Tales of the Pen-pal King
I just found this blog entry while puttering about avoiding my job. It's a remarkable post, not because it's particularly well written but because of the sentiments expressed in it. It certainly captures a period in my life fairly well; the obsession with comics and the awkwardness around girls may be common but as anyone who went through it will tell you, it always feels like you're the only one.
Moreso, I had a similar experience with female penpals. Flying Lufthansa from Khartoum to Boston almost 20 years ago I was given their kid's in-flight magazine. On the back cover was a list of the newest kids in the Lufthansa pen pals club. The small selection of kids seemed to be from all over the world and I suddenly wanted to be among them - not necessarily to write to any of them, but to be one of the names on the back of the magazine that some other kid would see and think was exotic and exciting. So I sent in my name and surprisingly they must have posted it since I started getting letters. More surprisingly the letters were all from girls.
They were from diverse backgrounds but all more enamored with getting a pen pal, I think than keeping one. There was one German girl who wrote enthusiastically and hoped we'd be in touch "forever" - but neglected to write down her address anywhere. There was the Nigerian girl who stopped writing after the second letter. In those and every other case the glamour wore off fairly soon. Perhaps it was me but I am convinced that it was the nature of the whole thing. Kicking off the correspondance was exciting and sort of romantic, putting you in touch with strangers on the other side of the world. After all, I had also been lured in by this idea - but after those first two letters what is there? Mostly banal accounts of the daily grind: school, sports, family; and those don't keep up the interest. In some ways it's a shorthand for most relationships, with their passionate beginnings descending into dull familiarity.
The interesting thing is that even these abortive attempts and pen pal-ing were a great boost to my adolescent confidence. It seemed that even as I schlepped along unnoticed in my daily life, there was some version of me that was cool, and attractive to people. On paper, anyway.