Pen-friends or pen pals are friends in the snail mail world, friends whom you write letters to. In the snail mail era, in case some of you guys have forgotten about it, we send our messages via ink on papers. Therefore we need pen and papers, savvy?
Ok. Anyway, having pen pals and writing letters to them were one of my past hobbies. I started writing letters to friends when I was in secondary school. Perhaps some of my former dorm mates still remember how I was always writing letters and receiving lots of letters. Also at that time, I frequently wrote letters to my mom, since living in the school dormitory in the 90s, far away from home, without internet, without handphones (only payphones around the school compounds), there's not much options to tell many stories of my daily life (and pouring out my heart's content ;) ).
This hobby continued until the end of my uni years (perhaps until the first year of having a career..). How did I get my contacts? Sometimes I browsed for potential friends in the pen pal sections in the magazines, of course, those with the similar interests, similar age and with ads that seemed honest for friendship. Once, I put my ads in pen pal section of Galaxie magazine and I got quite a number of friends from there. Most of them were of similar age with me at that time, but I did get requests for friendship from kids much younger than me and also people older than me. Once I corresponded with a guy whom I knew was older but I didn't know how much, until he mailed me his photo. With the photo, and the way he wrote, I ended the correspondence immediately. Geez...no need to continue when you sense something was wrong somewhere, right? Anyway, most of my friends were decent kids, decent people, who enjoyed the same hobby.
Why did I enjoy this? In those times, I liked to know people from different places. I wanted to know about their life, their interests, their point of view on any issues, their visions of the future, so on and so forth. I enjoyed reading their stories as well as I enjoyed writing mine. The good ones wrote in a very interesting way, that when I read it, I felt like listening the words from their own lips. As if we were talking to each other, not just reading some stuff. And I also wrote in the same way. We gave each other advices and motivation. I love reading their letters and I enjoyed writing. My pen pals were of various race and some were from other countries. Therefore I learned a lot of different cultures and different ways of other kind of people.
After reaching almost mid-20s, and started having a career, the amount of writing and letters received decreased gradually. I guess there goes another phase of life. Life changes, and now we have no time to write letters anymore. We don't even bother to write via e-mail. Now we prefer to keep things simple and short. There's Facebook, Twitter etc. etc. and for those who still likes to write such as myself, there's blog. We update our daily lives in these mediums, no more ink and paper.
I have lost contact with almost all pen pals except one who is now my FB friend. Nowadays, I don't care much to find new friends. Now is the phase of maintaining current friendship and finding old friends. Perhaps I can find some of my old pen pals in the social network, who knows....
Aaahh...old times, old memories....I wonder what have become of them now... :)
Update#1: 3rd June...tracked 2 ex-pen pals in the social network..
Update#2: 5th June...found one and becoming friends in FB..yeay!
