Valentine's Day is a another consumerist festival that takes an ancient fertility rite and transforms it into a shopping spree. Like Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Mother's Day, the dominant aspect is commerce. It's not what you do, it's what you buy. If you don't spring for a giant bouquet of flowers and/or a box of chocolates for your significant other (sent to their workplace so everyone can see), you just don't care. And if you really cared, you'd blow a month's salary on some sort of jewelry.

Sure, every year, there's a heartwarming story about the poor couple who gave each other some inexpensive but heartfelt gift because they didn't have any money, but they loved each other too much to let the day pass without some gesture. Thing is, the subtext there is that they only did that because they were broke. If you have money and try something like writing her a poem, well, you just don't care enough. I actually tried this once, and I never heard the end of it.

My plan for Valentine's Day is to not do anything. Tomorrow, I might see if I can buy myself some chocolate that's been marked down. But I'm single, so what do I know?

-Logan
"What do I want? I'm an American. I want more."

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.