The
Passive Aggressive Notes project would have never gotten off the ground were it not for my ongoing fascination with all-things handwritten. Under my bed, I have several boxes filled with personal artifacts:
grade-school compositions,
seventh-grade gossip, and pretty much every letter, postcard and birthday card I've ever received.
(This card from my grandmother, which arrived with a box of homemade baked goods, was the very first in my collection of passive-aggressive notes.)
Now that I spend most of my day sending and responding to e-mails, I get a particularly special thrill from finding something unexpected in my mailbox besides ValPak and the Pottery Barn catalog.
The Thing Quarterly is kinda like an art-oriented version of Powell's Indiespensable. It's not exactly cheap (a 1-year subscription is $140), but four times a year you get the thrill of receiving what the editors describe as "an everyday object that somehow incorporates text" — each one conceived by artist/writer types like Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You). Her "thing" — a pull-down windowshade, complete with brackets — is sold out, but Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude) and Starlee Kine (This American Life) are both on deck for the coming subscription year.
By the way, if you've never heard Starlee Kine's piece from the Break-Up episode of This American Life, stream it, ASAP! I see a lot of breakup-related missives at Passiveaggressivenotes.com, but so far none of them have involved Phil Collins.