{"id":4214,"date":"2018-10-09T11:00:38","date_gmt":"2018-10-09T15:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/comblog\/?p=4214"},"modified":"2018-10-05T23:07:08","modified_gmt":"2018-10-06T03:07:08","slug":"sophia-what-to-do-with-500-envelopes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/comblog\/2018\/10\/09\/sophia-what-to-do-with-500-envelopes\/","title":{"rendered":"Sophia: What to Do With 500 Envelopes"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>Recently I had to mail in an application for an absentee ballot (make sure to vote kids!) and came across a problem, I own no envelopes. In the age of email the need to send a real actual letter is not an eventuality my stock of office supplies was prepared for, and so I did what any college student who suddenly needed snail mail would do, relied on the Internet. I figured I would use this one use of the postal service as an excuse to get some envelopes to have on hand, if for nothing else than yearly ballot applications. I selected a 50 pack on Amazon, hit order, and two days later received 500 envelopes. Turns out I am worse at numbers than I thought.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Now came the tough part, with 499 envelopes left unused, I needed to find a purpose for some of them or else lug around 500 envelopes through junior year and beyond. So I wrote letters. Grandparents, Dad, brothers, that one friend from high school whose address I actually knew, everyone got a letter. I will not lie, I put off some very important assignments to write letters, but once I started I just couldn&#8217;t stop! It was fun to write down what had been happening to me recently, to update relatives I didn&#8217;t get to see that often, and to spend some time thinking about friends and loved ones I missed. I don&#8217;t often take breaks from the chaos of junior year, but writing these letters let me stop and reflect, and having an audience made me more motivated to write than I ever was with a journal or diary. It became a task I was doing for me, and I never stopped to think about receiving a response.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>One trip to the mailbox and a week later, and I started receiving responses. I guess in the back of my mind I knew that was what occurred when you sent a letter, but in my frenzy to make use of envelopes I hadn&#8217;t stopped to think about what would happen once my letters were received. There is no rush like opening a mailbox to find it full of letters, especially when all you usually receive is jury duty or Domino&#8217;s pizza discounts. It made me excited to check the mail, and reading the letters I received was always a nice boost in my day. Hearing from friends and family is always nice, but being able to read and reread how they&#8217;re doing is something special.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>It&#8217;s easier now to keep in touch than ever before, but sitting down to write shows how much you care, and makes catching up a little more special than before. So send letters. Maybe don&#8217;t send 500 letters, but write to the people you care about. You&#8217;ll brighten their day, and who knows! You might even get a letter in response.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently I had to mail in an application for an absentee ballot (make sure to vote kids!) and came across a problem, I own no envelopes. In the age of email the need to send a real actual letter is not an eventuality my stock of office supplies was prepared for, and so I did &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/comblog\/2018\/10\/09\/sophia-what-to-do-with-500-envelopes\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Sophia: What to Do With 500 Envelopes<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2018,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[44478],"tags":[44489,44533],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/comblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4214"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/comblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/comblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/comblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2018"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/comblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4214"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/comblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4216,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/comblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4214\/revisions\/4216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/comblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/comblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/comblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}