I'm flexible and easy-going. I didn't always used to be. I used to plan out my life and if every little detail did not go according to plan I would fall apart. People often ask questions like "What do you want to do tonight?" or "Where do you want to eat dinner?" or "What time do you want to get there?" In my opinion there are only three ways a sane person would answer these types of questions:
1. You have an opinion and say it ("I want to eat tacos for dinner and then play video games").
2. You have an opinion, but don't say it ("I don't care. Whatever you want to eat", while dreaming of tacos in your head the entire time).
3. You honestly do not care ("I don't care").
For the first 20-something years of my life I choose option 2. I always cared, but I never wanted to admit to caring. I don't know how it happened, maybe I just said "I don't care" enough times, but I really began to not care. I actually heard people describe me as "flexible".
An odd thing happened after I didn't care for a while - I started thinking. Not that I never thought before - I had thought a lot - but I started thinking in a different way. Somehow, when I'd been empty and without-a-care, all my pre-conceived notions of the world, and ideas society had put there, disappeared. What happened next was even more interesting - once I started wanting to care, I was able to make my own decisions, and share them, and live by them.
I decided that eating at restaurants frequently wasn't for me. I decided that I didn't want to get a Master's degree. I decided not to drink alcohol. I decided not to ever purposefully lie. I decided that if I was going to eat sugar, it was going to be chocolate. I decided to follow what God called me to do, not what other people called me to do.
Somewhere, in all my decisions, I decided that holidays were nothing special. In my opinion, holidays are cliched and over commercialized. I boycott all holidays that are simply an excuse for people to drink excessively. I don't go shopping on the day after thanksgiving. I'm generous at Christmas, but don't go overboard like society wants me to. Halloween is just pointless.
I definitely don't do Valentine's Day.
As far as I'm concerned, if you love someone, you should let them know that all year long, not just on some random day in February. Also, if I'm showing someone how much I care about them, the ideal way to do it doesn't seem like waiting 3 hours for a table at a restaurant, and then . . . I don't know . . . whatever people would do after that. Go see a movie? Eat dessert? Have sex?
Or, if you're so into this Valentine's Day thing, why not just make your own? Pick some random day in some other month, and then you go do all those things without the lines, and, if you live in Rochester, possibly even without having to scrape ice off your car in between every stop.
So, in my opinion, the only real benefit of Valentine's Day is that I end up with chocolate, and that is rarely a bad thing. Other than that, besides the people who have a financial interest in Hallmark, who actually cares?
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