Your Kindly Uncle William is a Modified Stoic, meaning that he is suicidally masochistic and gets off on pretending that nothing hurts him. So I love Valentine's Day nearly as much as the dentist's office. The only thing more exquisitely gruelling than a V-day on your own, wandering in the freezing rain with nothing but the glowing coals of self-loathing in your belly to warm your shivering carcass is the Valentine's Date Miserama with someone who doesn't love you, never did, and is so embarassed to have fallen for your naive, imbecilic charm that they pray for your death every time the phone rings. I have a special mutant ability to be in this relationship nearly every February, or to at least find someone who thinks I'm a dolt and who will play along.

When I was cowering up in Massachusets, freezing my brain into Taster's Choice Crystals and finishing my worthless degree, I was so hideously girlfriend-deprived that I spent a lot of time hanging around with mean girls from Smith College. I wound up not getting a girlfriend out of this (Smith women are, in fact, quite smart), but I did wind up doing this sort of Gorillas in the Mist thing where they got so used to my being around that stopped treating me like a Guy and would stuff bananas in my mouth and talk about really awful stuff in my presence. I learned a lot of interesting things, including that the atmosphere at Smith is so viciously competitive that unattached women feel compelled to send themselves flowers on Valentine's Day, often c/o "secret admirers", so that snotty cunts with display-quality boyfriends (mostly Ivy-league Ur-pinkboys in blue blazers who visit every three months and are paraded shamelessly) will not feel like they have an edge. I thought this was so funny that I spent 60 bucks to send a dozen red roses to a woman who didn't like me, c/o her secret admirer, with a note explaining that she had not sent them herself. Her boyfriend, who hated my guts, didn't send flowers. He did remember to call, much to his misfortune.