still applies. Yes, I am proud. As should Mrs. Studebaker and the other teachers who taught me the value of writing a paper correctly. I can still do the outline, thank you very much. Now, diagramming sentences…that was always a little daft to me and even though I probably still could try, my total lack of desire to ever diagram a sentence again gets in the way.)

I like doing things online. It’s convenient and simple. I have it set up so that I just login to my banking site and I’ve already got all my payees and bill notifications set up. I can just look at what’s due and boom! Payment is delivered within two days. While this is simple, it’s not foolproof. For example, say your direct deposit is delivered at 12:00 a.m. on a Saturday and you don’t think about paying bills until you’re in your office on a Monday. Then you realize that it’s actually the 3rd of the month and your Verizon bill is due today. If you go through the bank, it’ll get paid by the 5th. However, the beauty of a virtual world is that in this case, I can just go directly to my Verizon account, login and then click on “Pay my Bill”. Boom. Instant gratification.

Life is more convenient now. Before the internet, doing that would have involved a series of phone calls and possibly an emergency trip to the post-office. Now, it just requires going to a website, logging in and taking care of business.

Granted, it’s a little more dangerous but if you’re smart about it and you don’t put in “Password” as your password or something equally easy-to-guess, it’s pretty secure.

All in all, it is easier now. It makes it harder to be late with payments. It makes it harder to forget a payment because my bank reminds me when to pay. I also get reminders from the companies in my inbox.

The inbox has replaced the physical mailbox. It’s a little sad.

While it is nice to see fun, personal emails from friends and family and those nifty “Hey it’s your birthday, have a coupon for a free ice-cream” type of things on your birthday, I find that there’s something not quite as gratifying about email as there is with physical mail. Maybe it’s because email is delivered 24 hours a day, seven days a week whereas with physical mail, you have to wait for the mailperson to put it in your box. It is more convenient to have email constantly being delivered but it’s not as fun as real mail.

No matter how many emails I get, it never quite feels the same opening one as it does having a physical envelope in my hand, and trying to open the seal only to tear the paper. When the email opens, it’s so quick, there’s little time to pause in the anticipation of the letter. You can’t lay it aside and pick it up again to reread without having to log back into your email and reopen it.

And the smell of paper and the occasional accidental papercut is missing. I get it. We need to be green. I get as much email as I ever did physical mail, probably a lot more.

Yet, every time I open my mailbox to find it empty, it’s a little sad. I miss real mail.

And Chase Manhattan? You don’t count. Sorry.

Happy Wednesday

Great Expectations of Mondays...

It’s been a dark and stormy day out there for most of today. It seemed quite fitting for a Monday morning, honestly although it did make it rather hard to get out of bed.

As any of my regular readers go, I don’t like Mondays much. In high school, I had an English teacher for the first two years who was a bit of an eccentric old lady. She used to pronounce “ego” as “eggo” and then whenever someone would mutter “leggo my eggo”, she used to laugh and think that it was a clever philosophical joke rather than quoting a waffle commercial. Anyway, she also had another saying she used fairly often. Whenever someone would complain about not liking Mondays, she’d say, “don’t blame Mondays. It’s not Monday’s fault it’s not a good day.”

She’s probably right. It’s just the misfortune of Monday to be…Monday. The way I look at it is that if the weekdays were represented as humans, I see them as siblings. Monday would be the anti-social sibling who was the runt of the litter and had a rather sour disposition. He probably also accidentally killed his mother while being born and thus, he has that chip on his shoulder to bear. Thus, it’s not really Monday’s fault he’s the way he is but…he could be nicer.

That was a little weird and yet another ‘too much information as to how Captain Monkeypants’ brain works’.

Nevertheless, I should try to not be so negative towards Mondays.

In this case, Monday came after a nice weekend. It was a busy one but fun. I think those make Mondays harder to bear because I didn’t have much down time and I would really prefer Monday to come a little later and be, say, Tuesday instead.

Still, if it’s the price we pay for having weekends, it’s a small one. A world without weekends would not be a good thing. Sometimes when I’m reading books about the olden days and I see that people used to work every day but the Sabbath, I feel guilty for whining so much. We really do have it easy now what with employment practices and guidelines that mandate rules for time off and permitted hours we can work.

It’s probably softened us up a little. We don’t do nearly as much manual labour as we used to and you no longer hear of kids leaving school to work in the fields at the age of 14 the way they used to in Thomas’ Hardy’s time.

Things have changed a lot since then. I think about that quite a lot too. Back in Jane Austin’s era, the ways people spent their free time was considerably different than how we do now. Back then, ladies would spend endless hours doing needlework and arranging flowers. They would read and ‘take a turn about the room’. They did not spend hours watching “Top Chef”, mowing the lawn, tiling floors or think about food all the time the way I do. I would have made a terrible lady back then because I can’t really sew very well and when I try, I end up pricking my fingers and bleeding quite a lot. I’ve tried flower arranging but, well, once they’re in the vase, they always look fine when I plop them in with no gaps. I don’t really know where the arranging comes in, honestly. I do think floral arrangements from florists look nice but I don’t have time to get those Styrofoam thingies that you stick the flowers in so they don’t flop around.

I suppose if you were an Austin-esque ‘lady of leisure’, you wouldn’t necessarily need to appreciate weekends. I mean, the whole point is to take a break from routine and have two days of leisure. If you spend all day at leisure, would they be the same?

I don’t know why I’m thinking of Thomas Hardy and Jane Austin, to be honest. I’m finding that, once more, I have gone off on a weird tangent. This is a fact for which I apologize. Maybe it’s because I referenced Mrs. Studebaker, my eccentric high school English teacher and my brain decided to honour her by thinking of literature. Of course, if that were the case, I’d be thinking more of Charles Dickens and Great Expectations which I remember vividly studying and reading in far too much detail. What stays with me from that book is the mouldy wedding cake from the lady who never got married. I think her name was Miss Havisham.

I wonder if Ms. Havisham was supposed to get married on a Monday. I bet she was.

Sorry, Mondays…I really must work harder to like you more. My apologies.

Happy Tuesday!