Apart from a mysterious shooting pain in my left elbow right now, I'm doing not-so-bad. There are worse ways to spend V-Day than, um, at a Chevys with your parents and brother (I don't know why, but my parents like celebrating traditionally couple-y occasions, like V-Day and their anniversary, with their children). OK I know that sounds bad. But I do like going out to dinners, yes, even with my family, and besides, Chevys is delicious. I had fish tacos, still in keeping with my
But the highlight of my day might have been when I went for a quick run. A run in February! Who'd have thought. Indeed the weather today was unbelievably springlike, as if winter is cruelly trying to lure us into thinking it will be kind to us from here on out. What sheer baloney/malarkey/poppycock that is. Well anyway, I was wrapping up my run when I spotted an innocent pink carnation laying on the sidewalk in front of me. It was near the high school so someone must've dropped it on the way home. It goes without saying that I took it home. So now I'm a girl fat on fish tacos, whose night stand is housing a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, on top of which there is a secondhand flower bequeathed to her by a sidewalk.
No big deal. And as Liz Lemon would say, it's not V-Day anyway--it's Anna Howard Shaw Day, people.
The flower really did make me happy. I'm all about my facebook statuses so I put "on my run just now i found an abandoned pink carnation laying on the sidewalk. shoutout to my secret admirer--the universe." It felt like the universe, despite all its senselessness and absurdity and cruelty, was trying to send me some (really lame) message. Maybe it was a reward for all the self-love and taking care of my health recently. Or maybe it was just subtle encouragement to a girl who never had those carnations sent to her in high school.
In fact, there was a really excellent online journal entry I wrote on Valentine's Day 2004, unfortunately long ago deleted, in which I describe "love and quiet giggles flickering across the room", or something like that, and (because flowers were passed out first period, in this case geometry class) how "finding the angle of hypotenuses (hypotenii?) couldn't heal the pain in my chest, and even if it could, I suck at math." It's so MELODRAMATIC, and actually, I was awesome at geometry so I don't know what I was going on about.
Valentine's Day can really suck. But it doesn't suck the most for people like me--it sucks for those going through painful breakups, or even still holding on to the residual pain of one. Or worse, it sucks for people like poor Liam Neeson, whose wife passed away at the age of 45. The love of your life is gone, but you still have to put up with this tiresome, obnoxiously saccharine pink-and-red holiday.
So while I can and have pulled a Bridget Jones before (in spirit, but not yet in spirits, i.e. drinking wine all by myself and singing "All By Myself") I know it's idiotic, too. After all, I'm young and my pathetic love life still holds potential, at least. I am both young and an incorrigible romantic whose heart is (embarrassingly) convinced that one day I'll be 1/2 of an annoyingly in-love couple, and I'll have lame Valentine's dates, and I'll buy right into this tiresome, obnoxiously saccharine holiday. For single people is this day all about being as bitter as the darkest of chocolates or is there a way to make it about hope? (Ugh, the question at the end makes me sound like a second-rate Carrie Bradshaw). Psh, in an hour this day will be old news anyway. But I am in the mood to watch Bridget Jones' Diary all of a sudden.
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