June 29, 2007
I always have trouble when I want to mark an occasion or say something with a card. Don’t get me wrong–I have nothing against cards. I’ve gotten some very nice ones (the cat unrolling an entire roll of toilet paper is one of my favorites) and given a lot that pretty closely approximated what I wanted to say. The hardest part is finding the card in the first place because of all the categories: Holiday, Birthday, Congratulations, Anniversary, Condolence, Get Well, Thinking Of You, Blank, Belated Birthday, Belated Anniversary, Belated Blank, and then it breaks down into Funny, Serious, Religious, Funny Serious, From Both Of Us, From Just Me, From Them. The funny ones always have things on the outside like, "Congratulations on turning 39", and on the inside they say, "…for the fifth time!" Or they have a picture of a Mafia guy saying, "Have a whacky birthday…" on the outside, with the punchline, "…anybody who forgets it gets whacked!" Save that one for when you get the belated birthday cards.
And then there’s the anniversary card that, on the outside, says, "Darling, this year I’d like to take you somewhere you’ve never been…" You open it up expecting a tropical paradise or European capital and instead see, "The kitchen!" I think that one comes with complimentary divorce papers. Where do these come from? I imagine there’s a sweatshop full of retired performers from the Catskills who do nothing all day but sit around come up with these. Then there are the hunky, shirtless guy cards, which continue to be produced in spite of the fact that no woman will ever, in her life, buy or receive one of these cards, and the girl in a bikini cards that are produced solely for guys who have no wives or girlfriends and who, if they have friends who give them that kind of card, never will have wives or girlfriends. Where’s the section for the card I really want, though? Where’s the section for the card that says, "Please do not mistake my difficulty expressing myself for a lack of deep, sincere feelings for you. Here is a nicely designed piece of heavy paper that, I hope, will somewhat approximate the emotions I can’t quite verbalize." Where is that section? I guess that would be all of them.
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