and if you want to burn yourself, remember that I love you

[fitz_clementine]

1. Man, nobody has to like Valentine's Day, and I get a lot of the reasons why people don't (consumerism, the erasure of spiritual and religious aspects from what was once a holy festival, general tackiness), but I enjoy many aspects of it! And I am, wait for it, dating a woman! Even though I am also a woman!  And we are into the tackiness, let me

Comments

[signifiers]

there are so many exclamation points in this! you and my mom will get along great purely on the basis of punctuation.

I LIKE THIS HOLIDAY TOO.

(and i love you.)

[fitz_clementine]

I am excited!

... May !!

It's an excellent month usually, and now even more so. I hope you're doing better, then. And me, too, I guess. Both of us. Everybody. <3

[signifiers]

MAY. did your mom do the booking things??

yes. today has been exceptionally good. i hope that is not just because of there being good love things all over the internet!

[angerfish]

BEFORE SUNRISE ICON

And yeah, Julia, I like Valentine's Day too. I don't rely on it so much to take the monotony out of February, because I also have my birthday for that. XD But people are always extra generous with candy that day, and I kind of like people's aggressive efforts to make it about valuing your friends too.

idk I love holidays in general. They break up a lot of tedium in life.

[spacklegeek]

My goodness, was I really that cranky? Hehe, I didn't perceive myself to be cranky at all! I spent almost all afternoon reading a romance novel, so my day wasn't so very bad!

It is a heteronormative holiday, the way it's marketed. Meh. S'okay. I just wanted to poke at that a little bit. Get on my Undoing Oppression High Horse, you know? (It's a white and rainbow-y sparkly high horse, fyi. Very pretty.)

I guess what I really don't like about Valentine's Day is this idea that there's a Right Way to Be Romantic, and regardless of whether your single or with someone, you're probably not gonna do it right. But, on the other hand, if I was with someone and we both wanted to buck that trend, then it could be a really fun, silly sort of day, which I would fully support.

I don't know. I guess I just needed to rant a bit. :)

[fitz_clementine]

You weren't that cranky, just a little-- well, you were getting on your sparkly high horse! No worries, everybody does it from time to time; I found it mildly annoying to be told off (as I interpreted it) by a much more heterosexually-oriented person than I for enjoying a "heteronormative holiday," and more broadly, I thought that you could've expressed a distaste for the way Valentine's Day is marketed and promoted in consumer culture and popular media without making an insulting assumption that anyone who likes the holiday is some kind of uncritical dupe who likes it for really shallow reasons and celebrates it by, I dunno, buying crappy chocolates and red roses for their heterosexual, gender-normative date at an expensive Italian restaurant As Seen On TV.

I know that's not what you meant to get across in that blog post, but actually Valentine's Day is a pretty popular holiday for people-- all kinds of people-- to express their worldly, out-of-the-mainstream ways by being curmudgeonly about. < / awkward sentence structure>

[spacklegeek]

No, thank you for pointing this out. You're right: I suppose that is what I was doing.

See, I'd seen this on FB, thought - My god! It is kinda like that! - and then attempted to bring that revelation into my post. It didn't work, and, for the reasons you pointed out, it failed pretty spectacularly. Ironically, the commercialism of V-day does bother me looads more than this supposed idea that it's a heteronormative holiday, but I wanted to rant about that, instead.

I am sorry. Thank you, again, for saying this, because it hadn't occurred to me, and I'm glad you pointed it out. I've actually linked your post above to my v-day post, because I wanted to add what you've said to what I originally said.

[fitz_clementine]

Wow. Thank you for listening; I'm not sure that I was being terribly articulate, or terribly fair to you (especially now I've gone back and re-read that post a couple of times), but...yeah, okay, I'm just going to stop at "thank you." I'm so glad you're the kind of person who really values opinions that differ from her own and takes them into account. :)

The commercial marketing around Valentine's Day is truly obnoxious, and I can understand being annoyed by it, or even getting angry about it. I don't want to seem like I'm totally brushing off the existence of a toxic consumer culture or media culture by saying "just ignore that stuff and make up your OWN traditions!!" because it can be impossible to ignore, and because I'm sure a lot of people genuinely are made to feel worse about themselves on Valentine's Day if they're gay, or single, or divorced, or asexual, or not in a traditional kind of romantic relationship.

(Though, as mentioned in my post -- kinda-sorta-- consumerism and heteronormativity are everywhere in U.S

[beneficentbeast]

I like V-Day too! Mostly because of the sweets, hehe. Heteronormative as it is, that doesn't seem to stop same-sex couples from celebrating it! At least the ones I know.

I also loved Gary's beard. Cat-eye Glasses Girl was so cute! I think she got annoyed at me because I was staring at her a little but I was staring 'cause girl had style <3

[fitz_clementine]

It's the biggest secular Candy Holiday after Halloween! :D

That's sure part of why I like it.

All of the Delta kids I saw on our visit were pretty snappy dressers, TBH. Especially that super-tiny kid in the hedgehog sweater and tutu who was doling out the wassail.