my failed attempt at shotgunning a beer at this weekend's camping trip made me think that maybe i'm too old for shotguns. or maybe i'm just getting too old for a lot of things. it's not a big deal; it just reminded me that another year has passed.

so tonight i started reading the snail mail letters i got last summer. i haven't gone through them all yet because some of them are too long. but i read all the one-pagers (the ones that are only one page long!). it all made me realize how cool last summer was. "cool" is probably an understatement here, but how more accurately can i describe it? it was nice. granted, i was broke for more than half the summer and that i had no clear direction in life and i was almost losing faith in my CE diploma. but all of that didn't matter because i felt close to people. i knew i still had some humanity left in me and that i was capable of having feelings. and i'm saying all this because those letters felt more real than any emails i got in the past year.

snail mail letters feel more alive. i know they're not in real-time and are already several days outdated by the time you get them in the mail, but they feel more real than any other form of writing. every time i read a snail mail letter, i always picture the person writing it, so in a way, i always see them as i read, and that makes me feel that i'm actually hanging out with them.but i haven't gotten a letter since last winter so i don't know if i still feel the same way.

so what else have i learned this weekend besides the fact that i'm not as good at shotguns as i used to be? i'm not as broke anymore, but it's not like i'm rolling around in a bed of money. i still think i have no direction in life because i'm still stumbling drunkenly through it (with or without the shotguns). but i've found some faith in my CE diploma because it's single-handedly sponsoring all my materialistic needs and wants. but most of all, even though i sometimes feel that i have lost my sense of humanity, after all this time, i know i haven't lost any of it, at least not entirely. because if i had, i wouldn't be writing about any of this at all.