post post

On Friday I went to the post office to mail the rest of the bookish artist's postcards, because I said I would. I don't generally like post offices, in part because of a catch-22 in which I don't go often and thus don't know how to behave and thus make mistakes and get reprimanded (like one Christmas, I addressed all the cards in festive red ink and stood in line forever to mail them and then was told I couldn't use red ink and so stepped out of line and quickly traced over them in black ink and then got back in line again but this was also not acceptable so I had to go and find new envelopes that fit the cards and redo them all), and thus don't like going to the post office and don't go often. But I said I would and I did. I don't mind doing things for other people half as much as I mind it for myself, and I like walking. I mapped out how to get to where google said the nearest post office was and it seemed fairly easy. I tried to take a shortcut through the medina which was my first time getting lost on the way, and which I did about ten more times before I found the post office. An interesting things about being a woman is that I spent the first 40 or so years of my life being evaluated primarily (or at least initially) on the basis of my looks, which meant a great deal of my mental space went towards that. When I lived in Japan this was my looks as a foreigner and then as a woman but it was never not about being a woman on some level and if you think it is the same for men: it is not. Anyway I've spent the past decade aging out of this evaluation and it's an interesting process. It has been weird this past month to be basically soaking in patriarchy and to be foreign and woman again after a nice break of being invisible, and to have to retrain the muscles of not making eye contact and walking down the street like I would be really happy to punch someone, which is true but not my usual face. "Striking." Every time I stood still to see if I could figure out where I was in relation to a post office, men needed to stop and talk to me and were sometimes very angry if I did not want to talk to them even if I was generally polite about it. One man who wanted to talk to me said he recognized me from the hotel which might be true but probably wasn't and he was very kind and said he'd take me to a post office but he took me to a carpet store instead which involved more men being increasingly grumpy that I wasn't being compliant even though I really wasted almost 0% of their time while a fair bit of my time had been wasted and I was no nearer a post office. I asked people in a couple shops, but they all gave me directions back the way I came, where there was no post office, though I did retrace my steps a few times to check. I wandered about a bit, looking for an unoccupied place where I could stand still for a minute and consult my phone. One particularly fun moment was turning down a street that was not empty but rather filling up rapidly with men, all walking very purposefully toward me, overflowing the sidewalks and the road, and I imagined myself about to be crushed by a herd of... wildebeest? lemmings? But then I realized I was just standing between them and the mosque, which gave me a sense of where I was on the map in relation to a post office, wondrous, and I ducked down the next street and it was fine. It is fun to say to people "sorry no English" when they are relentlessly speaking French to you, by the way, and you can seize the moment of their bafflement to stride briskly away. At the post office a man wanted to put the stamps on the postcards and wouldn't let me do it myself but he didn't think they were proper postcards and torrented opinions at me but I just smiled until he eventually took them. With luck they will reach their destinations. When I got out of the post office my phone helpfully alerted me to the fact that I had walked 15 kilometers since leaving the apartment, and while I'm pretty sure half of that was just retracing my steps, I knew I was pretty far from home, so decided to spring for a taxi, which was two dollars. I asked the driver to drop me off at the light, and he did. There was a post office on the corner.