style council: Keep Your VD (Valentine's Day) to Yourself

I won't be joining my fellow Councilors at Taix Lounge tonight. Sorry, I love them, but I am a little sore around the aorta right now. I had met this dude. He was funny, smart, and talented (when he sings his voice is smooth and creamy like expensive French butter). He drives an enviro friendly car. He spent an entire weekend with me a couple of weekends ago. We held hands and talked about string theory, freewill vs. fate, we rolled on the sand at the beach at midnight, I sat on his lap and he put his arms around me and we played guitar like that. We drank copious amounts of Jim Beam and engaged in copious amounts of other activities, all weekend. And...I never heard from him again. I did the preliminary benefit of the doubt type stuff, he never got the emails, (oh yeah, I sent emails, I'm that much of a loser) or my favorite he's out of town and the town he's in doesn't have internet service. A friend tells me to stop kidding myself, "you had your Before Sunset moment, enjoy it and move on," she says. I know I only knew him for 3 days but I thought there was potential, I guess what I thought was, I'd like to get to know him better. Maybe I'm impatient, maybe it's Valentine's Day. This holiday has long been the kiss of death, the death toll, the grim reaper of my relationships. I never liked the holiday. When I was a kid, I was the buck-toothed big-headed girl who never got one of those silly pun valentine's day cards, you know the ones that have something like a bear on the front and when you turn it over it says "I like you bear-y much." Other girls got them and the conversation hearts that read "be mine." No one wanted to be mine, I was still growing into my teeth. Then in high school, my boyfriend was a Jehovah Witness, celebrating holidays was against his religion, I was shit out of luck on the Whitman Sampler, funny though, how God managed to look the other way when we made out in his car. But it was my post-college boyfriend who really set the Valentine's Day jinx, we dated for three years and once a year, a week after Valentine's he'd break up with me. On Feb. 14th I'd get flowers, nightgowns, chocolates and cards that read things like "I can't live without you. You are the most beautiful woman..." by Feb. 18th, he'd break up with me. I'd whip out the cards as a joke, as if they were evidence in a trial, exhibit A: "Do you recognize this handwriting? Is this your handwriting? Did you say on Feb 14th that you (reading) can't live without' me?" We'd eventually get back together but each year, right after Valentine's Day, he'd do it all again. By the time I moved to LA from NYC, February 14th was like Friday the 13th to me. So when this producer I had fallen for (I really thought he had made the moon and hung it) asked me out on my very first V-Day dinner date, I scoffed at the idea, "we'll never get in anyway, Valentine's day is so gross, gross candy and tacky flowers" He had, though I did not know it, already made the reservation, and flowers (tuberoses and big fat juicy roses) were already on their way to my house, but at the last minute he had to leave to go on location for his film, and dinner was canceled. I quickly burned him a CD, a soundtrack of our two and half year build up to a relationship to take with him. I knew I shouldn't have put Peter Gabriel's In Your Eyes on it, cause a couple of weeks after Valentine's Day, he broke up with me. Never put In Your Eyes on anyone's ipod, cd, itunes, nothin' unless you've known that person 50 years. That song is intense. No one has the balls Lloyd did in Say Anything, they just don't make guys like that anymore. I think it has something to do with the death of parachute pants, but I could be wrong. I realize I am a common denominator here, and truth be told, I'm still growing into my teeth. But something about the holiday freaks guys out, I don't blame them, it freaks me out too. Maybe for all of us commitment phobes the idea of being forced to do something on a specific day goes against the freedom rattling in our bones. But I have found ways— tried and true ones to fly solo on VD: order expensive takeout, buy a bottle of really nice red wine, and watch some unromantic movies— never pick a happy ending movie (forget Walk the Line, The Notebook, or Love, Actually) stick to movies where the couple either kills each other, like War of the Roses, or where they don't get together in the end like Irreconcilable Differences, or Shampoo. These schadenfreude flicks will do wonders for you, Kill Bill comes highly recommended. The other way to go is just to laugh — The Big Lebowski never fails, Super Troopers (High Times magazine rated this the #1 stoner flick of all time) Kings of Comedy. Me, I'm gonna have a couple of beers and work on my screenplay, maybe create a modern day Cusak character, minus the trenchcoat maffia jacket, of course...
happy valentine's y'all xoxoxo L

Photo courtesy of 20th Century Fox (John Cusak, Say Anything still 1989)

Comments

Blame it on the commercial din surrounding the holiday. There's just too much maudlin cheesiness in the air, and it's hard not to get repulsed. If there was a kernel of commitment-phobia lurking underneath, that's all the incentive it needs to burst out.

Posted by: Thalassa | February 15, 2006 at 08:14 PM