When you care enough to send crap, crap, crap

So I hate Hallmark. Every time I go there, I leave feeling like Mr. Rochester's first wife with a great desire to run about setting things on fire.

I had three tasks today: a birthday card for my mum, an anniversary card for my parents, and thank-you notes with martinis on them. First dilemma: I don't like sentimental cards with a bunch of flowery language. If I need to evoke some emotion, I will write it myself. Plus, you know when you receive a card with a bunch of words inside you don't read them, unless it is a funny card and it has a punchline in there somewhere (which is probably not funny anyway, see Second dilemma, below). So that eliminates approximately 94% of the cards in Hallmark. I usually don't buy sentimental cards anyway (unless its for a funeral, even then I try to find a card with the least amount of writing in it, which is not necessarily the most appropriate card: I once sent a Jewish-themed card to a Catholic friend of my mother's...).

Second dilemma: there were like five "humorous" anniversary cards. I put humorous in quotations because the powers that be in the Hallmark corporation (the same people who gave Dave Coulier a career, no doubt) think these cards are funny. They are not funny. They are not even close to funny. The new commercial for Shoebox (a tiny little unfunny division of Hallmark) has various women really yukking it up over a card (one of them honks, but it's not quite good enough). While reading through the cards, not only did I not laugh, I didn't even crack a smile. For some of them, I even cried a little bit at the awful unfunniness of the card. I ended up buying a card that was supposed to be for a wedding that I will make corrections to. (My parents understand my greeting card grouchiness, so they will not be surprised)

Third dilemma: no martini thank-you notes. No wine glass thank-you notes. Nothing remotely resembling alcohol in a three-by-five format. Everything had flowers, or bugs, or bunnies. There was one that had two cats sitting in a large coffee mug. What kind of message does that convey? Thanks for having me over, your coffee tastes like two cats sat in it for awhile. I left without thank-you notes.

I approached the lady at the counter (who looks a bit like me if I still wore glasses and gave up my law school career to make T-shirts with puffy paint) about 45 minutes after I entered the store.
"Did you find everything you need?"
Through clenched teeth: "Yes."
"If you buy one more completely unfunny card or some sentimental bullshit, possibly with Snoopy or Garfield on it, you can be eligible to pay more money to buy all this crap behind me." (I may have paraphrased what she said a bit.)
"No, I don't think I could possibly buy one more card."

As I left, I looked about the room....all those paper cards would go up in flames faster than you can say "Welcome to Hallmark".