That's right, it's 'Get over it' Friday. So what are we all getting over this year?
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Time to 'Get over it' Friday
Day insists it's time to move on
March 5, 2007
BY MEGHAN BARR
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Your cat kicked the bucket yesterday. The economy is souring, your baby's daddy skipped town and no matter how often you listen to "SexyBack," Justin Timberlake is never going to date you.
They may sound like the rejected lyrics of a country song, but such grievances comprise a virtual graveyard of buried hopes on www.GetOverItDay.com, where they have been laid to rest by thousands of embittered souls.
And you can entomb your problems, too, on Friday, when Get Over It Day makes its second appearance to the American public.
It's one of those holidays that seem to come along more and more often, when some enterprising individual decides to create a public brand for his or her own pet interest -- or, in this case, peeve.
Get Over It Day is the brainchild of Jeff Goldblatt, an entrepreneur from Atlanta who attracted the spotlight in 2001 with his Rejection Hotline, a popular prerecorded voicemail line that informs the caller he or she has been spurned by whoever passed along the digits.
"Not getting into the college you wanted, losing a job -- everybody's got something to get over," says Goldblatt, 29, who came up with the concept in 2005 while recovering from a difficult break-up. "Everybody's got to say, it's time to move on, get over it."
It's a make-your-own holiday in which participants devise their own, sometimes vindictive, traditions. A group of girls in New York last year burned photographs of their ex-boyfriends in a bonfire, inspiring Goldblatt to create an animated fire pit on the Web site. Complaints lodged in the pit range from the trivial ("I lost my favorite red stapler" ) to the political ("the government is stupid and nonsensical" ) and the tragic ("my father passed away" ), with each injustice satisfyingly churned into the flames.
For most, however, the holiday begins and ends on a bar stool, a fact that Goldblatt has exploited with merchandise sold on his Web site. Items include everything from Get Over It wristbands to One Night Stand toothbrushes.
Shawn Neuman, 39, of Deltona, Fla., was exhausted from her day job of hauling furniture and her night job as a mother and grandmother when she stumbled across the Web site last year. Inspired, she and a friend made a list of all the things they wanted to get over.
"I got over the fact that I can't do it all," Neuman says. "I can't be super mom, super employee, super everything. I can't."
That moment of clarity led Neuman to quit her job for pharmacy school, a transformation that she can hardly believe grew out of a holiday she celebrated on a whim.
Her success aside, will Get Over It Day ever be deserving of its own Hallmark cards?
Most major U.S. holidays did not start from scratch. Halloween, Christmas and Valentine's Day grew out of ancient times and survived by adapting to secular needs, says Bob Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University.
"Yes, you can get a lot of people to talk about it thanks to the Internet, but this holiday has very little going for it as something that could make it onto the calendar," Thompson says. "No candy, nothing for kids, no guilt to be assuaged, and no major activity around which to build a celebration."
Yet with endless numbers of pop songs, movies and self-help books obsessed with "getting over it," the phenomenon seems to occupy a treasured place in society's collective consciousness.
"It's just one of those things," pop princess Avril Lavigne sings. "You'll have to get over it."
The world is a book, and he who stays home reads only one page.
The future won't last; it will soon be your tomorrow.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes.
The future won't last; it will soon be your tomorrow.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes.
