February is a weird month. I like it because it’s short, but I like the shortness of it because I hate everything else about it. As a kid, I read somewhere that it’s the coldest month, because the Earth stores up heat from the rest of the year under its cloud cover, but by February, all that stored-up heat is gone — and I swear I think of that every time I round a corner and get hit with that pesky little breeze, the kind that barely moves my hair but feels like a hundred knives on my face. Also, people don’t know how to spell the month, so I guess it’s a good thing that it’s short, because if it had the regulation thirty or thirty-one days, I’d get even sicker of seeing “Febuary” and “Febraury” all over the place — people, people, people. It’s “February.” F-E-B-R-U-A-R-Y. Take an extra two seconds and think before you write it. It just might save the sanity of the grammar maven in your life. So, it’s freezing, and it’s frequently misspelled, and…well, Valentine’s Day. That’s where February runs into problems, you know? Because, as a month, you can do freezing, or kind of hard to spell, or containing an ass-chapping holiday that everyone seems to hate except the actors in Hallmark commercials, but you can’t do all three. The Catholics have kicked, like, eleven days off of the calendar before; February shouldn’t go around thinking it’s safe if they get fed up again. Seriously — we’ll just sub in another month, the month of…of…Bob! Yeah. Bob. “Oh my god, I can’t believe it’s already Bob fifteenth!” “WPIX Channel 11 would like to remind all our viewers that Bob is Women’s History Month!” “Has anyone seen the spreadsheets for Bob revenues?” See? It’s short, it’s easy to spell — it’s even a palindrome!

No? Retarded idea? Okay, it’s a retarded idea, but Valentine’s Day has got to go, for real. Everything about Valentine’s Day is just so very annoying and wrong. Long before I reached dating age, I loathed Valentine’s Day, because my parents — well, my parents had certain ideas about things, like all parents do. My parents didn’t believe in sugared cereals, or MTV, or in boxed Valentine’s Day cards, and I don’t know why not; maybe it involved some vague, inchoate mistrust of things that didn’t require enough effort or something. Anyway, we always had to make our own Valentines, and it took a week, and we never left ourselves enough time, so the night before the Valentine’s party at school we wound up staying up until the wee hours, hands clenched into atrophied claws around the scissors, knuckles strafed with paper cuts, high on Elmer’s fumes, trying to cut out that last pink construction-paper heart and stick on that last scrap of doily before the sun came up. Little works of candy-colored art, those Valentines. What did we get in return? Those flimsy, see-through-enveloped, Empire Strikes Back and Garfield cards that our classmates had burned through during a single episode of Mork & Mindy. Oh, and suck-ass Valentine’s candy.

Defend it all you like, but Valentine’s candy is bad, bad, bad — and even worse, it won’t let you stop eating it. The little heart-shaped Necco wafers? Awful! Taste like soot! Minted over a hundred years ago in a factory staffed by Prussian prisoners of war! Exist solely to chip your teeth and inspire rueful chuckles at the cryptically goofy six-letters-or-less sentiments printed upon them! “‘Funny Girl.’ Yeah, so funny I don’t have a fuckin’ boyfriend. Funny-looking, more like. [Sob.] [Crunch.] Ow.” “Who ‘loves me’? WHO ‘loves me’? A PIECE of CANDY, that’s who, and when I get done chewing, I’m going to KILL MYSELF.” Could those damn things get any more depressing? And yet, you see a bowl full of the little bastards, and can you walk past it? No. No, you have to pick one up and look at the twisted, neurotic, bitter little message on it, and once you’ve read it, you can’t just put it back, so you put it in your mouth and chew on the saccharine, lumpen ashes of everything that has ever gone wrong with your love life. It’s the taste of failure, folks. And it wants you to “be sweet.” Red-hots? Same deal. Little, cute, getting jammed in your fillings, burning a teeny weeny cutesy wootsy little charred heart-shaped HOLE in your TONGUE, cloaking their evil in Red Number Five. Yes, it’s true that I have a particularly adversarial relationship with the red-hot, dating back to an incident during my senior year in high school to which I shall refer as Redhotgate. See, my friend J Dub and I used to have a game we played with Tic-Tacs called Tic-Tac Poker, where we’d see how many Tacs of Tic we could put, and keep, in our mouths without ralphing. It sounds easy, but I’ll bet you’ve never tried it, and let me tell you something — one Tic-Tac is a friendly little breath-freshening helpmeet. Seventeen of them in your mouth at once? Mob rule. Anyway, one dark February afternoon found me and J Dub sitting around the senior lounge doing nothing productive, and we decided to play Red-Hot Poker because we didn’t have any Tic-Tacs, and because we were young and we thought we’d live forever, and — oh god, I don’t think I can talk about this. Okay, so J Dub, she — she stuffed twenty-four red-hots in her mouth at — at once, and — MY FRIEND DIED THAT DAY.

Okay, she didn’t die, but she did wind up dashing over to a trash can and firing them all out of her mouth in this big gooey pink sploooooof and then she ran out into the hall screaming “MY TONGUE IS COMPLETELY SMOOTH GEEEYAAAHHH” and I just stood there like, “Ha ha. Ha. Ha? J Dub?” and the next thing I know I’ve got detention. Fucking red fucking hots.

Yeah, so there’s the malevolent-candy issue, and then there’s the issue of flowers. I don’t have a honey at the moment, so no flowers or candy for me, and that’s fine, really — in fact, more on that later. Really, though, no flowers ever is fine. Flowers belong outside, in my opinion; I get kind of sad putting them in a vase and watching them diminish. Also, the last time a man got me flowers, I had to put them in the closet to keep the cats from eating them, and the time before that, I stupidly left half a dozen Gerbera daisies on the coffee table and went out, and when I came home, I had half a dozen Gerbera daisy stems on the coffee table and a cat whose breath smelled like the hanging gardens at Tivoli. The confetti-esque litterbox offerings of the next few days made for a nice change of pace, but I can’t have flowers in my apartment. Yeah, yeah, it’s cute when they pounce on the baby’s breath. It’s cute once. After that, it’s like having a dog.

Mostly, though, Valentine’s Day squicks me out because of TV. TV shows always feel like they have to do a Valentine’s Day “special episode,” or at least mention it in some labored and annoying way, and it’s the same as any other holiday mention on TV — yes, we know the time of year. Yes, we know it’s the middle of February. Oh, a guy dressed up as Cupid and poked himself with his own arrow on ER. Ha…ha. Not. Drop it. But mostly it’s the commercials that bother me. According to just about every retailer on earth, the men of the world had better get the women of the world a bunch of crap for Valentine’s Day…or else. Apparently, the women of the world really want flowers, and candy, and twee little teddy bears with twee little pink sweaters on that say “I Wuv You” in white script, and tacky-ass gold braided chains from Fortunoff, and cheese-tastic 14-karat-gold rings with the words “I love you” punched out of it and filled in with diamond chips, and slippery little pink satin panty sets from Victoria’s Secret that fall apart if you whisper “washing machine” in the same room, and if the men of the world don’t get us these things, they will get in big trouble. This isn’t true, at all. I mean, maybe women do roam the earth who will make their men sleep on the couch if they don’t show up with sparkly things on February 14, but I don’t know any of those women. What’s that about, anyway? What’s with making us seem like materialistic harpies? And what’s with putting all that pressure on the guys to get down on one knee? “Uh oh — she’s expecting me to propose, and apparently, there’s no other way for two months’ salary to last forever.” Huh? Ever heard of a down payment on a house? Plane tickets? A trip to Chanel? And what about her salary? What about what she thinks of his spending a whole whack of money on a rock? It’s just so fifties. I don’t believe in engagement rings, because, to me, it’s a holdover from the days of dowries, and I don’t like the idea that a man can buy me with jewelry, but that’s me — if you like your diamonds and you don’t overthink it, well, good on you. But the text of all the Zales ads — “get her something truly special this year” — has an ooky undertone that grosses me out. Yeah, get her something truly special. And utterly unoriginal. Because a good present is an expensive present, and chicks dig the ice, so even though she’s only getting you a red tie with pink hearts on it and you both know it, suck it up and hand over the plastic. I mean, whatever. St. Valentine isn’t even a real saint, for Chrissake.

It’s forced, the whole thing. If you have a sweetie, you feel compelled to make a night of it, to get romantic even if you had a sucky day at work, to make dinner reservations and wait around because the restaurant’s overbooked and rush through the fondue when you feel like you really should have stayed home and done the dishes piled up in the sink, and you’ve got to get a gift, and you’ve got to get flowers and chocolates and blah, and there’s all this pressure even if you think it’s a stupid tradition. If you don’t have a sweetie, you feel kind of left out, and you wish someone would send you a box of candy even though chocolate gives you hives and you also think it’s a stupid tradition. Everyone wants love. Everyone wants to feel loved. Valentine’s Day is ostensibly all about the love, but it winds up making everyone feel unappreciated and out-of-sorts, and it doesn’t make any sense to confine love to just one day of the year anyway. Go out and buy your boyfriend a nosegay on August 23. Spring for the diamond earrings in the middle of May. The whole affair is stupid, fattening, and a total crock, and I can’t wait until Thursday when it’s all over for another year. Happy Bob, everyone.

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