Things I Bought That I Love: Minted Stationery
In terms of time wasters during the day, I almost never turn to Youtube. I will on rare occasion enjoy clicking on a Youtube video link if a trusted source has sent it to me, but even then I'm wary. What I find cute and entertaining in a Youtube video is very specific, and if it's even slightly not right, I am totally turned off of Youtube forever. For instance, I love interspecies friendships. Turtles that are friends with cats, elephants that befriend small dogs, that kind of thing.
But if a friend is careless and thinks, "Oh, Mindy just likes cute videos of animals" and sends me the link of a video of a cat playing inside a bidet or something, I hate it. I hate it so much. There's such a fine line I just think: it's not worth it. And nothing is worse to me, than the feeling you have after you watch a bad Youtube video link. I'm just so disgusted in myself and it just suddenly seems like I'm the biggest loser who can waste all the time in the world. Shudders.
So my favorite time waster is designing personalized stationery for myself online and putting it in my shopping cart, and not buying it. The best design-your-own stationery site is minted.com. Personalized stationery is historically a stuffy affair, popularized by plucky Jane Austen heroines writing long letters to their sisters. I think personalized stationery has become a very "female" thing to have, which is too bad. Personalized stationery makes everyone, man or woman, boy or girl, seem confident in what they have to say, and proud of their name. It's just classy and immediately makes me think this person has their shit together.
And personalized stationery doesn't have to be all formal and cold. Minted seems to specialize in playful, modern designs and spiffy fonts. When my book came out, I had a lot of people to thank, so I purchased these colorful orange-barber-stripe cards to send people.
And if you choose to spend a little more money, you can get extra baller details like shimmery pearlescent paper (yes please) and a pattern on the back of the card (yes, yes, yes).
There's many, many options for guys on here, too.
Good for: Great gifts to recent high school graduations, recent bar and bat mitzvah'd kids, and to just seem like an official person.
