April, it seems, is birthday season for my Chicago friends, as September was for my Princeton ones. Thusly, I spent about twenty minutes yesterday browsing the birthday card selection at Walgreen’s. It was horrible. One likes to believe that one is an original, freethinking sort, that one’s ideas and emotions cannot be expressed by a $2 piece of cardstock mass-produced by a faceless, thus presumably evil and unfeeling, corporation.
This is untrue.
Turns out, all my feelings can be expressed pretty easily in birthday card form. Even the subtle, complex ones that I barely understand. American Greetings has it on lockdown. The results of long introspection, the fruits of my navel-gazing, have already been put to print. They can put my deepest desires into verse, find rhymes for all my moods and affects, and even play my favorite songs to cheer me up. It’s embarassing. In the end, I was unable to buy anything, so encumbered by shame and mediocrity.
Then I ate some pizza. Fun day, over all.
