I have a pen pal!

Warning: this post is completely non-beauty related!

Recently through my school, I was given the opportunity to reconnect with my pen pal in Nepal. I had my pen pal through middle school, after first writing to her in 5th grade, I believe. I thought it was really cool that I would get to know someone in another country. My pen pal is an amazing artist and a really cool person (I'm not sure she would want her name shared, so I won't post it on here). However, I wrote letters and never mailed them. Which is honestly awful, because I really liked having a pen pal. However, this year this was presented as a school project where anyone in the grade would participate, and the school would send a large package of letters from people in our grade. I jumped on this opportunity, as this would mean that if I wrote the letters, they would actually be sent. So I went home and managed to dig up a letter I had written in 2010, and I then wrote a 2 page letter to send this time. I included pictures, and I have a picture of her that she sent me a while back. I'm really hoping that she'll still want to be my pen pal after such a long silence (I feel awful). I look forward to reconnecting with her.

Now that I think about it, nobody seems to really write letters anymore. In the digital age, people send emails or texts, or use other means of electronic communication. It's rare that you receive or send a hand-written note, since hand writing things is just a lot more tedious than typing them. And besides, hand written things are easier to lose and forget about, unlike emails or texts which stay until you delete them, and even then there are probably digital copies left behind. It just seems so much more convenient to do things digitally. However, there's something about a hand-written note that's just really nice. Knowing that someone took the time and thought to write you something and being able to pin it up or do something with  it - there's just something special about it. I handwrite thank-you notes, but that's about it. This letter to my pen pal is the first hand-written letter I've written in a long time that wasn't a thank-you note. If I get one back, I'll be really excited. For me, things rarely come in the mail besides packages or a paycheck (I work grading papers in elementary school for one or two hours a week). So when/if I do get something back, it'll be nice to be able to sit down and open my letter, and read it. This was a bit of a pointless paragraph about digital mail vs. snail mail, but in the end they're both good. There's just something about a hand-written letter that a digital letter doesn't have.

I just thought I'd share with you guys since I'm really excited about reconnecting with my pen pal. Like I said, this was totally non-beauty related. But I'm still allowed to blog about non-beauty stuff sometimes, right? Anyway, happy Tuesday everyone! ^^