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.
Posted by davidtaus at September 22, 2006 01:09 AM | TrackBack