Mail Brag
Not so special deliveries
I have a mail problem. I also have plenty of male problems, but this week we’ll focus on letter delivery and not all that.
Now, I live in a newer building, so the process of getting packages has been an elegant one for me since I moved in six years ago. We have a doorman and also a package room where when we receive something in a box or large envelope, it gets checked in and then we get an alert on our phone, and then we can go pick it up from a relatively organized room, and then sign it out so the building knows it made it to the right resident. Except that right now, as our building shifts over to new management, there is no package system. Things get delivered but you have no idea that they’re waiting for you. And when you get it, no one knows if the right person picked it up or not. It’s chaos.
I’m very good about retrieving my packages. I actually don’t really get many. I’ve been on a long shopping hiatus (cough, mostly), and I try to never rely on regular delivery for household things except cat litter, because it’s just too heavy for me to carry around. I tend to know when I have succumbed to a Real Real order or have some specific items on the way for a Hanukkah party, so it’s not hard for me to fall behind. The one place I do, however, is when my publisher sends me galleys and new releases, a benefit of being an author. You never know when they’re coming, but they’re small and as long as I get an alert one arrives, I happily grab it on my way upstairs after coming home from a long walk or a late show.
There are people in my building who get regular deliveries. I’ll go down to grab my one envelope and see dozens of Amazon boxes arriving every few hours. Occasionally the building would email people being like, “Hey, everyone get your packages!” and I would smile with a self-satisfaction that I’m not the problem there.
I wasn’t always this on top of things, and I think part of it is because we have this lovely, modern package system. I had never lived in a building like this before I moved here in 2020. My last apartment was a little walk-up a few blocks away, and while it was small and old, I did love it. But it was absolute hell to get packages and even mail. We had a front door that you had to buzz, and then it was just a few mailboxes, a tiny square of tile floor, and the stairs up to the units. No system, not even a second door to protect things. And our door was glass, so you could see whatever was sitting on the floor, waiting to be stolen.
When I lived there, I was on tour with Ilana one summer and I won a sweepstakes. I know we all look at online sweepstakes and are like, “No one actually wins those.” Well, I did. I won like $1500 of credit across a few home goods stores after entering something on Instagram while I was bored one day. It was the perfect time because I had recently moved into my place after subletting and hopping around after my year in LA. I was able to get gorgeous new plates and bowls, some cute pots for my plants, a jewelry organizer, and a handful of other things that need to be shipped carefully. I was riding a ceramics high.
Unfortunately, those items all started arriving when I was away. And the UPS delivery people would, fairly, buzz my apartment. When I didn’t answer, they would just buzz the other apartments in the building (four in total) until someone opened the door so they could drop the package in the entryway and get on to the next delivery. This is no problem for most people. Living in a New York walk-up apartment, you get buzzed for the front door whether it’s for you or not. You can ignore it or buzz or whatever, but that’s just part of living here.
My elderly neighbor who I shared a floor with did not feel this way. He would leave nasty notes on my door about UPS ringing his apartment (which I have to believe weren’t always for me). He once confronted me in the hallway and started crying about how people buzz his apartment for me and I’m never home. This wouldn’t be that upsetting to me except that a few weeks later, thanks to my downstairs neighbors, I found out this guy likely murdered his wife and got away with it when he lived in a different apartment. Soooooo...it was a tense few weeks.
But anyway, I’m on a high horse about certain building behaviors like retrieving packages from our luxe package room. I’ve had garbage room confrontations with people who live on my floor about breaking down boxes. I always get my packages the day they come in. I don’t leave things in the hallway. Sure sometimes I’m in my kitchen loudly talking until 3am with friends, but aside from that I stay on top of my building responsibilities.
Except for emptying my mailbox.
The thing is, the mail is my problem. The package room and the garbage room and the hallway are public spaces, and we’re living in a society (George Costanza voice). But my little rectangular shelf in our wall of mailboxes is my problem and my problem only. Which is why I feel totally fine not checking my mail for sometimes months at a time.
I know it’s bad! Mail is important. Alyssa yells at me all the time, and often threatens to send me more mail. I don’t know how I became this person. I wasn’t always like this. I remember being glued to my mailbox in college after receiving several weird catalogues addressed to the student who lived in my dorm room before me. My friends and I would pour over the bizarre SkyMall meets Etsy pages of random crap and laugh until we got kicked out of the dining hall.
In high school of course I loved mail. The only things that came to our house addressed to me were Delias and J.Crew catalogues, birthday cards, and eventually college acceptance letters. Who wouldn’t love mail when it’s just adulation and consumerism???
But mail isn’t that fun in real adulthood. It’s mostly bills, and most of those bills already exist on my computer. I don’t need to be confronted with a hard copy of an insane expense I already know about and dealt with digitally. It’s all junk, as mail I know has always been. It’s credit card offers and, well, mostly that. It’s institutions I love that I’ve been to once in the last year begging me to pay for a membership I can’t really afford right now--throwing in my face that money is tight and I’m not, as I like to believe I am, a patron of the arts. I’m a once a year museum goer.
There’s something about mail I just find stressful. In a way that I happily will answer a phone call from an unknown number as long as it isn’t spam, I truly dread opening my mailbox when I walk by it every time I come home. And then, once I haven’t checked it in a while I start to panic that I have already missed something important and bad, and instead of immediately checking to make sure, I avoid it like seeing an ex on the street. I much prefer letting a small problem become a crisis than dealing with something in the moment. It’s bad, it’s unproductive, I know that. I’m working on it, but it’s very much how I handle things.
I missed jury duty once. I get my friends’ holiday cards in February and then feel weird just tossing pictures of their cute kids in matching outfits immediately in the garbage, but what am I supposed to do at that point? The worst is that I don’t just miss and have to deal with “bad mail.” I have missed good mail! The coveted large green envelopes from the WGA filled with residual checks do not come on an obvious schedule, nor are you ever aware if you’re getting any at all. In the last few years when I’ve mostly worked on streaming shows, I expect to never see those beautiful green envelopes again. But then I once was sorting through probably 7 weeks of mail and saw one peeking out from behind my corporate credit card bill. I was floored. Sometimes you get one of those envelopes just to find 6 checks inside each worth three cents, but this was substantial enough to cover a lot of my bills. If I had checked my mail earlier, I would have had it earlier.
Usually I’ll finally check my mail when I come home a little tipsy, enough liquid courage to see what lurks behind the metal slot. Again, it’s usually nothing scary! It’s bills I’ve already paid, it’s offers for things I don’t want. But one or two gin martinis is enough to face whatever is in my little locker.
The problem is, there’s nothing fun in the mail. Maybe it’s not all that scary, but it’s also not that exciting. I’m not saying I want to be overloaded with catalogs and cards and letters every day. But I miss the era of fun magazines. I get New York and The New Yorker still, but increasingly those covers telegraph to me what a hellish world we live in. I miss the window of magazine world where subscriptions were down but the magazines themselves were still the same quality. You could pay $12 for a year of Vogue or Elle or Esquire and it was a delight every month to have something glossy and fun to flip through while watching TV or riding the subway.
Those days are long gone. Magazines are mostly just ads. Catalogs lack the coolness and excitement of my youth. I’d come home and lock myself in my room with the latest 90s J.Crew and just circle everything I wanted, like a white tipped two piece in “Aegean” or the perfect black flip flops. Now when I get a catalogue, even if it’s a brand from which I buy things, it does nothing for me. Maybe that’s late stage capitalism, but I think it’s the catalogs themselves. They aren’t little magazines anymore filled with things you haven’t seen before. They’re like 12 pages of too thick matte paper with the same four sweaters you see all over your phone and computer. I’m looking at you, Jenni Kayne.
Mail feels almost exclusively like a chore I don’t want to deal with. I spend all fucking day doing everything. I’m a single adult who lives alone. Every task that needs completing in my life falls entirely on my shoulders. I’m not saying my lifestyle is the most difficult or oppressed by any measure--I don’t have kids for a reason--but it is an exhausting one. A dish in the sink is my job. The floors need to be mopped, well that’s on me. I pay all the bills, I buy all the food, I keep Rizz the cat alive, I fix things when they’re broken, I make every meal and clean up after it. I get my packages. I break down my boxes. I also do a job that requires a lot of self motivation to sit and write things on spec, to leave the house after I’ve been comfortable all day and go do spots. There is no break. There is no moment I can ask someone else to just pick up some slack or help me out. So mail, I’m sorry, you are going to get ignored when I can. Males, you, too.
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