Valentine’s Day Curse

Please allow me to say that this week was one of those weeks where you look at your bed or couch and don’t recognize it. All you recognize is your desk lamp, your pencil, or maybe your computer screen. All I recognize are the endless pages in books. Each word is a soldier coming to fight me. I can take them on one by one, even the most difficult ones; anybody can with the dictionary weapon. The word army is very big, though. It seems so when there is more than you’re able and less than you’d like to read.

So let me roar about my Valentine’s Day, not that I have that much to say about the actual day. I just feel like I should add in my two cents. Normally, I do not specifically remember Valentine’s Day. I just see it on the calendar or see red being sold in a shop, and think: oh yeah, I remember that holiday. Are they still doing that? I usually think of bunch of friends born near Valentine’s Day, including on the day itself. I’m mostly concerned with all the work I have to do on the day. I don’t hate Valentine’s Day. What I really think about on this day is the fact that traditionally for me, crap starts to happen. It’s like a curse: each year has its menstruation of very bad things and uses me to block the flow.

Definition of the Valentine’s Day Curse: Maybe it’s not actually Valentine’s Day, but it’s some day in February. If you were to graph out my annual happiness, it would be kind of like graphing the temperatures for each day, except that you would push everything back a month or more. February is bad and the late summer is the best. This is how it works: From Valentine’s Day, or some day nearby, to the end of the month, the twelve plagues of the Bible fall down on me. There are locusts and earthquakes. There is crying and gnashing of teeth. Then, in the next month, no new crap happens, but you still have to lie in what the last few weeks puked up. The following month is the recovery period, when the vomit gets cleaned up, and by the end of spring, things are on their way up. I don’t think it has anything to do with the temperature either, although it may seem to. I think it has more to do with where it falls within the school year. Who knows, though? Curses don’t always have to care about things like that.

I’ve gone over many years, and have recalled the bad things that have happened in this half month. It’s not self inflicting, because I don’t always remember it. All of a sudden the days are Hell, or would be if they were warm enough, and I look at the date to find out that the curse has activated itself. It’s the shortest month, but always seems the longest, and I’m always waiting for the first of the next month. Last school year, I escaped this deadly pattern. The bad times came in the late fall, and I slid through the following February. This year, or at least this week, it’s not looking good. I suppose things aren’t that bad yet, but I’ve still got half the month left for bad things to happen. You’d be surprised how many demons can fly up your left nostril in just two weeks. Sometimes, it’s nothing more than finding out your favorite whatever is actually something you don’t like all that much—you just thought you did. So now you have to deal with the fact that you no longer have this favorite thing, and you must also deal with the fact that this stupid thing has been your favorite for so long. I’m not talking about people as you might think. Let’s include anything else that you might have a favorite of—or even a least hated of.

I’ll go back to the actual day, now. I had seen stores with pink candy and cards up to two months ago, but in my first class of the day, there was no sign of the holiday. Then in my second class, right in the middle, there was a knock on the door. Some girl came prancing in and delivering flowers, although there was only one for our room. The rose went to this girl in the class who wears lots of make up. A minute later the delivery girl brought in the card that went with the flower. The receiver of the flower was not an especially attractive girl.

Definition of Not-An-Especially-Attractive-Girl: It seems like she’d be really beautiful except for one thing, but you can’t exactly say what it is. She dresses in fancy clothes all the time to make up for this slight lack, but maybe it’s to match her perception of herself. She says she went to a prep school. Girls who think they are good looking tend to either be very arrogant because they know they can be, or are very friendly because the other gender must consciously or subconsciously give them lots of good attention. She’s friendly enough, but you can see in her manner that she thinks she’s quite something. As for her brain: she’s a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Once the teacher asked her a question about something she had been talking about for five minutes. She didn’t even know what the question was. If she ever asks me to help her in the class, I like to take a baseball bat and smack her in the back of the head. She politely responds, “Thanks.”

There was a mild amount of chatter and excitement in the class over the flower. It’s a class where the students know each other relatively well, but not enough to account for all the chatter. The teacher did not seem to mind this interruption in class and started talking about what various colors and numbers of flowers mean and asking questions from the students. As we discussed this very interesting topic, we all munched on our Valentine’s Day cookies that some of the students had been nice enough to buy for the entire class. Actually, I wasn’t munching. They didn’t buy enough, and when the cookie bag got to me, I knew it was going to be one of those Februaries where I’m always one cookie short of a bag. I should have remembered the curse was coming when my washer broke, but like I said, I don’t always remember that it’s coming.

Then for the rest of the day, there wasn’t much of the holiday. I heard that one guy who took his girlfriend to Paris for a long weekend. He’s done that before too. If I had that kind of money, I’d probably have spent it on one of those giant pointing hands made out of foam. I’m kidding; I’m kidding. I hope that guy’s girlfriend doesn’t demand those sorts of things. The richest man in the world would soon empty his bank account with a girlfriend like that. That’s way too much for such a small holiday. For those of you who don’t know, Valentine’s Day didn’t start out as it is. You may have suspected this. It started out as a day when this guy named Valentine would give gifts to poor children (he sounds like Santa Claus). I think that’s what the story is. You can do an Internet search to really find out. After Valentine disappeared from the scene, stores capitalized on the idea and turned it into what we have now. I’m not going to make some big statement about society here. I’m just passing on the trivia.

Before I stop here, I’ll say that one good thing did happen on Valentine’s Day. I think it just might have even had something to do with Valentine’s Day too. I’m not going to say anything more, though. Maybe that would ruin it.