Day 21...Wait, what did you say?

 

I know it's already supposed to be Day 22, but I'm still up and according to my cousin Will, the day doesn't end until you go to sleep, so I'm gonna blog about Day 21.

Today (or tonight), I am thankful for modern technology, even though it may not work all the time.

In a age where internet did not exist, military girlfriends, fiances, and wives had to actually write hand-written letters to their men overseas.

We'd be so happy we could cry together
and then we'd love the way we used to do.
I wish that I could hide inside this letter
and seal me up and send me off to you.
Special delivery,
I'd V-Mail this female to you.
—Nat Simon and Charlie Tobias, “I Wish That I Could Hide Inside This Letter,” 1943

I found this really awesome paper written by a girl at the University of Wisconsin, about letter writing during World War II and in it she wrote, "A 1945 document entitled “Annual Report to the Postmaster General”compared the volume of mail between the fiscal years 1943-1945. In 1943 when the war was well

underway, 570 million pieces of mail were sent. This increased to 1.4 billion in 1944 and rose again in 1945 when 2.5 billion pieces of mail were dispatched. These figures reflect only the letters sent to the Army, a similar increase can be seen for letters mailed to sailors in the Navy."

That's a ton of letters!

I'm thankful that today it's easier to send hand written letters overseas than it used to be and that it's even easier when I can just send an e-mail from my computer or my phone and I know it will instantly be in an inbox, waiting to be read.

I'm thankful for my smart phone that lets me be connected anywhere, at anytime, for those random days when communication is possible and if I hadn't been near an electronic device that opportunity would have been missed.

I'm also thankful that even if the internet acts up and I have to talk, wait a minute for my voice to be heard and then another minute to get a response back, I can still hear his voice and we can still have a conversation.