happy tortured love, y'all
For much of my life I've been known as the girl who hates Valentine's Day. You're thinking: well, who hasn't? This is the comforting thing, isn't it? You grow up and discover that everyone hates February 14. It's not just you.
My grade/high school best friend -- who I now refer to only as Satan -- and I used to plan for weeks in advance. Most years we managed to pull off only the most inept of scams where we sent ourselves flowers or something. My parents always sent me something from a "secret admirer," which only made things even sadder -- except for eighth grade when they got Satan and me tickets to see Bon Jovi. (I am not proud, people. My friend J and I used to compete for who had The Biggest Hair on a given day.) Once we got cars, Satan and I would conduct more elaborate ruses, where we'd pretend to be dating boys from out of town, who would of course send us flowers. I'm sure this fooled nobody. Having an overprotective big brother and being a smart-ass didn't seem like virtues at the time, but now I'm also glad I never really dated any of the boys at my high school.
In college, I wrote a column about how much I hated V-day. I turned it in late, as usual, handing it in to lay-out and going off to sleep a few hours. I walked in to my first class the next morning to the hush that can only be brought about by one's editor putting one's mug shot above a giant heart with a giant NO symbol across it. All my fellow bartendrixes, who had dates for the evening, invited me to tag along in solidarity, thus completely missing the point that I only wanted the day to disappear. That what I'd written my column about was not being a romantic and wanting the superpower that allows you to punch someone in the face really hard only they can never tell anyone about it and if they try to they just talk about how great you are. Or the power to cause multiple accidents involving flower trucks.
That sort of thing.
Now it's hard to believe I ever invested the effort or the loathing into a little fertility celebration about fucking birds named after one to three Catholic saints. Looking back, it was all kind of fun.
Tonight we'll have champagne and something not cooked in our kitchen for dinner; I'll take any excuse for these two things, actually. And I got the Wonderfalls DVD as a present, but the Barnes and Noble girl blew that one two weeks ago, even after being told not to say the name of what had been ordered when checking to see whether it had arrived or not. Damn you, Barnes and Noble girl! Well, not really, I just like saying that. I'm giving Christopher tickets to Neko Case. Basically, in other words, we use this as an excuse to buy stuff we'd buy anyway.
I still invite y'all to post your favorite love stories, anti or pro, movies or books, in the comments section. A quick think about mine turned up: The Awakening, Happy Accidents, Midnight, The Princess Bride, Jeannette Winterson's The Passion, Of Love and Shadows, I Capture the Castle (hey crushes are what Valentine's Day is really about, right?), and, hell, I'll keep adding as I remember.
My grade/high school best friend -- who I now refer to only as Satan -- and I used to plan for weeks in advance. Most years we managed to pull off only the most inept of scams where we sent ourselves flowers or something. My parents always sent me something from a "secret admirer," which only made things even sadder -- except for eighth grade when they got Satan and me tickets to see Bon Jovi. (I am not proud, people. My friend J and I used to compete for who had The Biggest Hair on a given day.) Once we got cars, Satan and I would conduct more elaborate ruses, where we'd pretend to be dating boys from out of town, who would of course send us flowers. I'm sure this fooled nobody. Having an overprotective big brother and being a smart-ass didn't seem like virtues at the time, but now I'm also glad I never really dated any of the boys at my high school.
In college, I wrote a column about how much I hated V-day. I turned it in late, as usual, handing it in to lay-out and going off to sleep a few hours. I walked in to my first class the next morning to the hush that can only be brought about by one's editor putting one's mug shot above a giant heart with a giant NO symbol across it. All my fellow bartendrixes, who had dates for the evening, invited me to tag along in solidarity, thus completely missing the point that I only wanted the day to disappear. That what I'd written my column about was not being a romantic and wanting the superpower that allows you to punch someone in the face really hard only they can never tell anyone about it and if they try to they just talk about how great you are. Or the power to cause multiple accidents involving flower trucks.
That sort of thing.
Now it's hard to believe I ever invested the effort or the loathing into a little fertility celebration about fucking birds named after one to three Catholic saints. Looking back, it was all kind of fun.
Tonight we'll have champagne and something not cooked in our kitchen for dinner; I'll take any excuse for these two things, actually. And I got the Wonderfalls DVD as a present, but the Barnes and Noble girl blew that one two weeks ago, even after being told not to say the name of what had been ordered when checking to see whether it had arrived or not. Damn you, Barnes and Noble girl! Well, not really, I just like saying that. I'm giving Christopher tickets to Neko Case. Basically, in other words, we use this as an excuse to buy stuff we'd buy anyway.
I still invite y'all to post your favorite love stories, anti or pro, movies or books, in the comments section. A quick think about mine turned up: The Awakening, Happy Accidents, Midnight, The Princess Bride, Jeannette Winterson's The Passion, Of Love and Shadows, I Capture the Castle (hey crushes are what Valentine's Day is really about, right?), and, hell, I'll keep adding as I remember.
posted by Gwenda @ 2/14/2005 07:58:00 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home