Why a penny? Maybe there's no real reason that the item chosen was a penny other than it is small and convenient. Or maybe the penny means something. I decided to assume the latter.


Based on this assumption, I began to think about this penny, and the physical act of moving it, via snail-mail to another individual and what this meant to me. Now, I rarely get around to thinking, a fault, I think, of my generation, so to commemorate this rare instance of thought, and because I presumably needed to explain why I was mailing a penny to the recipient, I wrote a letter.




The text of the letter, because that image is rather blurry, reads as follows:

"Blame it on my compulsive nature, but I feel compelled to not only send you this penny, but also to elaborate upon the significance this seemingly inane act holds for me.

Old friend, we are very far apart, not only geographically, by psychologically as well. Clichéd as it may be to say so, life has begun to take us in very different directions. It has become especially easy for me, given our infrequent contact, to lose sight of the fact that, despite their differences both dynamic and static, physical and emotional, concrete and flesh, our two separate and wildly different realities are not so separate and radically different.

To prove this to myself and to you should you need convincing, I am demonstrating our interconnectedness, the fact that we are both still of the same universe, I am physically moving exactly one unit of my world to yours. It is unfortunate that I could not mail you a molecule, for that would be a more authentic demonstration of the concept I am trying grasp, but I do not have the necessary technology. However, this penny, this single economic unit I am using to represent a single physical and conceptual unit, will suffice."

In place of a signature I affixed our tall president with a short piece of scotch tape.

The recipient, I should establish, is an old close friend of mine from Jr. High. The last time we had seen each other, on holiday from our respective schools, we discussed how separated we felt, despite the connection this digital age allows. This quite obviously influenced my letter a great deal.


Now that I had the contents of what I was going to send I needed an envelope and a stamp. I thought I could buy envelopes from the post office but the one on campus was a bit understocked - all they had were those first class/airmail envelopes that cost like three dollars. More than I was willing to spend, as I was on a budget of exactly 1c.


Luckily a floor mate of mine had envelopes and stamps. I borrowed some, promising should he ever be in dire need of paper products I would do my best to assist.






It was a rather simple matter of writing our addresses and affixing the stamp. I had grown up using primarily email, and rarely mailed anything without prepaid postage labeled business reply mail, so this actually took me longer than you would think. I am postally challenged. Also the picture is doctored because I decided having our mailing addresses floating around on the internet would be a bad idea. I left the cities and states legible to give the reader a sense of how far, physically the letter would be traveling.




After this, it was a short walk to the mailboxes for a task completion.




Whee!

Note: I may update this task should the recipient, who is another player, respond.