Candy hearts, flowers, and spleen: an irritable Valentine’s Day post
Via About Last Night, here: Make your own custom Valentine candy hearts with the Acme Heart Maker. This is one of the prototypes for the fabulous Church Sign Generator. It’s a testament to my overall peevishness about Valentine’s Day that I came up with the following:
Why the peevishness? Because I have a bad history with Valentine’s Day. Memorable Februaries past have included Valentine’s Days spent alone while in long-distance relationships; Valentine’s Days spent alone, period; a Valentine’s Day date that resulted in a funny story that I still dine out on, but it wasn’t nearly as funny at the time; a Valentine’s Day that coincided with the arrival of two grad-school rejection letters; and one Valentine’s evening spent wandering around Collegeville staying away from my apartment because my then-flatmate and his S.O. were, ahem, celebrating. Lately I’ve just taken to ignoring the 14th as often as possible. (And I’m not the only one. The other day a friend, who gets lot more dates than I do, remarked that she always seems to be alone on Valentine’s Day too. We agreed that Collegeville is not a great place to be single and in your late twenties.) And this February 14th, I’ll have a stack of ungraded papers to distract me. Joy!
But enough of my Valentine’s pity party. In a week I’ll be in a concert hall listening to Cecilia Bartoli singing Salieri and Vivaldi arias, which makes up for some of the February wretchedness. And if I get enough papers graded tonight and tomorrow, some of my single friends and I might have an evening out. And on Sunday or Monday, I’ll go out and buy discounted chocolate to eat while grading the last of the papers.
[Edit: when I wrote this entry, I hadn’t yet seen this definitive post on Valentine’s Day spleen from Paula’s House of Toast. Aw, man, she’s got Baudelaire and everything. I bow in the direction of superior splenetiveness. (Thanks to Dale for the link, and yes, I have indeed always wanted to use the word "splenetive" in a sentence ever since I first encountered it in Act 5, scene 1 of Hamlet.)]
As a friend of mine put it late last week:
Remember, it’s named after some guy killed for buying into all the mushy stuff.
A bon bon for your mind
For your delectation I offer a deliciously-written review of Anne Carson’s work by Meghan O’Rourke. Carson, recent translator of Sappho, writes of irony, eros and desire. Her name spurred a seduction on The L Word. And she has a career…