music: Calexio & Iron and Wine- In the Reins
At least one full aisle of any Walgreens, Rite Aid, CVS, or other drugstore is dedicated to thick paper rectangles, usually decked out in brilliant four color funniness or deeply touching and adept aphorisms. One. Full. Aisle. And this is every day of the year; Mother’s Day and Christmas might even see an explosion of the greeting card aisle, with cardboard rectangles leaking into cosmetics or weekly specials. And the greeting card aisle is usually divided into sections: congratulations, I’m sorry, thinking of you, condolences, you graduated, you’re great friend, and of course happy birthday, further subdivided into his, hers, funny, from grandparents, from aunts and uncles, spiritual, romantic, even happy birthday from the dog. These pieces of cardboard run for at least $2, nice ones with fancy cutouts and embossed flowers and whatnot going for closer to $4. It’s the greeting card aisle; we all know it well.
I find the greeting card aisle to be a terrible place. Not because of the lack of selection, it’s quite apparent that there’s really a card for every occasion imaginable (“congratulations on finally beating your longtime tennis partner for the third time this beautiful holiday season after he got out of dialysis!”). What i’ve found so terrible about the greeting card aisle is that people countrywide are paying from $2 to $4 to borrow words that they want to share with their friends and loved ones during highly memorable and emotionally charged times. Cards mark milestones, serve as tokens of how we really feel about those to whom we choose to give a card. Greeting cards say, “you are important to me and I’m thinking about you.” And because our friends and loved ones are so important to us, we cough up a nominal amount of change to rent words that aren’t ours and use them as if they were ours. Is it so hard for the mass public to spend a minute or two coming up with a couple sentences of their own and scratching them down on glossy matte cardboard instead of using Emerson, or Margaret Mead, or Ghandi, or that crotchety old lady invented by the good people at Hallmark specifically for the purposes of making those who buy her cards more witty in their sarcastic tone? I’d like to give the general public a little more credit in terms of linguistic ability. I’ve definitely read my share of bad prose, having been a high school teacher, but even in those poorly spelled sentences there’s something more personal and vital than the canned and packaged lines found up and down the greeting card aisle.
We’re all guilty of this, finding others’ words and making them our own in some way. We all relate to certain songs personally, and make mix tapes (mix cds? playlists?). Back in middle school the way you showed someone that you cared about them was making them a mix tape with all your favorite songs. It’s not so different than greeting cards in this light, although I’d like to think that a 45 minute set of music has more elegant and artistic content than a 4” by 6” piece of paper. And to a lesser extent we’ve all cherished certain quotes or perhaps even kept a book of our favorite quotes. And I am not immune either — this very weblog’s subtitle isn’t mine originally; I can thank Frederick Douglass for the sentiment that has guided a good deal of my thoughts and actions.
I spent some time in the greeting card aisles this week, it being my mother’s birthday in a couple of days. I actually went to four places (four!) before I found what I was looking for: a card with nothing written on or in it. That means that by informal survey, 75% of the stores that carry greeting cards have no blank cards whatsoever. And the one that did had quite a selection: about 15 different blank card in the entire aisle, which easily held over 1,000 cards. Granted, if I would have bought a card with prepackaged emotion I would have mailed it already and it would arrive at mom’s doorstep in time for her birthday, but I’m still thinking of exactly what I want to say and the card is sitting blank on my desk. Even if it is a day or two late, it will be my own thoughts, my own emotions. In times worth marking and recognizing with these little cardboard tokens, I think that a little tardiness is worth some originality. Judging by the state of the greeting card aisle, it appears that most of the population is perfectly happy to pass off someone else’s words as their own, and is quite comfortable homogenizing their own emotions for the sake of timeliness and less work. I had no idea a trip to the drugstore could be so discouraging.
music: Sigur Ros- Agaetis Byjun
I’m doing laundry now, which is probably way overdue, and as I’m moving my clothes from the washer to the drier I notice that the clothes really aren’t all that wet. Rather, they aren’t as wet as I remember clothes being after a wash cycle. They are damp, there is evidence of water being involved at some point here, but they really should be more wet than they are. Then i realize that all of the clothes I’m moving from washer to dryer are made of plastic. Capeliene, polypro, nylon/lycra blend, duofold, bergelene…and the only clothes left out of the wash cycle are my gore-tex jacket and my windstopper fleece jacket. Granted these are my travel clothes, the small handful of garments I’ve been wearing ever since I rolled out of Boston on July 1, and when I consider all the clothes I own the picture changes. But still.
No-correction-my socks are a blend of wool and synthetic (40% wool i think), and my bandana is made from 100% cotton. So there’s that.
But still.
What happened to plants? Or animals even? Scientists working in high security research bunkers have managed to turn used milk cartons and tennis ball fuzz into such a wonderful facsimilie of plant fiber and animal hide that we’ve forsaken plants and animals altogether. Now our outdoorsiness manifests itself in brightly colored plastic clothes. We think of fleece in terms of the newest North Face or Patagonia garment, but often fail to remember that fleece originally referred to sheep hair. My ‘fleece’ jacket doesn’t have that barnyard smell to it (I take that for granted), and it is very light, packable, and due to some space-age laminate completely windproof. But here’s the kicker: I wear my jacket around town and people look at it and probably think “wow, that guy is really outdoorsy, really into being in nature.” Only when i cover myself in plastic, apparently.
I wonder what the environmental impact is of all the waste chemicals pouring out of the Gore labs…
Perhaps we’ve gotten too far ahead of ourselves as a culture when something so clearly synthetic, so clearly made by chemicals in a factory becomes the symbol for outdoorsiness or an affinity for nature. Maybe it’s just really good marketing by the gear companies. But it shouldn’t be so. Wool and leather, still quite acceptable materials from which to make clothes, should really be the marks of the nature-lover. Cotton is still a wonderous material, despite being a poor insulator once it gets wet, and there’s all sorts of alternatives like silk, hemp, or beech. These are all truly natural fibers, and would be better symbols of the nature-lover than the dryer full of plastic in the next room.
(Something similar could be said for food, but I’m not going to get into that right now.)