I think Valentine's Day has become my favorite holiday. Well, maybe it's not better than Christmas, but you can't mess around with Jesus. He always wins.
Yet still I like a holiday which most people detest, for some reason. I think it has to do with the accumulation of emo tendencies in the youth of this nation. No one feels loved, and therefore, Valentine's Day doesn't have any meaning for anyone. Most people are already beginning to run around shouting about how depressed they are because they're single. To which I reply, "So am I". On the other hand, you have the cynics, who even though they are in a relationship would do anything to be get out of the mess. Who knows that small percentage of couples that actually likes being together.
But I couldn't care less. Loving other people is a weird, weird thing. Love, as an emotion, is very odd, and I can't categorize it. It always feels different, depending on the situation, but it always feels good. But it's also incredibly deceitful. Like that horrible 90s dance song, "Another night another dream but always you" (okay, so I actually really like that song, but it has absolutely no musical merit). The cognitive dissonance from holding long time secret crushes (SECRET LOVERS, also a horrific song) is perhaps the most mentally daunting thing I have ever experienced. Love doesn't seem to technically make sense in terms of Newton's Second Law. How come it's so much easier for you to fall in love with someone than it is for anyone to fall in love with you? (I find this lyrical tidbit from The Main Ingredient's "Everybody Plays The Fool" particularly insightful:
"And now you cry but when you do
Next time around someone cries for you"
This exploration in music lyrics also offers another interesting point. Why do so many songs deal with love? Honestly, check out your iTunes or WMP, or illegal downloading library, and I guarantee that nearly 1/2 your songs deal with love and/or relationships involving love. Its like artists don't know how to sing about anything else. Or perhaps love is the only thing worth putting to music. Mathematicians are going to try and find God through numbers, and musicians are going to try and define love through chord progressions.
I can't honestly say that I've ever been in love. I'm pretty sure I've been in creepy awkward stalker sketchy love, but that was fairly juvenile. I've loved "things" before. My Zune, upon dying, made me cry. I had given it a little personality, and it couldn't do anything to hurt me, because it did its job, and that's all you can ask anyone to do.
Am I making inferences on real people? Yes. I don't like people because they always disappoint you. They always do things that you didn't want them to. They never take your advice, especially when it would help them. They start fights with you, even if you've already pledged your undying love. They over think situations (e.g. I love you, you love me, why are we breaking up (stupid high school relationships)). Also, humans are completely untrustworthy because they have free will (The Matrix).
But it would be very hard to love someone if they didn't think for themselves. The various oddities of people are the selling points that allow me to love with them. Susan's way of always talking about inappropriate things just a little too loudly is what made me love her. Drew's inability to not make a fool out of himself in front of pretty much the entire school over Orientation weekend made me love him. Perfect people are probably a lot easier to love, but I wouldn't be compelled to think about them, to figure out their peculiarities.
I guess I could talk on the subject of romantic love, but since I fluctuate betwixt asexual and bisexual, I don't think there's much I could say that would make sense to the general population. I don't think Valentine's Day should be so much about lovers as it should be about friends. How many lovers are you going to have in your life? 0-20, probably. How many friends? At least 200. With completely arbitrary numbers that's ten times as many friends as lovers.
You could always take the, "I AM GOING TO DATE MY FRIENDS!" approach which is strongly advocated by the only man who reads this blog... (NICK! yay!), and is also supported by Jurassic 5's Thin Line featuring Nelly Furtado: "We been friends for a long time, a very close friend of mine, love you like you was mine, but respect the thin line". I have never dated a friend, except for Nick (yay!), which is rather depressing. But Nick was a good seventh grade boyfriend, and we saw STAR WARS EPISODE II: Attack of the Clones, which is an awful date movie.
Elora's Date Movies:
Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones
King Kong
300
Hitch
I don't have a very good list going. Oh well. I wanted to see Cloverfield as a date movie to add to the list of horribleness, but 1) it was good and 2) I was single. Too bad you can't construct robots to date you. You could probably build them with just enough free will to be interesting but not enough to break your heart.
Maybe instead of Valentine's Day being a day where you celebrate PEOPLE you love, it should become a day when you celebrate the THINGS you love. And to this, I have a great love indeed.
I love water. I don't know why, or how, but I do know three things about my introduction to the awesomeness of water.
1) At a young age I apparently fell into our backyard pool and was submerged for quite sometime before my aunt rescued me from the briny depths of the cement pond.
2) When my mom asked me what recreational activity I'd like to do at age 5, she couldn't get an answer out of me. She asked me if I'd like to swim. I said it sounded like fun. This is one of my earliest memories.
3) A little after this time I developed an obsession with fish. I couldn't stomach to go snorkeling until I was much older, around age 16 or 17, but I feverishly tried to remember everything about fish and the ocean. My favorite computer game was Microsoft Oceans. My greatest accomplishment was being able to name all the fish in the Rainforest Cafe tanks from memory.
It's not just the fact that the ocean is amazing, and that I like swimming. It's that I LOVE the ocean. Half of my dreams, when I'm not in love with a human, involve the beach somehow. I have dreams about aquariums, fish tanks, dark lit beaches, swimming with orcas, running off docks, etcetera. They are always creepy, but I love them.
I also love the feeling of being underwater. I've been swimming at least three times a week for the last thirteen years. Being able to control water at its surface is one thing, going under and letting it embrace you is quite another. For some weird reason I enjoy being under a lot of pressure. When I used to get band-aids, I'd always ask for them to be applied as tight as possible. I love wearing tight socks. My hair has to be pulled back tightly or I freak out. When I get hugged, I want to feel like I'm dying. For a halloween a couple years back, I wrapped my breasts in Ace Wrap (I was a vampire, I wanted to look as dead as possible, and that meant losing curves and applying porcelain concealer to my face), and I LOVED it. Water gives you all the pressure you need. It's so dense, it drives me crazy. If I didn't need to breath, I would probably spend all my time underwater. Unfortunately, I have horrible lungs (for a swimmer), and I have a strong compulsion to suck in my favorite diatomic atom: Oxygen. Oh, but if only to have gills!
Likewise, water is probably the most important molecule on earth. Having taken six science classes in High School, I have written the essay to this question too many times: Why is water so essential for life on earth? Because it's amazing?
If you ever go swimming, I ask you do this one thing. Take off your goggles, undo your hair, swim to a relatively deep spot, and sink under. Exhale, let yourself sink a little bit. And then just listen. Move your arms around a little bit, and listen to the water move past you. Small movements drastically change your body position, so be careful when trying to achieve neutral buoyancy. Your hair is probably in your face, but feel how smooth it is? You couldn't look that sexy about land if you tried.
Which brings up another point. Land lubbers suck at looking good underwater. So you'll need practice.
I can remember the first time I ever played water polo. I thought it was absolutely ridiculous. Playing about the water? Why, you couldn't see anything. This was ridiculous, a horrible compromise between water and air. But as I started to get better at it, I realized how much more fun it was than just swimming. My years of messing around at practice became important for realizing where I was in the water, and being able to move to new points, ridiculously fast, as efficiently as possible, to try and catch a yellow ball. While other people dealt with the menutia of the game, the attacking, the covering, all I had to do was be really fast (which I was in comparison), get open (which was easy when you were the "2oth fastest swimmer in Illinois*), and score goals (which was difficult at first, never needing hand-eye coordination before). Playing water polo changed my perspective of the pool from a playground to a battle field (or just a more violent playground). *YES I AM BRAGGING. sorry.
So that's my love. Water. Dihydrogen oxide. The Universal Solvent. 70% of your body.
So while you're thinking about how lonely you are on Valentine's Day, maybe you should consider everything that you love about your life. Maybe even consider all the things that you love about yourself. Leave the future for lovers, because Valentine's Day shouldn't be about buying things or faking interest. Valentine's Day should be about everything that makes you happy. Everything that makes you feel that emotion no one wants to or even can describe: love.
1 comment:
That was absolutely fantastic.
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