Not So Literary

This isn't literary at all. I was recently looking around for an e-card for a friend's birthday. (I'm bad with birthdays too, but occasionally remember them, sigh.) And I just recalled how so many e-greeting sites are just horrendously awful, insipid, so sweet your skin might exfoliate from even coming into contact with so much sugar, seeming to assume everybody in the world is perpetually 5 years old or something. I mean, I've been known to send them anyway, gritting my teeth and thinking, "It's the thought that counts. Right? Right?!? Is my friend going to think I'm that cheesy? I'm just trying to remember a birthday and of course, of COURSE I didn't go out and get a card!"

Come to think of it, most paper greeting cards are likely to put somebody in a diabetic coma too, so I guess there's precedent for the electronic versions to aspire to the same level of complete disconnect from reality. And maybe this is a semi-literary post; I guess some starving writers probably make some money by writing some of those rhyming poems with "so much heartfelt emotion" or whatever (and come on, it's never quite right). I'm not sure I've ever heard of somebody getting that gig, though.

But come on, there's a market, I'm sure, for things like, "Happy Birthday Dad, even though you really haven't been much of a dad to me, but I know you've been more of a dad to somebody..." (See, that even kind of rhymes, too, if you kind of emphasis the "ee" sound at the end of "somebody.")  

Well anyway I stumbled across a site with much more edgy (and in some cases kinda mean) e-cards, called Some E-cards. Some of the "sentiments" (i.e., not very sentimental) made me laugh out loud. I wasn't crazy about the artwork, but I'm willing to forgive it for that, since the cutesy cartoons on some other e-card sites are just... so... awful. 

Anyway I thought I'd pass it on, fwiw. (And I hope I haven't offended anybody out there who maybe does write sappy sentiments for greeting card companies... hey, we all do what we gotta do.)

Keep on reading, writing and greeting...

LLB