Jolie wrote me a letter. It showed up on the 22nd, and true to form I filed it in my notebook, unopened, and put it off reading it for almost a week. It was the first physical entry into a brand spanking new Mead Five Star. The second being the Watchmanesque "radioactive" sticker I put on it tonight. The sticker rode around for almost a week in the same pocket and is now on the front cover for the duration.

A letter, yo. Hand written on special (read : not loose-leaf or notebook) paper, startlingly legible.* With the envelope and the stamp and the return address and everything. I got something in the mail that wasn't a bill.

And it smells good. It smells good and handwriting says more about a person than Arial or Geneva or Times New Roman or Comic Sans or Lucida Grande ever will. A handwritten letter is everything email isn't.

<3 letters.

Jolie++

* Reading your own handwriting is analogous to drinking your own urine - though mine is so improvisational at times that it's given me an edge in decoding the writing of others. I think it helps that Jolie's handwriting is a weird blend of cursive and print elements, the way that mine isn't.