On the banality of greeting cards and the corporatization of sentiment

Big title huh?

Simple concept. I want to someone a greeting card. My wife's birthday, our anniversary, blah blah blah. I go to Rite Aid, or CVS or whatever and start looking through cards.

Who the hell buys these things? Almost every one I look at is insanely utterly lame. The serious ones are like two page love poems with every trite cliche you can imagine, including my favorite, "I love you more than words can say" (even though you just spent four paragraphs trying to do just that... but there is no recognition of irony in a greeting card, sadly). Do people read this and think, "My wife/girlfriend/mother/father/whatever will love this because they know that I am thinking of them"? I mean its not like YOU wrote the poem. How can the poem possibly apply to the person you're giving it to? I mean make no mistake, I'm not suggesting you have to write poetry to give a card, but for chrissakes, sentiment printed on a card is not real sentiment!

And then you have your 'humor' cards. This is where I spend most of my time since the 'serious' cards sicken the shit out of me. Even these are at least 75% complete junk. Love "humor" seems to consist of teddy bears and bad love poems combined in four way pullout cards, for the most part. To get anything simple and straightforward you either have to make your own, or hunt hunt hunt.

Because I have no artistic talent to speak of, I hunt. I sometimes spend 30 minutes or more looking for a good card, because, it matters to me. I never want to halfass it and give some lameass card. That shows so little thought and consideration, what's the point? I mean a greeting card isn't a gift - the idea behind it is that you're giving someone thought and expressing it, so shouldn't the thought be at least your own or at least thought about?

I know this is too much to ask for in a society that thinks high fructose corn syrup is a "natural flavor" where everyone sleepwalks through their days. Still, if you can't take five or ten minutes to find a card that captures you and/or the other person for real, at least just a little bit, why go to the effort at all?

/rant