Lance Schaubert

Three weeks ago, a good friend of mine became my pen pal. He prefers Twitter, texted more than he called before that  was preferred, and used chat rooms and ICQ long before wall posts and Gchat came along. He uses e-mail only when all other paths of pithy, electronic messaging run cold. I used to write letters to him in college, letters he replied to via e-mail.

But I’ve noticed something. The lead time runs about two days on our current letter exchange. Two days – the same time I take to get to an e-mail. I receive his letter on Sunday, write my own and put it in the mail. He receives it on Tuesday, writes a response that I get Thursday. Come Saturday, we have each written two letters and received two letters. More than this, the letters run two pages long or longer, containing several hundred words about things both private and public, humorous and tragic. They bear the intimacy of our personal scrawl – his tidy lower case rounded out and hiding under half the width of a single line, my conglomeration of typefaces I’ve collected over years of handwriting. Words in this medium use tone. They don’t when you read text like this blog.

Most letter writers point to those benefits. Let us isolate the time range: one week, four letters. When was the last time you emailed or Facebooked a conversation that took on that depth in that length of time?  The only correspondence that comes close arrives in my email from those unable to send letters. They live across the pond where postage costs more than a four-pack of G2 pens.

When I was growing up, we owned no dishwasher. Heath and I fought over which of us would wash and which would dry. We sought not to win, but to delay our chores. However, we both memorized Mom’s threshold. There existed a limit to the dishes our small counter held. If the counter filled up, no friends came over. Period. Each argument over washcloths and towels was predicated by one question: had we crossed the dirty dish threshold? If so, no argument delayed Mom’s wrath. Finish or be punished. Efficiency won.

Flash forward to three apartment complexes and my house when my very own dishwashing machine “simplified” my life. What convenience! I could do twice the dishes in half the time!

In reality, larger capacity and quicker execution led to stark inefficiency. This was truest when I lived with eight other guys inside a two bedroom (another tale, another day). With dirty dishes secured out of sight I justified another night, heck another week, without having them done. Twice the dishes, half the time – remember? They can wait…

Little did I know that Dish Threshold never moved. He waited, predator-like on the counter, waiting for my naïve return to his territory.

After getting married, I interacted with a lady whose realm is the kitchen. I don’t say that derogatorily. I mean that when it comes to all things appliance, all things culinary, all things domesticity I stand infinitely out of my league. Kiddo takes pride in having her kitchen just so. I stay out of her way.

But I started out far from from that ideal. I started out taking sweet advantage of the dishwasher. My reasoning? Twice the dishes, half the time. Load that sucker up! But then these hidden rules emerged, rules about which dishes I could and could not load.

“Why have a dishwasher if you’re not going to use it?” I asked.
“Because certain things don’t go in there,” Kiddo said.
“Yeah, well you learn the rules to break the rules,” I said.
She replied, “Not when the bottom of the plate says ‘not dishwasher safe!’”

We both had a point, but she had a better one. One by one, the types of dishes I must wash by hand accumulated on the sink. Thresholds were reached. Lines were crossed. That apothegm came back to haunt me. Is it not written: He who allows sink full of dishes to compost shall not host friends for dinner. I shifted my butt in gear and started washing by hand. Efficiency beat convenience. I get more done by hand than by those little Finish plugs you stick in the second wash cycle door when there’s two racks full of long-lost bone china.

People laugh when I tell them I write my first drafts – even this post – on my typewriter. The truth is, I can’t hit CTRL-T and open up a Facebook tab. There’s no TweetDeck chirping at me. No Quirky, Goodreads, Readernaut, Small Demons, Flickchart or WordPress notifications pine for my immediate attention. It’s me, my Smith-Corona, a blank sheet and a mug of Earl Grey (lemon, 1 tsp sugar, no milk). I get more done with less convenience and I’m starting to think that’s the case with most things. Think Wal-Mart.  Yes, everything’s at your convenience, but the sheer busyness of the place stretches every trip at least a half-hour. For an experiment, I went to a drug store (a farther drive) for something I normally get at Wal-Mart. Never mind the ethics of shopping at fascist-mart. My drugstore trip took five minutes, as in a mere 297 seconds. Days I walk or bike, I get more done. Perhaps I don’t occupy my day with as many activities, but those precious few I do employ earn my undivided attention and are thereby holistically complete.

I hesitated to post my mailing address on here — didn’t want anyone to come and steal schtuff at my house. Then it hit me — both computers crashed, our TV is a humble $20 vacuum tube and our books are free to lend. There’s nothing worth stealing at the Schaubert residence. All the same, I opted out. If you’d like to be pen pals and see how much more we can get done, shoot me an email at

lanceschaubert [at] gmail [dot] com

And I’ll shoot you a letter.

(pics linked to originals, yay!)