Thursday, February 13, 2020

Some "holiday" thoughts

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. Today is the made-up (Well, MORE made up, or more obviously so, because it stems from the early-2000s comedy "Parks and Recreation") holiday of Galentine's Day.

I don't love either one, I will admit.

Valentine's Day is pretty much all about romantic love and it feels a bit pointless to those of us without it, even as I sent off a few cards this year and my mother did send me a box of Aplets and Cotlets. (And Lulu and Hazel is doing a "party" and I hope it's more like the grade-school parties of yore...)

I do remember Valentine's Day in grade school. It was one of the three holidays that we got off classes for (the other two being Hallowe'en and Christmas/"Winter Festive Day"). We had a class party for each of these days, with snacks and punch and some years the teachers would either let us play the radio or would bring in a turntable and records and play them and we got to talk with our friends in class and you KNOW? Even for a kid like me who fundamentally liked school and liked learning it was a nice break; it was something to look forward to.

Most years, up to junior high, we did a valentine exchange: every American (maybe every Anglosphere person, I don't know if other countries do it) know the little cheap paper valentines, often themed to whatever cartoon characters or movie franchises are currently popular with kids, that you can buy in boxes of 20 or whatever. You went out with your parents and bought a box or two of whatever you liked best, and then you spend an evening deliberating over who got what valentine - putting aside ones with favored characters or the funniest sayings for your special friends, maybe hoping you could find a special one for the boy you like-liked, making SURE you had a couple that JUST said "happy valentine's day" with no mention of "be my valentine" for that kid you knew you didn't want to encourage.

(I wonder: have school valentines become "problematic" in that they may encourage kids to try to "pursue" kids that aren't interested? Or have they become passé, now that kids grow up so fast and maybe even 12 year olds are "doing it" now, so stupid paper valentines seem redundant?)

And then also you made a mailbox. This was always a Big Issue in my family as we never seemed to have shoeboxes (the preferred thing for making the mailbox out of) and we usually didn't have all the fancies for decorating it, and often my parents seemed uninterested in going out and BUYING any of the special Con-tact paper or tissue paper or stickers or whatever. And it always annoyed me a little because many years there was also a contest where the "best" mailbox (the neatest, or the most artistic, whatever) won a small prize and I felt as if I were handicapped in that race by my parents' unwillingness to spend "frivolously" on something like that. (Oh, I am frugal in many ways now but if I had a kid and that were being done? I'd take him or her to the JoAnn's and give him or her a budget of, I don't know, $15 or something, and tell them to pick out whatever their heart's desire was, because you're a kid only once, and adulthood doesn't have all that much that's fun in it...)

And it was just....kind of nice. Most years my teachers had the unwritten rule that if you got a valentine for ONE kid in the class, you had to give them to everybody and I've written about that before. Maybe some of the more "hard" people (I think of that Ayn Rand Daycare that was in a Simpsons' episode once) would say "Kids need to learn that not everyone is their friend!" though I suspect the most extreme of those types would look askance at the concept of having a Valentine's Day at all. But I tend to feel like: Life has too many hard edges on it as it is, and if you can let an under-10 feel the illusion that they're loved by classmates for ONE DAY, well, there's something to that.

Anyway, I did it, even if I had to search for the cards that JUST said "happy valentine's day" for the one or two kids in the class I thought were icky.

But the way it worked....after lunch that day, you went back to homeroom and got out your little mailbox and your baggie of cards, and usually that was when the teacher put the music on and you went around and put your cards in the mailboxes and sometimes that was also when the voting took place in the mailbox contest. And after it there were cupcakes and usually that red Hi-C (oddly, the only time I remember ever having Hi-C was at school parties or at day camp; we never had it at home, the artificial-fruit beverage we had was Kool-Aid made from the powder...) and then we opened up the mailboxes and looked at all our little cards and you know it was just NICE for once. And if you had friends in the class you got to talk to them.

It was simple fun, or at least I thought it was, and adulthood doesn't have enough of that kind of simple fun, adulthood fun takes so much PLANNING.

Which brings us to Galentine's Day. It's supposedly today, I guess so you have tomorrow open for your Significant Other (O lucky souls who have both a significant other and nearby good friends to do things with) and you go out for a drink after work or something with your female friends and celebrate....being female, I guess?

I don't know. Like I said, it's complicated when you're an adult. I don't have any close by female friends who would be interested in "hanging out" this evening - most of my local friends are older and have a lot of family responsibilities, or they never heard of the day. And anyway, I don't drink, so unless we could go for dinner or an early-evening coffee/tea drink, not much point. (Actually, if you don't drink or gamble, there's not a lot to do here in the evenings, which is probably why everyone who doesn't drink or gamble is involved through the church they belong to).

But yeah. I like to think about what a full-day "Galentine's Type" day would be if I could spend it with one of my (all far-flung) female friends who share interests with me - depending on the person,it would be going to a quilt shop, or to antique stores, or out for a fancy tea somewhere, or to a weird roadside museum type place and then get lunch somewhere funky and interesting. Or to a yarn shop. Whatever.

But of course, today is my longest day of teaching so what I will ACTUALLY do is (if I have enough energy) buy something at Pruett's on the way home to cook a marginally more complex dinner than what I have been doing, and go home, and wash my hair, and maybe play piano a little bit....and probably go to bed early.

At least tomorrow there will be a trip to Lulu and Hazel's, and if the weather's okay on Saturday I might take that quilt top down to Home a la Mode.

But it would also be nice to have the time to go out to lunch today or tomorrow, and someone - I don't care whether it's friend, potential-significant-other, or even mere acquaintance-who-is-good-to-talk-with - to go with me.

And yes, I know, there are multiple kinds of love....New York Life now has a commercial out and in its long form it talks about all four kinds of love, but focuses on agape (but without the New Testament religious context, which feels a bit odd to me, given how steeped I am in that) and I openly admit the first time I saw it it made me cry. Partly because for goodness sake, we need to emphasize more that "unpartnered people have love in their lives too" even though it sometimes doesn't feel much like it, but also....well, sometimes that "agape" love is self-sacrificing enough that you wind up not really getting your needs met. I admit, I'm tired a lot these days and a lot of the time it feels like I'm doing a lot for other people and....not getting a whole lot back and I can't decide whether it's ACTUALLY that way or if it's my brain being broken/selfish and I'm not SEEING what I get back.

But yeah, one of the things that wears me out in a week is all the stuff I do at work or at my various volunteer things, and then I come home and the laundry and cooking still need to be done for me, and if I am ever going to get rid of that old broken lamp I will have to be the one to heft it out of the house and I guess drive it down to the dump because bulky waste now only picks up yard waste and so the stupid broken lamp still sits there because I never have energy and I especially don't have time when the dump is actually open (four of the five days it is I am at work the entire time, and the fifth day I am often too tired or have other errands to run.

And so, yes: I would welcome some kind of tiny break from things on the order of the school valentine's party, but adult life has decreed that adults don't get that sort of thing. Not unless they make it for themselves, and see the "no time and energy" above. (And also, it would feel ridiculous to do some of those things by myself). And so I plod onward, hoping that at some point in the future there will be Fun, but there never is, quite.

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