Happy Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is coming up. I know it's a little bit off topic...well lets be honest I may have some themes but I don't really have a topic exactly, so this is fine.

You know I love Valentine's Day, but I do have some problems with it. I like Valentine's Day as a celebration of love in all forms whether I'm single or not. When I'm not single (though I've been single for many VDays now) I even like the celebration of romance. What I don't like is the mass bastardization of what romance means. I don't want to be that person that rails against the commercialization, but in this instance I do think commercialization is the problem.

They're trying to sell something and the only way you can sell something to a large number of people is to make it so generic that it doesn't appeal to anyone specifically but to everyone generally.

What do I mean by that? Well, what would you expect would be really bad Valentine's Day gifts for a woman? Kitchen appliances? Tickets to sporting events? Home improvement products? And what would you think would be great Valentine's Day gifts for a woman? Jewelry perhaps? Maybe flowers? Well, I'm a woman and I would far prefer any of the former to the latter. I don't really wear jewelry and one of my cats likes to eat flowers even though they make her sick so I can't have them in my house.

I'm not going to make a case against consumerism really. I'm all for putting as much money as you can into the economy just spend it on the right things. Real romance is paying attention, knowing someone so well that you know the specific things that appeal to them and don't need to fall back on the generalizations that are being sold on every corner. I'm sure lots of women like jewelry and flowers but I'm also sure that many of them would prefer something else (if you're observant enough to figure out what it is).

Men, of course, are a mystery to me, but I would imagine that the same holds true for them.

Anonymity

I've discovered recently that if you mention Zachary Quinto on your blog many people will read it. The Sarmy is a force to be reckoned with. I've blogged about sports and entertainment both here and at my other blogs and never gotten the kind of traffic that I got when I wrote fan mail to Zachary Quinto.

I never really thought people would read my blogs. What I mean is not that I assumed I had any sort of privacy when I wrote about my personal life in intimate detail and posted it on the internet...it's just that I never really thought about it much. I have a meter and I look at it but it does count things like the google bot and doesn't count things like google reader so I never really paid much attention to the counts until the counter on one of my other blogs had a sudden jump (right after my fan letter to Zachary Quinto).

When I first started blogging (and this was my first) I thought a little about who might read my stuff (as I've mentioned) and specifically didn't tell my friends and family that I was doing it so that they wouldn't read it (strangers I was okay with though). I've gotten over that since and put the link to this and my other blog on facebook where people I actually know can find it, but I still have tried to maintain a sort of anonymity (never mentioning people by name, not having an e-mail address on my profile, etc). I'm giving up one more of those veils now. I put an e-mail address on my profile.

I'm still not sure anyone actually reads this stuff, but if you do and you want to contact me now there is a way to do that. If anything, I expect I will now be graced with e-mails pointing out my lax editing...maybe I should just go through the archives and correct a few spelling errors while I'm thinking of it.