Comfort in Consistency

Yesterday my friend Haley made fun of me for drafting e-mails.

"Doesn't everyone do that?" I said.
"I don't draft e-mails," she said. "No one does. Not like that."

Currently there are 991 drafts in my mailbox. Most of them are earlier drafts of letters that have already gone out, but I guess it's a nauseating number for anyone who writes on impulse & clickity-clacks send, who isn't phased by a minefield of technical errors, and who is less concerned with expressing their ideas most effectively than just getting them out there.

Perhaps it's the affliction of a writer-to-be*, but there's nothing I brood over more than a letter to a friend. In a rational world, how much you care about someone and how long it takes you to write them should be inversely related, but neither writing nor I is rational. In other words, if I haven't written you back yet, it probably means I like you a lot.

In addition to my letter-ary ineptitudes, I tend to be late with all holiday dispatch. This Halloween I told myself I'd rise above and send McKenzie's sisterly box of surprises early enough for it to arrive before the holiday. Six days would be ample time for a Priority Mail parcel to reach South Florida from Atlanta, so I'd penned in the deadline accordingly. The package included a short coloring book I'd made and a ton of chocolate because there's never any of that stuff in the White House. When we had sweets, like my grandparents' annual shipment of tin foil-wrapped Cadbury ghouls, they'd never last longer than a few days.

A week had passed, Halloween had come and gone, and the package still hadn't arrived. Go figure, I thought. When I'd finally gotten a box in the mail on time, it'd gotten lost. I was a failure as a sister.

Then one Thursday afternoon, while toiling over a stack of headlines long enough that my brain was more baked than the Jersey Shore, the phone rang. It was McKenzie.

"Hey dude!" I said.

"Hi, Courtney. Today there was an entire tube of Hershey's, and Dad and Mom finished them off!"

*writer-to-be: term coined by Skyler Dobin, Copywriter