Comment by dijit

If I'm being honest with myself, the "Happy Birthday" pre-written text forces me to choose something else to write as my personal message.

Yeah, it's frustrating in the moment that the exact sentiment I want to express (have a happy birthday) is already taken and repeating it seems lazy, but when I think about it: it's lazy to just express such a generic sentiment anyway.

Asking them to think on the year, and to look ahead, maybe reminding them of some things they've done and achieved is not only nicer to receive, it's nicer to write too.

I don't hate Hallmark for this (though I do in the moment that I'm confronted with this random creative challenge).

Lois C.K says this about George Carlin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R37zkizucPU

> So I was doing it at a Chinese restaurant called Kowloon in Boston, it’s August, Massachusetts, and I was sitting in my car after the show just feeling like, “This was all a big mistake, I’m not good enough, and I felt like my jokes were a trap, and I listened to a CD of George talking about comedy and workshopping it and talking about it seriously, and the thing that blew me away about this fellow was he kept putting out—specials, every year there’d be a new George Carlin special, a new George Carlin album, they just kept coming, and each one was deeper than the next, and I just thought, how can he do that? And it made me literally cry that I could never do that. I was telling the same jokes for fifteen years, so I’m listening and they asked him, “How do you do all this material?” And I hear him and he says, “I just decided every year I’d be working on that year’s special, and I do the special and then I just chuck out the material and then I start with nothing.” And I thought, “That’s crazy. How do you throw away. It took me fifteen years to build this shitty hour. If I throw it away, I’ve got nothing.”

> But he gave me the courage to try, but also I was desperate, what the fuck else was I going to do? This idea that you throw everything away and you start over again. And I thought, “Well, okay, when you’re done telling jokes about airplanes and dogs, and you throw those away, what have you got left?” You can only dig deeper, you can start talking about your feelings and who you are and then you do those jokes and they’re gone. You’ve gotta dig deeper, so you start thinking about your fears and your nightmares, and doing jokes about that, and then they’re gone. [and so on].

My point is, it forces you to dig a bit deeper.