Anyway, the reason I like postal mail is:
the *whole world* is so fcking broken except/yet somehow postal mail services have these weird legacy neural synapses and arcane procedures in place which get little slips of paper – directed by other slips of paper – from point to point without much fuss and, irrelevant of wars, geo political conflict, currency fluctuations, blockchain ledgers, wire tapping, warrants, embargoes, schemes to build giant glass villages and mountain alpine resorts in the desert, sand castles in the sea, court proceedings – and mostly and importantly – the tendencies in some places to privatize the public mail service which should be always handled within the public and outside of political/government interference), postal mail inexplicably arrives at the destination more often than not (I mean, sent postcards by surface mail to India in the middle of the pandemic in six months later, sure enough, it arrives, although aerogrammes to the USA almost always disappear) so what all of this means is:
Yes yes yes I hate giving money to courier companies plus, Japan being a weird island country that doesn’t adopt things from the outside world, has a whole other scheme of couriers (which work fantastically within Japan and delivered frozen meats with an hours somehow) and during the stupid stock sale situation, I spent so much money on notaries and courier services which were always a complete hassle so yes, I hate courier companies FedEx, UPS, DHL et al (sidebar: do you know the weird story of Larry Hillblom, the “H” in DHL? If no, remind me to tell you)
And yes, I do like going to the post office because it gives me a “purpose“ and I enjoy the process of choosing and putting stamps on envelopes and dropping off but really, the local post office just did a staff rotation and all my friendly people have gone, they’re always playing some terrible music on a loop, and it’s not like I need the extra job, but still:
*It’s because I love the fact that postal services exist in this strange neural network and dozens of hands touch and handle the envelope as it goes for me to you.*
{Now, with packages, there’s all kinds of new requirements to print out barcoded declarations to go on the packages which makes things extra complicated but I’ve also learned that the “international postal union“ which is (of course), based in Switzerland, maintains what’s called ‘the worlds most complicated spreadsheet’ which tracks all of the postal rates and remittances between countries and that of course is very amusing to me
So this is why I like to send postal mail: it’s because it’s *important* // It’s like a ledger without the crypto, it’s like a blood stream without the blood, it’s like a trout stream without the trout or maybe there are trout, are the letters the trout? what do I know about trout fishing in America? #RichardBrautiganReference
So we go on.
And as long as that riff about “why I like postal systems” was, I have a much longer one about citizenships and “move to this glorious place” consultants and arcane details of the pros and cons and ways and means of living an existing in other countries. So much to say! And really, my spiel was crystallized in Bali with naïve Americans and clueless Australians abounding. And every time someone mentions Costa Rica or now even Portugal… I’ll stop now, really…
I’ll save it for another time.
Except for this part:
“when at the immigration office, picked up the most hilarious brochure with the incredibly complicated points-based professional status immigration program which is basically impossible as they’re looking for people ideally under 29 that have a PhD and a decades worth of experience in a field, hold several patents and has widely published academic papers in accepted journals – and then it was put together in fine point type with cute character clipart as though this was some kind of fun little activity”