February alone

February finds me longing for a day off. I don’t want to complain because I love my life and I am INCREDIBLY blessed, and I know this. But I am greedy and what I would really love, what I find myself longing for with an increasing fierceness, is a day that is all mine. A few hours, on one of the days when the children are in daycare, during which I won’t have to work and won't have to speak to anybody.

I want to be alone, and I want nobody to need me. Nobody to wait for me, nobody to send me emails or briefings, or to call to ask me if I’m happy with my current electricity plan. Maybe I will go and see a movie, or get a massage. Maybe I’ll paint some pictures or spend the whole day writing my book. Maybe I’ll just go for a walk, or grab a coffee. Somewhere where nobody knows me or wants to talk to me.

That day would be pure gold.

And at the end of it I would pick up my babies from daycare and kiss them all over their faces and love them all the better for the new energy I had to give them. I would kiss my husband when he came home from work and be ready to give him the smiles and time and attention he deserves, instead of hiding away in this blog or watching TV because I am too exhausted to talk.

And the next day, when I wake up to little voices calling my name at an hour when little voices probably shouldn’t be calling anything our to anyone, and spend the next four hours managing meals cleaning nappies and toilet-training getting them dressed mopping up spills getting them changed packing bags moderating arguments finding lost toys finding lost shoes changing more nappies more trips to the toilet wiping noses washing dishes (mopping up spills, getting them changed) dropping them off to daycare and THEN starting an eight-hour day of work (emails and phone calls and briefings and research and deadlines and backaches and headaches and hand-cramps and blurry vision and creating things for other people to other people’s tastes) before picking them up and starting all over again…

On THAT day, I will do it all with added joy. Because, the day before? That day was MINE.

Let's talk. What have you been longing for lately?

Image credit: Doug Robichaud (licensed under Creative Commons)

You make my heart sing

I feel a bit sheepish admitting this in public, but Mr B is a huge country and western music fan. I know! Right?! Anyway he is, and I might not love his music but I do love Mr B. So I decided to write some tongue-in-cheek snippets of lyrics from three of his favourites (Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton and Elvis Presley) onto these heart biscuits, then packed him off to work this morning with a very pink box of Valentine’s Day biscuits under his arm.

What I wrote:

“know when to hold ‘em” (uhuh Kenny) “love me tender” (thanks, Elvis) “all decked up like a cowgirl’s dream” (ah, Dolly: Mr B in cowboy boots? The mind boggles!) “don’t take your love to town” (this is good advice Kenny) “I will always love you” (awww, Dolly!)

Actually the point of this post is to give a bit of a shout-out to the Melbourne-based company that made the biscuits, Blank Goods. Not because they’ve sponsored me or anything (they haven’t) but because they made it SO EASY to personalise this lovely gift. I ordered the biscuits online and in less than a week they arrived, beautifully iced and amazingly unbroken, along with a food pen (!!) with which to write my messages, and all the pretty packaging accoutrements you see in these pictures.

I think food pens might change my life.

Anyway, happy Valentine’s Day for tomorrow, all you lovers. And you too, beautiful strangers.

Dear friend, email vs snail mail (+ mail art)

Dear friend,

Why do you think we set up email and snail mail against one another, as if one was superior to the other? Electronic versus paper. Fast versus slow. Wireless versus tangible. Really they’re all just ways to communicate with one another, aren’t they? To reach out, to stay connected, to be part of… more.

I love that the movie You’ve Got Mail, a movie about falling in love - anonymously - over email was based on The Shop Around the Corner, which was a movie about falling in love - anonymously - over letters. You’ve Got Mail pays homage to The Shop Around the Corner in a hundred different ways, even in the style of writing used by two sets of pen-pals, almost 60 years apart.

But it also shows that there’s really not a lot of difference between the two forms of letter-writing, when it comes down to it. Both movies are light-hearted fun but as viewers, it’s not beyond our imaginations that two people might just fall in love with one another from their words alone, regardless of the medium through which those words are shared.

I guess that’s because humans are the ones doing the letter-writing, so the heart remains the same.

Still, I wonder.

“I would send you a bouquet of newly-sharpened pencils, if I knew your name and address,” Joe Fox wrote, via email, to his pen-pal Kathleen Kelly in You’ve Got Mail. But if their movie had been about snail-mail instead of email, well, then, he could have gone ahead and sent her those newly-sharpened pencils. And newly-sharpened pencils would be rather nice to find in your letterbox, don’t you think? (If you are pondering whether or not to send me pencils through the mail, don’t hold back.)

Did I just disprove my own point, dear friend? It’s entirely possible, but then I’m still not so sure. I guess it’s something think about. I’ll write again soon.

Hope you are well. Yours truly, Naomi xo

ps. The letters below are from another batch of mail-art I recently sent to blog readers. You can see more here.

12 nice things to do for yourself or somebody else on Wednesday

I've been painting. This is going to be a postcard, if I'm happy when it's done...

Did you know it's Random Acts of Kindness week? What a week! I love this! I actually wrote and scheduled this post on the weekend, and then only yesterday found out about RAK Week. Serendipity, my friends! So here you go: 12 nice things to do for yourself or somebody else.

1. Nurture a little love: make somebody a seed bomb

2. Get a pedicure. Give somebody else a pedicure. Give the dog or cat a pedicure (just try not to smile)

3. Make a cup of tea. Now think about how you spend your life

4. Leave a love note for a stranger

5. Buy somebody a coffee: buy one for a friend, shout the person behind you in line at your cafe, donate the cost of a coffee to a charity

6. Those lines on your face? Learn to love them. Tell your mother you love hers, too

7. Try this: go 24 hours without complaining

8. Now this: go 40 days without being mean

9. Look for poetry in unexpected places. Then share it

10. Get a house-plant. Give a house-plant

11. Invite your friends over for a proper, grown-up dinner party

12. Dress up. Go the whole shebang, even if you’re only going out to buy bananas. You'll feel good, and it will make other people smile (especially the green-grocer)

Valentines for strangers

Under the cover of almost-darkness, the dog and I went for a walk down one of Melbourne’s many laneways last night and left behind some little inspirational love-notes for strangers. Because maybe just maybe, the RIGHT words will be seen by the RIGHT person, just when they need them the most. The neighbour’s cat was less than impressed.

This, but also that

Ugh. We have been sick all weekend. First it was Ralph, who went to bed just fine on Wednesday night and within four hours had produced enough mucus to fill a swimming pool. By Thursday night Scout had joined that club, and managed to sneeze INTO my mouth not once but twice while I was rubbing Vaporub onto her chest. And lo and behold, by Friday night I was sporting a tell-tale sore throat…

We are all feeling sniffly and foggy-headed and sorry for ourselves, bunkering down with copious quantities of berries and freshly-squeezed orange juice, and garlic-y foodstuffs. The house looks like a bomb hit it, the floors and all visible surfaces thick with toys, tissues and craft supplies: fallout from a weekend spent with two children sick enough to need to stay home but well enough to need constant entertaining. I could tidy up at night, but I’m too busy lying on the couch and moaning and sipping lemon-honey tea.

Also, I’ve been watching some of the movies on the Snail Mail Movie Club list. Here’s an update so far:

The Postman Why do people keep paying Kevin Costner to make movies?!?, BUT, I kind of like the premise that in times of war or oppression, communication becomes a powerful weapon

The Shop Around the Corner Sweet and I loved how closely You’ve Got Mail referenced it in both style and substance, BUT I could have wished for more of the actual pen-pal correspondence - I think they did that better in You’ve Got Mail

Letters to Juliet Super cheesy and WHAT were they thinking with the utterly cardboard romantic-interest guy (I can’t even remember his name - the blonde one), BUT a completely beautiful (and real-life) practice of writing letters about love to Juliet Capulet, AND Vanessa Redgrave - I want to be her, at any age!

84 Charing Cross Road Followed the book quite closely and just made me happy really, BUT occasionally a weird thing would happen where sometimes the actors, while reading their letters out loud, would look straight at the camera

Still to watch:

* Il Postino * We’ve Got Christmas Mail * The Night Mail * In the Good Old Summertime * PS I Love You * Message in a Bottle * Air Mail * Poste Restante

What am I missing? Any other movies about snail mail? And have you seen any of these? What did you think?

And how are you? How are your loved-ones? Hopefully sore-throat and mucus free!

Image credit: horses (totally unrelated to this post but I liked them) by Bethany Legg, licensed under Creative Commons

Love letters

Earlier this week when I posted about the Snail Mail Movie Club, a number of people gave me some wonderful recommendations for snail-mail-themed movies to watch. One of them was Letters to Juliet, which I duly watched on iTunes a couple of nights ago.

Have you seen it? The premise is that people write letters to Juliet Capulet (of Romeo and Juliet fame), mostly about their love-lives, and leave them on a wall opposite the balcony in Verona where once the original Juliet sighed and pondered “What’s in a name?” (It doesn’t seem to matter to them that Juliet is a purely fictional character.)

So far, it’s just a kind of sweet “passing through” tradition, like leaving a padlock on the Pont des Arts in Paris. But the best part of THIS story is that a group of women who call themselves the “Secretaries of Juliet” hand-write answers to each and every letter.

After I finished watching the movie I looked this tradition up and, with a lovely sense of “rightness” in the world, I found out it was true!

Apparently it all started more than 100 years ago, when visitors began to leave notes at Juliet’s supposed tomb. But the tradition really found its feet in 1937, when the then-custodian of Juliet’s tomb, Ettore Solimani, began replying to the notes, simply styling himself “Juliet’s Secretary.”

In the letters, which came from all over the world but were predominantly from adolescent American girls, people told Juliet their hopes and dreams. They shared their stories. They asked for her advice, they asked for her help.

“Help me! Save me!” one Italian woman wrote to Juliet, after her husband had left her. "I feel suspended on a precipice. I am afraid of going mad.”

Juliet, through Solimani replied, “Men have moments when they are unable to control themselves… Have faith… The day of humiliation will come for the intruder, and your husband will come back to you.” I hope everything worked out for her, whether he returned or not.

(That exchange came from a 2006 article in the New York Times, taken in turn from the book Letters to Juliet by Lise and Ceil Friedman, which I’ve ordered online but not yet read).

I love Solimani’s extravagant eccentricity in taking on the role of Juliet’s Secretary, a title he held for 20 years until he retired in the late 1950s. Stories tell that he created a series of rituals for visitors to the tomb, inviting them to make wishes that he promised would come true, and training turtle doves to alight on female visitors.

These days, the Secretaries of Juliet are a team of letter-writers, volunteers engaged by the City of Verona, called the Club di Giulietta. They answer all the letters, in every language, contracting translators if necessary. If you want to, you can even volunteer as a secretary yourself!

If a self-funded trip to Verona is a bit beyond the budget right now, you might still want to share your stories and dreams with Juliet, or seek her advice, at any time.

"Who knows if Juliet can really solve the problems in the matter of love, if she can make a dream come true or give hope to lovelorns… Sure is that this phenomenon has taken on global dimensions and has become part of the collective imagination,” her Secretaries say.

If you’d like to write to Juliet, simply addressing your letter to “Juliet in Verona” will be enough, but her formal address is:

Giulietta Capulet Club di Giulietta Via Galilei, 3 Verona Italy

Dear tree

Did you know that you could email any individual tree in the City of Melbourne, and the tree would write back?

The helpful folks at Council have individually mapped every tree in the city and assigned it a unique number, then created a website by which you can identify and contact each tree.

The website was set up originally so that people could report any health or other issues with all the trees in our city. But a lot of people are using the service just to say hi or thank you to the trees for greening and shading and purifying our city.

Last week, Scout wrote to her favourite tree in Carlton Gardens. Here is her email.

We haven’t heard back yet, but I’ll share the tree’s reply when we do!

Image credit: Jonas Nilsson Lee, licensed under Creative Commons

Snail mail - seaside holiday

A little while ago a woman approached me and asked if I'd like to collaborate with her by illustrating a children's book she had written. It was an absolutely beautiful story, about "Grandad" and a family of dolphins, that was based on true events.

I gave her a resounding YES, with the caveat that I would probably be very slow, since I had so much on my plate (not the least of which was a backlog of about 40 mail-art letters I'd promised to send).

True to my word, I was (am) very slow. But towards the end of December, when the days started to warm up and my Facebook feed was full of photos of watermelon and children in swimming pools and families talking about summer holidays, I thought I'd get into the spirit of a seaside holiday myself.

I had 10 letters written and ready to send, so I painted each one with something friendly that might be found somewhere along the Western Australian coast (where the story was set). The theme fit the season, and it was good practice for the actual illustrations I needed to create.

Painting them en masse like that made me feel a little bit nostalgic for the lazy seaside holidays we used to take as kids (ahoy there, Tuggerah Lake). It felt like summer when summer was about nothing more than holidays and the slip 'n slide and icy poles and tan-lines and sleepovers in a tent on the front lawn.

I hope my lovely bloggy pen-pals enjoyed their own little slice of seaside holidays, too!

The snail-mail movie club

Shall we start a club, of sorts? A movie club for people who love snail mail? And, related: do you want to be in my next book?

Let me explain.

I’m writing a book about snail mail. One that celebrates snail mail in the modern age, and has a lot of fun with all the ways you can write and create and send snail mail, to brighten others’ days, not to mention your own. Since I’ve been researching this book, I’ve also got to thinking about snail mail in popular culture, like books and TV and movies, and that’s where you come in.

I’ve made a list of all the movies I can think of that celebrate snail mail. Perhaps you know some others? What I’d love is for you to watch one or more of these movies, or one you know about that I haven’t shared here, and send me your impressions, either in the comments or privately via email (nabulger at gmail dot com) by the end of this month (February 2015).

If this was a proper club, we’d watch one movie a month together, or something along those lines. But at that rate, my book wouldn’t get written until about 2018! So instead, just pick one or as many movies as you’d like to watch this month, and go for it!

It doesn’t have to be a full review. You might just want to send a couple of words. Or one sentence. How the movie makes you feel about snail mail, something that surprised you, something that inspired you, something that made you go WHAAAAAT?! Pretty much anything!

Hopefully I’ll have enough movie responses to be able to share little comments and quotes when I talk about all the snail mail movies in my book. I’ll use your first and last name unless you’d rather be anonymous (just let me know and I’ll make a name up), and if you have a blog you’d like me to share I’m happy to do that too.

What do you think? Will you watch a movie (or two) with me? Maybe you could have a snail-mail movie night with friends, while writing and decorating letters (Valentine’s Day is coming up - does Grandma deserve a love letter?).

Meanwhile, I’d really appreciate it if you could share this post around your social media and other networks, so that as many people as possible might be able to be part of this.

Yours sincerely,

Naomi xo

The movies: 

(Top row) 84 Charing Cross Road // Message in a Bottle // Night Mail // We’ve Got Christmas Mail (Bottom row) Air Mail // Poste Restante // The Postman // The Shop Around the Corner

ps. I actually haven’t seen any of these myself, so if you’re in the same boat we’ll be watching along together for the first time. Some of them look really bad, don’t you think? But that’s half the fun. The two I’m looking forward to the most are the The Shop Around the Corner and 84 Charing Cross Road (brilliant book!)

ps2. Here’s where you’ll find some of my old snail mail and mail-art posts

ps3. My last book, called “Airmail,” is a novella about two strangers who are connected by letters and stories. You can find out more about it here