V-Day

There's a bookstore about a mile and a half from my house that I love. Every pay day Friday since I've moved in, I've made a habit of stopping in and browsing, occasionally picking up the odd book of poems or novel for their book club that I never seem to be able to make it to.

It's a great bookstore. It's locally owned, has a fantastic selection, and they don't seem to mind if you buy something and then curl up on the couch. The staff makes excellent suggestions and write reviews of books that are useful and funny.

I haven't been there in two months. 

The reason I stopped going is because one of the clerks is, well, astoundingly good-looking. Handsome men and I already have a tumultuous relationship (I can't look them in the face and my stutter comes out) but this guy is not only painfully good looking (he has David Tennant as Doctor Who hair!) but he writes the best reviews in the shop (they're funny, pithy, smart) and ohmygod likes amazing books. 

As such, I am utterly incapable of having a normal interaction with him. Once I spit my gum out while talking to him about the Song of Ice and Fire series. I've walked smack into him when he's taking me to find a book. I stammer and blush like a fourteen year old girl trying to ask a boy to homecoming. When he followed me on Twitter, I had to go hide in the storage closet at work to calm down. 

Anyway, about two months ago, I was in the shop doing my normal Friday browsing and I decided to pick up Eleanor & Park. I needed a quick read and it's the book for book club in April. As I was walking up to the counter, past the table of biographies this guy asked me a question out of the blue about the book and I was so startled and nervous that I walked right smack into said biography table, upsetting it (and me) and spilling nearly half the books on the floor. Guiltily, I offered to help clean up, and when he (graciously) said thanks but no (probably envisioning the havoc I would continue to wreak in the store) I turned scarlet, turned tail, paid for the book, and fled. 

***

I spent last Valentine's Day explaining, in tedious, exhausting detail, why a friend of mine was an idiot. 

In my defense, he was being a little bit of a curmudgeon. I had been telling him about a close friend's recent break-up (two days before) and how it had screwed up my Valentine's Day plans (which, let's face it, were to get drunk with a couple lesbians in the city's brewpub) and his response was, well, not cold, but he didn't get why someone might be so broken up over breaking up. 

Oh man. He completely underestimated that I a) am an emotional person b) have a pathological need to be both the smartest person in the room and c) am an narcissist who will never use one word where I can use 1,000 (actual count in the email).

Seriously. He's lucky he didn't get a footnotes.  

I am, retroactively, more than a little embarrassed. 

I still think I was right. 

***

I've gone through a lot of versions of Valentine's Days.

Let's clear the air first. I am 0/29 on being with someone on Valentine's Day. Zero for twenty-nine. That's pretty fucking grim. Never once in the whole series of tempestuous relationships I've had have I ever spent a Valentine's Day with someone. Not. Once. As such, I've had twenty-nine years to figure out the best approach to the holiday. I've tried ignoring it. I've tried staying in and ordering takeaway. I've tried bourbon and Patsy Cline, bourbon and Miles Davis, bourbon and bourbon. I've tried dinner out with friends, I've tried picking other malcontents up at the bar. I've tried workshops at the local feminist sex shop. I've gone to and performed in The Vagina Monologues. 

I've tried everything to get through it, get over it. 

***

"I'm wigging out about Valentine's Day."

My running partner and I are out for a long walk and because of that special bond that forms with someone who has seen you through, well, some gruesome side effects of being an endurance athlete, I confide in him. 

"Oh, Christ. You're turning into one of those people." 

"Oh, shut up." 

He laughs and we change the subject to body image and thigh gap and The Biggest Loser and I'm forced to tell him that he was right about my cracked out conception of my body. He teases me, with less bite than usual and when we get back to my car, I spend the moments waiting for it to warm up in quiet gratitude for our friendship and the ways in which it's grown over the past years. 

***

"Kel, I don't know how you stay so positive about dating." 

The comment comes as something of a surprise and from one of my closest friends. She has the kind of adult life I envy and that seems impossible for someone who isn't even thirty. She's respected at work and good at her job, she has a husband, a house that (at times) feels more like home than my apartment, and a comic book collection in the basement. 

I start laughing. "Really? I always feel like I'm being really negative." 

She waits for a moment. "No. I mean, I think you're being funny and sort of lighthearted about it, but you manage to be so upbeat. I don't know how you do it. It seems so hard." 

I am confounded by her comment. I feel like out of all the aspects of my life, the one about which I am most consistently negative is my dating life. But it's one of those cases where I'm willing to take the compliment so I just say "thanks." 

***

I had really thought that by twenty-nine I would have a better grasp on my personality than I do. 

I'm probably going to be the only person who was amazed by what I am about to say, but when I realized it, I didn't know what to do with myself. 

I have a Pollyanna streak a country mile long. 

A colleague pointed it out to me a few weeks ago. I have a tendency to, even in the face of great adversity, be relentlessly upbeat. Even if the anxiety-fueled part of my brain (which is most of it) is churning away on the number of worst case scenarios, I am outwardly pervasively (perversely?) cheerful. 

Whether it's using humor to deflect my actual feelings or if it's simply my normal personality, I have no idea, but I am apparently the worst person to have around if you want to bitch about what's going on in your life without someone telling you about all the things you have to be grateful for or the myriad ways in which it could be worse, so just buck up already. 

***

I've been listening to Billie Holiday all week. 

I've been turning Spotify onto a private session, pulling up Billie, and putting One for My Baby, One More for the Road on repeat for hours. 

Man, no one can sing about heartbreak the way Billie sings about heartbreak. 

As the week went on, I made plans to spend Friday night in with a bottle of bourbon, Billie Holiday, and Wuthering Heights. That should give you a pretty good indication as to how I feel about love these days. 

Except it doesn't.

For all the Billie Holiday and novels about doomed love and jealousy, I'll wear red to work on Friday. I'll pull out my heart-shaped cookie cutters and make Jammie Dodgers to mail out to people on Monday morning (I've never been great with timing). I'll watch Pride & Prejudice while baking tomorrow night. 

I've spent a lot of years trying to be grouchy about love because it seemed like the thing to do on Valentine's day.  As a result, I've been grouchy on a lot of Valentine's Days. 

But the issue isn't the singleness. It isn't that I'm awkward around men and knock over or run into things. The issue is that, well, I love love. 

It turns out that the Pollyanna streak in me is fucking irrepressible.Put another way, my default is to such an intense level of cheerfulness and everything always works out for the best that even when I think I'm being negative, harsh, or angry I'm still radiating positivity.

This year it's changing how I feel about Valentine's Day. Or rather, it's making me less wigged out. The walk with my running partner shook up the Etch-a-Sketch. Instead of getting angrysad about the fact that I'm going 0/29 this Valentine's Day all I can think about is the people who brought me soup and crackers last week. When my best friend and I have sing-alongs to Dashboard Confessionals at the top of our lunch. How Kerry and I video chatted for hours on Monday about books and science. That my family is alive and healthy and growing and (Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ, here comes the Pollyanna streak) there are so many people in my life right now that I consider family. The number of people who love me, and love me deeply, is more than I deserve.  

And, yes, I want the Eros kind of love (you had to know I'd bring back the Greek at some point). I want all of the foolish, ridiculous, top-over-teakettle stuff (the mooning about, the can't-keep-your-hands-off-of-one-another, the late night giggly phone conversations, the exchange of books and movies and music). I want it so badly that sometimes I feel like I might shrivel up and die without it. But for as much as I want it, I'm no longer willing to let it run roughshod over an entire day. 

So, this Valentine's Day, no Billie Holiday or Bessie Smith. No four-page-long emails to men telling them they're idiots (whatever idiotic assertions they might make). There may be bourbon, but instead of Wuthering Heights it just may be accompanied by something I've picked up from the bookstore on my way home. 

Looks like I finally did have that moment of Public Radio insight.