When you care enough to send some damned thing or other

Sometimes I find something that I want to share as is. If I don’t have much to say about it, I’ll put it either into a general links post, or if it’s debate-oriented, a Coachean Feed post. Sometimes I’ll be inspired to write at length. After all, I like writing stuff, so why not? There are some people who like reading it, and that’s good enough for me.

Take this article on The Best-Selling Greeting Card of All Time. I don’t have a lot to say about the article per se, but I have to admit, it did start me thinking about greeting cards in general. Hence, an article on greeting cards. That is how the mind works, take it or leave it.

I went over to hallmark.com, just to grab an image, and found this one, apparently just the tip of the Bieber greeting card iceberg. I also found that their site seems to organize one's greeting card life completely, so you can keep track of all the holidays you celebrate, and the people you wish to celebrate with. In other words, greeting cards are, apparently, alive and well. Who knew?

I come from a serious greeting card family on my mother's side. I don't mean just Christmas and birthdays. I mean every holiday and event imaginable. Valentine's Day. St. Patrick's Day. Easter. Fourth of July. Halloween. Thanksgiving. Mother's Day. Father's Day. Grandparents' Day. First Communion. Confirmation. Anniversaries. Thank you. Get well. And something tells me that I'm just scratching the Hallmark surface here, as far as the phenomenon itself is concerned. They have cards for events and holidays most of us have never heard of. Which raises the primary question, why do people send cards in the first place? I mean, half the cards we sent were to people we saw all the time. If I'm going to have Thanksgiving dinner with you, why am I sending you a Thanksgiving card? For that matter, what's so special about St. Patrick's Day that we need to send a card to acknowledge it? I can understand why Hallmark is motivated to create cards for every event, but why are people motivated to buy and send them?

I wonder if the answer is a combination of things. First, yes, a card does allow us to remove ourselves from actually having personal contact with people, so it can be a nice long-distance but vague connection. My parents would send Christmas cards like crazy, mostly to people they hadn't seen in years. By the time my mother reached her Aged P status, Christmas cards were a barometer of whether or not people were still alive. If she didn't hear from my Aunt Mary, for instance—a woman who is not my aunt and who I would not recognize if I found her cleaning the litter box on a dark night—she would wonder aloud if Aunt Mary might be dead. On further inquiry, it would turn out that if Aunt Mary were alive, she'd be about 124, leading me to suggest to the Aged P that,indeed, Aunt Mary was probably no more.

Another value of cards, and here I think we're talking about the incidental cards, like the St. Patrick's Days, is to give voice to one's inner cuteness. Cute, which as far as I'm concerned is a clinical pathology, runs rampant through my family, and of course, they're not alone. Fly onto the wall of a Hallmark store any day of the week and I'll bet you you'll hear the words, "Oh, that's cute," within three minutes of your arrival, and every three minutes after that. Humans, of course, have a predilection to favor cuteness memes like big eyes and big heads and so forth, which is fine if it means adopting a puppy or not eating your firstborn, but gets a little old when it means you subscribe to every holiday on earth just to send a cute card for it. If my mother were a computer person (an idea in which she lives in the direst fear), she would no doubt spend all her days watching cat videos. Cute St. Patrick's Day cards and cat videos are symptoms of the same disease. Any one of us might, at any moment, be taken by a quick bout of the cutes (after all, I'm a Disney fan), but I keep my cute moments pure and separated from all my other moments. Come visit me in a tab room at a tournament some weekend and watch me for a couple days straight. You will not see one moment of cute lapse. I promise.

Obviously I did not inherit the strong cute gene that runs rampant through the rest of my family. As the years went by, I sent progressively fewer and fewer cards, until now I send my mother a Christmas card and a Mother's Day card, the former because she decorates her room with them (and, by the way, decorating for holidays is strongly connected to the cute disease, and my mother had maybe six or seven holidays with boxes of crap pulled out every year to celebrate them, in addition to the expected Christmas ornaments), and the latter because no doubt otherwise she would disown me. I've cut literally everyone else from my card list. I don't send greeting cards to my staff or my colleagues, I've taken my birthday off Facebook and don't acknowledge anyone else's birthdays (because acknowledge one, you've got to acknowledge them all, and seeing that I'm on fb about once a week, that's 6 our of 7 I'd miss), and if you get sick, I might visit you, but I won't send a card with a cartoon nurse sticking a thermometer up your butt. It's just not me.

And I wonder how many other people it is these days, the literal card bit, that is. There is no question that Facebook has taken over indifferent social interactions. People who don't give a crap about certain other people feel obligated to like their various life events and wish them a happy birthday, in numbers that would have made Hallmark in their heyday drool uncontrollably. It's interesting. The postal system originally allowed us to remove the human from human interactions, and the interwebs merely develop it to 21st century dimensions. Maybe all we want out of life is a handful of real friends and a lot of connections to unreal friends, and greeting cards used to do it, but fb does it even better. I know for a fact that I am friends with people on fb who I don't know, whose names mean nothing to me. Since they're all also friends of O'C, I assume when they petition me for my amity, it is because they are denizens of the forensics universe. I certainly hope that's the case. I'd hate to be friends with them just because, say, they wash dishes at Japonica.

Anyhow, here's thinking of you, you're my bestest friend, you're invited, get well soon, may the Lord have mercy on your heathen soul, my sympathies, congratulations, you don't look a day over eighty, have you lost weight, and have a happy August Civic Holiday.