Puty's Journal

December is coming, and the malls (I have to admit that I love going to malls, and this is a confession) start to be decorated with red and green and fake snowflakes. Fake plastic trees, and fake Santa Claus. Candies and cookies are wrapped in bell-shaped boxes, and fake mistletoe are hung on the ceilings and in front of the doors. Christmas songs are on the air.

I don’t celebrate Christmas, but I like it when it is coming.

Even many things are fake, welcome, December.

Yesterday I received my 6th postcard from Russia of Postcrossing, and this morning I tested myself: draw a postman.

Here’s what I drew:

I don’t know why I drew this kind of postman, with blond hair and pale complexion, and blue uniform, instead of Indonesian postman with orange and grey uniform, with helmet and the motorcycle. Maybe I drew this, because I haven’t seen real postmen that much, and I won’t see them that often in the future, I bet. I watch cartoons, and I read comics: those are how I get the impression of a postman.

And you?
When someone says “postman”, what would pop up on your mind?

How would you describe it to your grandchildren, if they ask you to tell the fairytale of postal service? If they ask you to tell your analogue past, and our good old days under the ozone layer which was just starting to disappear. There will be time when people stop using envelope and stamp, the way Polaroid abandoned instant photography last year. There will be time when postcard becomes an artifact, and people can’t read the history without electricity. There will be time where quizzes by post sounds as far as us now with ancient Egypt.

We’re near the brink. Postal service, sooner or a bit later, is fading away. Let’s try to enjoy it. Try to send a birthday card to your grandma, try to do Postcrossing, try to send a letter to your best friend in other city. It’s nice. I’m not telling you to go back there, I’m just suggesting you to look back. It’s like using Lomo in this digital era.

If a couple years to come your future daughter is lucky enough, tell her to go post office, and come inside. Tell her to send a postcard for me. Introduce her to a postman, and let her remember what kind of man a postman is.
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I decided to make a place on tumblr for my postcards, sent and received. Visit it on deltiology.tumblr.com. Deltiology is the study and collection of postcards.
And if you want to postcard-exchange with me, just email me :)

People do this all the time. Covering the eyes because they see what they don’t want to see.
I’m doing this right now. Hiding beneath my palms because I don’t see what I want to see.

When I was a kid, I once was asked, if I had to give up one from five senses I have, which one I would give up. I answered: smell. I’d be blind without my sight, and deaf, without my hearing. But what’s so bad about not being able to feel the odors of life? Ever since, I underestimated it, yes, my sense of smell. Like I wouldn’t suffer if I didn’t have it.

Then lately, as the rain poured, and damped the ground, creating one of the best scent on Earth, I’ve been wondering: how amazing the sense of smell, built in our nervous system. How we can’t do scent-recording, but how the smell sometimes can be the best memories keeper. The best memories keeper we can’t handle. And we don’t need something like negative rolls of films, or ribbons in cassettes to keep them close to our present or future. They are just nowhere closest to somewhere. And because aromas, are personal, that we can’t even keep them in words.

My elementary school. The street I and my friends regularly walked on the years of junior high school. Splash cologne I wore when I was 13. My English course class room with my first crush on it. Talc powder I wore in high school. My grandma’s house, and its fish pond. Ramadhan, and Padangnese food: my father’s hometown. Perfume I wore when I was 17. My first ‘office’ of internship. Her cigarette’s smoke, coffee shop, and cinema. Bubblegum perfume on my first year in Bandung; when I fell in love. His car. My best friends.

And, yes, smell can keep secrets too.