Love Is In the Air, and It's Starting To Set Off My Allergies

So this past weekend was Valentine’s Day. For being a very short month, February is filled with a lot of random holidays (by the way, does anyone else think it’s a little suspicious we made the shortest month of the year Black History Month?). Luckily Valentine’s Day only comes once every four years and compensates for the rotation of the Earth. Wait a minute… dammit wrong February Holiday.

Nobody really knows how Valentine’s Day began (okay so by that I mean me). I’m pretty sure it is a holiday conceived by women in order to get flowers and candy. And like many cherished female traditions, this one started with an innocent man suffering. Saint Valentine was some poor soul who lived a long time ago and was killed by somebody. I don’t really know how he died, the Wikipedia article started to get really boring and it began involving French people so I stopped reading and decided to make up the rest of the facts. Besides, if you read this to learn things, you have bigger issues.

Anyway, what better way to celebrate some guy’s life than by connecting with that special someone. And by “connecting” I mean “buying them a whole lot of s**t.” At least that’s the case if you are a guy on Valentine’s Day. You have to buy cards, jewelry, dinner, and lots of chocolates (which they never eat because they say it will go to their hips but still insist you buy). Let’s think for a second who Valentine’s Day truly benefits. Women in a relationship get a whole bunch of stuff, men in a relationship have to buy a whole bunch of stuff, single women are reminded how single they are (which is when they need all that chocolate), and single guys laugh the laugh of the carefree and then go to the store the day after Valentine’s to take advantage of all the cheap candy on sale.

Or at least that’s what I did on Monday night. I went to Safeway and ended up buying a box of Twinkies (which I have been subliminally craving since “Zombie Land”) and Ding-Dongs as part of my new diet, the “Have a Stroke Before You Can Gain More Weight” plan. As if that weren’t enough, there was a Girl Scout stand outside. And I just couldn’t turn down the chance to help out my community by supporting the scouts by stuffing my face with cookies (and for some reason, it took the retarded girl scout almost ten minutes to give me change, so they need all the help they can get).

Anyway, Valentine’s Day is not just about food (or so they say). It actually helps men out in their relationships, because while women are in touch with their emotions all the time and can talk about them any day of the year, men need some advance notice. So having a set day gives men time to prepare to have emotions and communicate and all that other mumbo jumbo. A great example occurred in my journalism class the other day. We were all asked to name our favorite Super Bowl commercial. The women all named the Google one about finding love in France as their favorite, whereas the men in the class had trouble even remembering the ad. We were a little too busy thinking about the Megan Fox ad, thumb doubles and all (which was stupid, because Megan Fox could have gills and antennae and she would still be one of the hottest women in the world).

Do you want to know what men think of true love? Just watch one of the fifty dating reality shows that are on TV at the moment. It always consists of about twenty very emotionally unstable women who think they are there to win the love of a celebrity and one celebrity who is there because the producers told him he could make out with twenty women in a mansion and then ditch all but one of them (and the last one too if he wants another season).

I bring this up because I recently watched the finale and reunion of “For the Love of Ray J 2,” (and for the record, both my roommate and I think he made the wrong choice). Now, Ray J would get mad at the girls for doubting his ability to settle down even though he 1. didn’t bother to learn their names but instead gave them stripper nicknames, 2. spent the entire show making out with twenty women at a time and 3. was on his second season. Yep… can’t see why they wouldn’t trust him.

I feel like I would do well on that type of show. It would be called “For the Love of Mitchell,” and the entire episode would show me trying to choose between a Twinkie and a Ding-Dong.