Earlier this month my friend Jessica found an interesting program called Snail Mail My Email which was a free service that allowed you to have a typed email handwritten and sent to anywhere in the world. The transcribing was done by volunteers, so Jessica immediately signed up to be a volunteer. I’m not sure how many letters she got, but I think it was at least one per day. She even let me do a few of them. And I’m probably breaking federal postal regulations here, but I’m going to post the letters I did.

The first one was in French and didn’t have a name on it, so I addressed it to “Someone” on the envelope. I was too lazy to paste their short letter into a translator, so I have no idea what I wrote.

The next one I did on post-it notes and faked the lipstick kiss that they requested since I don’t own any lipstick.

And finally, I transcribed some guy’s girly letter to a girl he obviously has the hots for. He requested a unicorn near some trees and mountains. He failed to specify the type of unicorn, though, so I decided to draw a homicidal unicorn who’d just killed a bear.

The project at snailmailmyemail.org seems to be over now, but you can visit their site to look at some of the letters that other people did. It’s too bad because I would have enjoyed doing this kind of thing maybe once or twice a week for the rest of the year.

When I was in grade school, my teacher started us on a fun craft project. We made baby rattles! How do you make a baby rattle? It’s easy! Take a normal incandescent light bulb and paper-mache the entire thing. Then you paint it bright, happy colors. After the paint dries, you smash it against your desk so that the glass inside shatters into a hundreds of tiny glass shards. And that makes it rattle!

Yes, in the early 70′s / late 80′s, it was completely acceptable for your teacher to suggest that you give babies GLASS to play with. Of course, it was completely safe, being wrapped up in PAPER. What could possibly go wrong?