Broken Mailbox

The mailbox in my apartment has been broken for more than a week. I can't get my journals, cards or letters, and feel cut off from the world somehow. It again proves that even in the internet age, we still can't live without postal service.

An old poem says, "A letter from home is worth ten thousand pieces of gold." (家书抵万金) In old days, mails were delivered by mailmen on horseback. Therefore during wartime, it was extremely difficult to keep the postal service running. When family members were separated by war, the only way to find their whereabouts was to sending letters to hometown in hope of receiving responses. Thousands of years have passed, letters still remained the most important way of long-distance communication until telephone was invented. Telephone makes communication easier and faster, but fail to keep records of messages, and therefore unable to convey important messages. For example, you may write a love letter to woo the girl you've crush on, but you won't call her and say "please be my girlfriend". Telephone is not a good substitute for letters, but internet is much more similar. Emails, as we can tell by the name, are a new form of mails, but faster and cheaper. The rise of internet gives postal service the last fatal strike. Nowadays, most of what we can get from mailbox are commercial ads, government notices and bills. Personal letters largely go by emails.

Now we won't pay gold to receive a mail, and a shabby mailing system won't really undermine information communication any more, but a broken mailbox more or less prevents me from receiving important stuff. Of course I can write another blog about how terrible it is to have the mailing market twisted by the government, and make the postal service one of my worst experiences in the US (better than medical system though). But now I just want to say, I want to read my periodicals!