The Anniversary of a Beheading

It's not just any set of Sunday PostSecrets this week. It's the Valentine's Day edition, where strangers from all over the world get to reveal their deepest darkest thoughts on love, romance, and $18,000 Tiffany & Co. receipts.

Oh, goody.

Valentine's Day is a singularly perverse concept. It's a holiday dedicated to romance, named after a martyr, and unrelentingly marketed for a solid month by companies looking to sell anything red or chocolatey.

Let the record show that I have spent the vast majority of my life loathing this holiday, and with good cause. Valentine's Day has been commercialized in exactly the same fucked up series of consumerist money grabs that ruined Christmas. It can go fuck itself for all I care. I still haven't come to terms with how I spent the last several Valentine's Days of my life, primarily because it seemed to be The Slut's favorite holiday (in retrospect, the words "big surprise there" come to mind) and I wasn't allowed to spend the night curled up in front of the TV swilling gin and hating the world. I guess I started to think I lacked a reason.

Not anymore. From now on, I am doing this and I am doing it my way. If they let Chandler eat grilled cheese on Thanksgiving, then I'm allowed to have this. This year, I plan to celebrate, if you could in fact call it that, with a simple little ceremony involving wine, sulking, and angry-depressing music.