Pony Express

This post will seem like another indictment of LA. But it's not.

It's about the luxury of having something that I think maybe doesn't exist anywhere else in the US except Manhattan: a 24-hour post office.

I take way too much of my New York life for granted.

I have been to the 24-hour GPO (="General Post Office") at 32nd and Eighth more times that I can remember: for late-night postcard mailings such as this one; for warranty instances where I had to have a postmark by a certain date (they'll even do that on Sundays); in the old days, I was there on April 15th every year to get my taxes in. (If you've never been there the night of the IRS filing deadline, you should go just to see the carnival that occurs for one day every year—it's like when they blow up the Macy's Day Balloons. My favorite part is that Bayer or Bufferin, or someone similar always sets up a truck to dispense free headache pills. But I digress.)

So yesterday was the day that I had set aside to do a big postcard mailing. The kind you send to casting directors every month or so (if you're diligent) to remind them what you look like and tell them what you're doing.

My postcard, by the way, looks like this:



My day began, however, with an unexpected war against ants.

As I mentioned before, it's been cold here. (And I have to say, all my snarkiness aside, it's been a problem. I personally still have not been cold, but something like ¾ of the local citrus crop has been destroyed by frost. Prepare to spend a lot more on produce next month.)

So, if you've ever lived in California, you know that ants are kind of a fact of life here. Particularly in the summer months. And, as I discovered, during the winter months when it gets really cold outside (either that, or it was the fact that my roommate made fruit punch Wednesday night and didn't clean up well). Whatever the cause, yesterday I was greeted by kitchen counters teeming (yes, teeming, thank you very much) with hundreds of ants.

And so yesterday morning was spent pulling everything off all the kitchen counters, spraying them with ant spray, leaving the house for a while, coming back and cleaning up the carnage, cleaning the counters down to the tile with bleach and other chemical-filled products, and reassembling the now-ant-free kitchen.

All of which took me until early afternoon. At which point I got down to business and began to get my mailing together. Which involved:

• figuring out which casting directors the postcards were going to
• cross-checking their addresses online in case any had moved since my last mailing
• composing some breezy copy about my latest accomplishments
• adding personalized notes for the casting directors I knew personally
• mail-merging the whole thing and having it print out on oversized labels
• adhering those labels to the backs of my postcards
• creating a label trumpeting my Without a Trace appearance, to go on the front of the card next to my face, where it will garner even more attention from the bored receptionists at the casting directors' offices
• stamping them all
• signing them all

Normally, this kind of thing takes me 3-4 hours. I've gotten pretty good at it, but the clock was ticking, and I wanted to get it in the mail last night so that it would hit people's desks Friday morning. The advantage of Fridays is twofold:
1) you're arriving on a light mail day (as opposed to Monday, which is a heavy mail day); and
2) some CDs take their mail home and you're with them all weekend.

So I did all the above stuff, and was running late, and wrapped up at about 7:30.

And then (can you see this coming?), then I went online to find the location of LA's 24-hour post office.

To discover there isn't one.

In fact, the latest any post office in LA is open (that I could find, anyway), is 7pm.

Oops.