Great Expectations - Valentines Day

I always find this a difficult one - what do you get your partner / love of your life / penguin
for Valentine's day?

It is a day of ridiculously high expectations fraught with danger and innuendo.

I mean for example, if you get the person a nice bunch of flowers, there are all these
bizarre rules.

Don't get them yellow roses because that means "I like you, but not in THAT way"

And forget pink camellias because that is deemed to mean "I am longing for a man"
and you don't want to appear desperate.

Striped carnations mean "rejection" and "sorry I can't be with you"
(where do you even get striped carnations anyway?)

Thankfully, red roses mean "I Love You"

But what happens when the roses start to wither? People get awfully superstitious
about such things and a nice gift can turn into a weird bouquet like those flowers
in "Supernatural" in the bit where the zombie is making the ground unholy.

There I go on the unholy ground rave again. I am trying to write about Valentine's Day.
That's what you get for being born a Scorpio.

So forget flowers. Then you have the gift section. Teddy bears. I don't know.
What does a grown woman / man do with a teddy bear? And if you get one every
year it turns into "Summer of the Seventeenth Doll" and people get freaked out.
That was the problem with that play, the guy should never have bought her dolls
in the first place. Dolls are in Stephen King novels, in Chucky movies, but I'm steering
clear of them for Valentine's Day. Did I mention dolls really creep me out?

I can't imagine why.



No dolls.

Seriously.

Okay, what have we got left? Oh yeah, all those weird tacky presents like the
elephant underpants and shiny silk boxers with little hearts on them.
You know what?
You might want to give these a miss. They could backfire on you and make you look
like a weird pervert. I mean those edible undergarments are just hideous. If you want
your partner to think you are weird, cheap, pervy and tacky, then go right ahead.

Hmmm. I'm running out of options. There are those "Romantic Adventures for Two"
things on those corporate entertainment (isn't that an oxymoron?) websites. So if you
really wanted to, you could risk both your life and the life of your loved one in a tandem
jump coordinated by a man who takes far too many steroids. It's totally up to you.

So then there are the romantic getaways in Balinese-style huts that look incredible until
you realise you can't smoke in the huts OR on the grounds, you can't light tealight candles
or any other sort of candle so the atmosphere is severely lacking, you are surrounded by
other stressed-out couples trying desperately to relax while dealing with nicotine
withdrawal and rampant boredom. There are only so many times you can sigh and say
"isn't this nice" before you want to kill somebody.

So what can you do? Lock yourself away in a room with all the windows boarded up until
the daylight rises over February 15th? Perhaps. Or you could get a nice card, write a
message that actually means something, buy some choccies, get a nice bottle of wine and
go out to dinner.

xxxoxox