man's greatest challenge

i am musing over my salad and melba about valentine's day and what i see it doing to these girls here at school. it is undeniably in their faces: they all want a boyfriend RIGHT NOW, and are eying each others' significant other with envy and desire. they don't want to keep him forever--they just want him for Sunday.

i can sense their gathering anticipation, growing louder and louder in their body language as the day approaches. already in their mind, they have painted a picture of what it will be like, and assume with the naivety of their 15 years that they are telepathically transmitting this to their boyfriend and that he is most certainly receiving the message without a shred of mis-interpretation. each time they walk by him, an orchestra plays and they see roses and presents and....well, the pimply-faced adolescent is on a conveyor belt heading swiftly to his demise under the crushing weight of his chosen female's expectations.

that poor kid cant accomplish what older, greater men than he have tried to since the beginning of recorded history (and before, i'm sure): satisfy the deep longing of a woman's heart.

over my twenty-some years of life, i have celebrated valentines day in a plethora of ways. for most of my childhood, it meant learning about St. Valentine, making a super-cool valentine's box out of cardboard, construction paper and the odd art supply and fashioning personalized valentines to drop into each of my sibling's respective boxes. then there were the years of angst-filled teenager, sighing over images of people in love and wishing i had someone to take me on a romantic date. following was the single college woman phase, adamantly opposing the entire concept of valentines day and proving it by going out on the town with my other single ladies. as a woman newly in love with the man who would become her husband, i was giddy with excitement imagining what may or may not happen--thrilled with being doted upon and surrendering to being starry-eyed. now, having been married almost 5 years, i find myself trying desperately to stave off the conscious and semi-conscious expectations assaulting my brain.

"it's a trap!" the logic side of my mind screams, only to be suffocated to silence by my irrationality. indeed, our saturday morning fight was stemmed by the "holiday," as i sat holding the fragments of my broken and impossible desires (some of them incapable of being articulated--try to fulfill those, fabio!). after weighing all the good times and the bad, i come to this conclusion today at this stage of me: i wish i could ignore that this day existed.

likely to happen?
*sigh*
probably not.