My Dumbest Valentine’s Day
When I was like twenty-two I was long distance dating this guy I really liked (here’s how it turned out, if you’re curious). By the time Valentine’s Day rolled around we’d been dating about six months, but we’d been dating on and off with varying degrees of seriousness for about five years. Somehow we’d never managed to have an ‘on’ phase that fell on V-Day.
The holiday came and nearly went until 10:30 p.m. or so when he finally texted me (rest assured I drank an entire bottle of champagne as a coping mechanism, rest assured that I drank it with my friends who were engaged while we watched Contact, rest assured they asked me to have a threesome with them and I muttered something incoherent and then claimed to have a stomach ache and went home).
Anyway, the text said something to the effect of “hey, you’re not mad I didn’t do anything today, right? I figured you’re too smart to care about valentine’s day.”
As you can see I’d now been trapped in some kind of bizarre romantic-philosophical paradox. If I say, “Yes, I care” then I’m dumb. If I say, “No, I don’t care” then I’m betraying myself. I mean, I’m not the kind of chick who wants a dickload of flowers and a $500 dinner. But some acknowledgment… any acknowledgment would have been nice? Plus I was still young/not that cynical/believed in love/LOL.
Regardless, that was the end of that. I think I probably didn’t respond and we probably didn’t discuss it. Flash forward to February 18th.
I go pick up my mail because I don’t have weird hyper-localized anxiety yet and there is a manila envelope from some girl named Kelly in Michigan in my mailbox. Inside is a non-shrink-wrapped CD from a band called Mae. There is no message and no packing slip. “Who the eff is Mae,” I thought. “Was my identity stolen?”
I take it upstairs and put it in my CD player (because I had a CD player, it was 2007, okay). Out streams some kind of off-putting emo-ish glam rock (sorry to any of you who like Mae, but back then the most indie music I listened to was Snow Patrol).
So I do what any rational, modern twenty-something would do. I Wikipedia Mae. Turns out they are one of those mainstream bands that is somehow secretly a Christian band. “OMG,” I think. “Who is trying to give me an albeit subtle and passive-aggressive intervention?!?!?!” I Googled and Facebook-stalked ‘Kelly from Michigan’. I read every news article about Mae that had been posted in the last thirty days (don’t worry, this pretty much occurred pre-blogs so this is a less creepy statement than it sounds like).
Finally after twenty-four hours of worrying that I’m about to walk into my very own personal intervention/exorcism orchestrated by Kelly from Michigan’s Finest Christian Rehab, I Facebook message her. Yes, that’s weird, but so is sending me a freaky CD sans explanation. “Hey, sup with that used CD you sent me, do I know you?” I ask.
The next morning I wake up to a response from Kelly from Michigan which read something like this:
“Hey, I sent you that CD because someone named [Dumbass boyfriend] [Last name] bought it from me on Amazon. It was supposed to be used and I sold it to him for $4.34. Did I send it to the wrong place? Were you expecting a new copy?”
Needless to say, I never told him I received it, we never talked about it, and I never listened to it. Happy Valentine’s Day to me.
