as promised in my last entry, here's the first Life Review. more to folllow:

Letter to Rodney C.,

At Basic Training

5 pages long, completed 12-19-01

Oakland, CA

{7.2}

Though I have always considered myself something of a professional (and somewhat obsessive) letter writer, recent events have seen me setting down the pen and elegantly appointed notepad for other forms of communication. Writing daily in an online journal, as well as a lack of reasonable candidates on whom to set my correspondence sights have been the biggest reasons for my nearly 9 month hiatus. This changed when a friend (we�ll call him Rodney C.) recently enlisted in the US Army. He is away from email, online chat, and unreasonably late phone calls�that is, almost completely out of my communicational reach. Because he is somewhere in Louisiana doing 1600 sit-ups a day, eating gruel, living in close quarters with other young hot men and learning to be incredibly incredibly violent, however, he is exactly the person I can focus on to re-up my letter-writing pleasure.

Our friendship has been a strange and intense one, up and down, at times highly affectionate/flirtatious and cold and cutting at others. Rodney is someone like no other I�ve met: probably one of the most believable poets I have ever read, and very funny; he is also politically conservative and communicatively combative to the point of idiocy. I miss him in his absence, and I was surprised to receive a letter from him because the last we spoke we were on a considerable �downturn� in the friendship.

My reply starts up common enough, hello how are you, holy shit I can believe you�re in the army, flirtation/affection etc etc etc. Quickly, though, it becomes a reflective exposition of our friendship, our differences, the strangeness of creating friendships with people whom we�ve never met and what the artist�s disposition might be. I reference old conversations and inside jokes, and try not to be negative toward his life choice of joining the military, as he has made it clear that he wishes it to become his career. At the end of the letter, I turn to more common correspondence fare�I talk about my life and what�s going on, music I am listening to and what I am currently reading. I inquire about what his life is like now in basic training and what the people he knows in boot camp are like. I then close it up with proper affectionate salutations ask him to write me again.

All in all, a pretty average letter, hence the C grade. I think with a bit of work, and more material from his letters, I should be able to get back in the swing of things, and find myself writing my above average style letters in no time.

Of note with this particular letter:

-Written over 3 days, the penmanship varies wildly. At the beginning of the letter it is fast and nearly illegible. At the end, it is small and neat. An obvious insight into my character, somehow, but I leave that to the graphologists.

-I left the notepad out on my desk overnight with a paragraph on how much I hate my job in plain view. I will update later if this is used in my termination.

-I actually fell asleep while writing this letter. In fact, I fell asleep twice�once while writing, and second while writing a note pointing out the fact that I had fallen asleep. Avant-garde, no?

-Handmade envelope could raise rating from 7.2 to as high as 8.2, depending on materials and cleverness.