I am not a collector. I am a mailer. I love to send and receive mail with eye-catching stamps.

I often send birthday greetings by email. I forward jokes by buddy list blasts and pretty much send most correspondence electronically these days. I am even training myself to pay bills online.

This is more efficient, I guess. Maybe I have avoided a few late fees on credit card payments. But it feels less personal. While the postal service has been the butt of jokes for years, the ritual of preparing a letter, or sending off a payment, or sealing and stamping an envelope containing a specially picked out card seems like an important experience.

I haven’t given up snail mail altogether. I love sending out Christmas cards. Mine go out with silly personal notes handwritten on the inside. I am probably one of those people you hate to get in the line behind at the post office because I will actually have the clerk pull out all the different kinds of stamps that are available for sale before making my selection and walking away with one sheet of twenty.

I could order online, but I love to look at the stamps. I like to hold the sheet and look at the history or whimsy I hold in my hands. The stamps I use are a way to let people know what I’ve been thinking about. I consider a stamp to be like an announcement, calling attention to the fact that the letter or card is from me. I believe an individually selected stamped envelope is less likely to end up lost or unread in our pre-email versions of spam folders.

I’ve bought breast cancer awareness stamps when I was thinking about friends who had survived cancer. I used to enjoy sticking a Buckminster Fuller stamp on envelopes. Always an advocate of creative thinking, I’d wonder if my mail’s recipients knew about Bucky Balls or remembered the craze around geodesic domes. About eight or ten years ago, I liked to buy Greetings from America, stamps of all 50 states. I would choose state stamps based on what I was sending and where it was going. And, of course, getting to plaster the front of an envelope with a smiling, pre-Vegas Elvis was a lot of fun.

So this past Friday, I needed stamps. Having planned to spend a morning cleaning up paperwork in my office, I expected to come across things I would have to mail. The lines were really short and I wasn’t going to take the clerk’s bait, settling for a cracked Liberty Bell when I knew she had something better she hadn’t pulled out of the drawer yet.

I was trying to decide between The King & Queen of Hearts ( a longtime favorite); Gulf Coast Lighthouses ( I’d like to encourage people to add any light they can to the world); Mother Teresa (a nice reminder of every day kindness, although I am no saint); and, of course, The Simpsons looked pretty good.

I decided on a great image from the Legends of Hollywood series. Katherine Hepburn. Independent, discerning, self-aware, positive but not Pollyanna. High-collared sexy.

Getting to put your personal stamp on something is no small thing.