1:29 p.m. - 2003-12-03
Postal blues
the postman always ring twice, why?
last night I was zombie-ing at the postal office, sorting out mail and stamping the stamps with a black rubber stamp which reads �postage paid, 02 Dec 2003�. Stamping them is no easy task, you have to hammer down with a great force and its painful for the wrists, especially if you have a few thousand to stamp. Yeah there�s so much mail these days. It�s Christmas� and payback time. Ha.
There�s crumpled letters with lousy cringly brown paper; there�s pink perfumey letters with cute handwriting; there�s government notices to draft NS kids and evict illegal settlers; there�s suspicious letters with hard tube-like objects in them ( no, not dildos, er�more like lipsticks or spark plugs.); there�s letters with forms to supermarket contests pasted on the back of them with wet dreams and saliva; there�s air mail to weird places like Icuna and also from weird places like compassvale; there�s letters stuffed with thick slabs of paper addressed to companies; there�s thin grey letters with computer printed words from banks; once there was this letter with its flap open and a thick white cotton sock popping out (it got delivered anyway, nonplussed); there�s letters without stamps and I dunno what the absent minded people were thinking about as they drop this; and then there was the ghostly musical card.
but before the musical card, I was gathering up the mail in my hands and stamping them.
All these letters, very personal and all, they were handwritten or typed and dropped into mailboxes by people like you and me, who pasted stamps gingerly, licking them and wondering about the weird taste and then worrying about whether our recipient gets the mail in the end. And here I am, another helper among the complicated organization in the process of delivering them. I felt like an elf.
ok, so I was zombie-ing half-asleep, at the sorting table, when suddenly a cheery musical melody chimed out. I thought it was somebody�s stupid handphone going off but then we are not allowed to carry phones while working. And then the melody just went on and on.
I stared at the mail collected and sorted out in this yellow plastic tray. I put my ear closer to the letters. yes, the music is coming from here. this is not the climax. I thought that it must be some musical card stuck and so I shifted the letters a bit and hey, the melody stopped.
yeah. And so I continued working, stamping with a vengeance.
I even made up a tuneless song while doing the task. What a promising elf I am.
Santa, give that man a tiger!
List of good writers who have worked in the postal service before:
charles bukowski
yossarian in Catch 22, well he did censor the letters of the servicemen while he was in hospital, ok he�s not a writer.
List of writers who have never worked in the postal service before:
Shakespeare
Li Bai
so on� the list continues.
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An except from george orwell�s 1984, this reminds me of spurs.
�On this April day, Winston has left the Ministry of Truth, where he works in the Records Department, to take his lunch break at home, because he wishes to write in his diary�a compromising activity and a compromising possession to begin with. Yet, despite his fears, he is overwhelmed with the need to impose some sanity upon his world. Winston is a rebel at heart, a heretic who does not subscribe to Party doctrines or beliefs.
After reflecting on the day's events, notably the event which inspired him to begin the diary on this day, Winston is startled by a knock on the door. Could it be the Thought Police already? �
