Anxiety at the card rack...

I find it so stressful to shop for birthday cards. Standing there, perusing rows of sentiment, sarcasm and scatalogical un-funny jokes, I am overwhelmingly flumoxed. Where to begin? What's appropriate? Who am I shopping for again? Why does this card cost so much?

There are a score of birthdays coming up--friends, nieces, in-laws, children, more friends. I suddenly realize that almost everyone I know has a birthday this spring (does that signify June weddings? I'm not sure). I've seem to have surrounded myself with people who were born in February and March. I married someone whose relatives were all born in February and March. And then there's April and May too. I hadn't even gotten through the list when I started thinking about those birthdays added in as well. Then there's Mother's Day and Father's Day and graduations and weddings. The year, marching onward in my head, cards and more cards, raining down from the sky in my head, like leaflets dropped from a plane.

I've tried the email cards, without success. It's just as annoying to sit at the computer searching for the right tone, the right greeting, as it is to stand in the aisles at the drugstore, physically opening and refiling paper cards for an entire afternoon.

Some of my friends have embraced the hobby of making their own cards. They are singular works of art, handmade paper art. I am impressed and more than a little intimidated by the thought of setting out to create my own cards. It makes me tired just contemplating the angst and effort it would require to start still another creative activity, complete with stampers and foil embossers and glitter powder and ink pads, all which would need to be bought and organized and stored somewhere, refusing to be found whenever there was a birthday coming up.

When we were kids, my brother and I would walk up the hill to the neighborhood drug store and sift through the racks looking for the perfect card together. One year we chose one for my father that we thought was oddly funny, something with a dog and a fire hydrant I recall, that we didn't really understand. My mom made us take it back and exchange it for something more appropriate. We were confused because we really didn't understand why (until she explained it), and then we were just appalled at our own ignorance. I remember being completely embarrassed by my lack of knowledge about the symbolism, and horrified that my father would have thought that the card (and by extension, his children) were stupid.

So, I stand there for hours, seeking the cards that not only carry the burden of a sincere, thoughtful birthday wish, but the cards that also say something about me, the sincere, thoughtful, (intelligent!) person who sends it.

If that's not the ultimate in self-absorbed behavior, I don't know what is. Sheesh. Maybe I should get a grip--sometimes a birthday card is just a birthday card, right?