1. Your Mom

Because she’s worried about you. Because she drove you to the train station or will pick you up from the airport. Because you know she will thumb-tack it to the giant corkboard that covers half of her art studio. Because she needs reassurance that you’re eating enough*. Because she’ll actually read it.

2. Your Little Sister

Because you guys never see each other any more and that’s weird. Because you feel bad for accidentally kidnapping her blue-velour-stretch dress from H&M for an entire semester. Because you’re trying to guilt her into visiting you sometime soon. Because if you include a message in dog-speak for your canine brothers**, she will read it aloud to them.

3. Your grandparents/aunts/uncles/cousins

Because you don’t talk to them enough. Because they remember your birthday when you can’t remember theirs. Because they actually read their mail instead of assuming it’s all Discover card offers and J. Crew catalogs addressed to the previous tenant. Because they want to know where you are.

4. Friends with whom you have decent amounts of inside jokes

Because remember that time you got a little drunk at the free dinner your study abroad program was hosting on a weekend excursion to rural France and instead of going out on the town to drink in bars you stayed in the hotel watching French MTV while rolling on the bed and laughing about those girls from high school that were obsessed with horses***?

5. Your place of employ

Because even if it’s a lowly student job, it’s the cool kind where they let you print out a picture of Clint Eastwood petting a kitten to stick on your office door and don’t mind if you put out a collection plate to raise money for the Romantic Times 2012 convention. Also because it’s a good way to show them you’re a responsible type who’s not all SPRING BREAK

6. A high school friend or two

Because they weren’t horsegirls. Because you miss them, actually, and want to ask what’s up in a way that’s not weird, and a postcard can do that.

7. Yourself

Because how else will you know how long it takes them to get there?

& how to send them

Handwritten are the best if you want perfect glossy pictures of the Biodome paired with your chickenscratch that aspires to the legibility of a 13-year-old boy’s. Dirty hipster that I am, I really like Postagram, because you can 1. include yourself in the picture of the Biodome 2. have your message typed and thus readable 3. not have to remember how to pronounce the French word for “stamp”**** and 4. the picture pops out of the card for your scrapbook or hope chest.

*Seriously Mom DO NOT WORRY about this
**Woof woof, bark bark, yip. Good boys.
***If you cannot name a horsegirl from your high school, you are the horsegirl
****Tahm-bruh or tim-bruh?! The world may never recall