Valentine's Day

Only ten more days and it will be over.

I hate Valentine's Day, in a perennial but circumstantial manner. Every damned year, I get to see the second-worst sort of commercials... I don't watch a lot of TV, but Valentine's Day commercials are so ubiquitous that one can't get through an hour of the telly without getting slammed by them. They're like a giant ocean wave, the sort that slams you down into that muck-sand you get in the shallow parts. The sort that makes you suck kelp and pray to Jesus. (Everybody prays to Jesus in that circumstance, Jews and Muslims included.)

I was watching House, which usually makes me feel pretty good about myself. The diamond commercials all through the show left me feeling frustrated and socially impaired. They ruin everything.

As I just mentioned, albeit in a roundabout fashion, I find the diamond commercials to be the worst. I can't stand to see happy people in love. I don't want to watch them on TV... God knows I see enough happy people in love wherever I go. I hate them all, with the sort of hate that flares up, like a pile of phosphorous shavings set to a match, out of nowhere for a few brief moments. Afterwards, I am bereft, left with a pile of dusty ashes.

Diamond commercials are like all the pith of a chick-flick compressed into a slingshot pellet that nails me right between the eyes like a ball-peen hammer.

All Valentine's-specific commercials aside, most commercials depress me. They all show people being happy, and I can't help but notice that they all are happier than me. Even the ones you expect wouldn't be, like the overweight ladies in the Weight Watchers commercials, or the people with chronic illnesses in the prescription-drug ads.

I get the uncomfortable feeling that one day I'll see a commercial for a funeral home, and everyone in it will seem a lot happier than me.

Upon due consideration, Valentine's Day is only one of the holidays that I hate. I hate New Year's Eve for much the same reasons that I hate Valentine's Day: it's a day to feel particularly lousy about being single.

I also hate Christmas, because of all the people who are nice to me. Truth is, they're only being nice because it's Christmas; during the rest of the year they'd just as soon spit on you. It's hard to keep the sneer off my face whenever I hear that same old tripe about keeping alive the Christmas Spirit all the year long.

Actually, I'm thinking that the sum of all this is that I just hate people in general. Those I perceive as doing better than me I hate because they seem to be happy and successful in all the ways I feel I am not. Those I perceive as doing worse than me I hate because they are simultaneously a blight upon the earth and a potential person who would be doing better than me if only I were doing rather worse than I am.

Anyway, I hate Valentine's Day.

Ten more days until it's over.

And then only one hundred forty-one days until the Fourth of July, which I hate because of the loud noises.

Some people are just never happy.

Or at least not as happy as damned near everyone else seems to be.