Welcome to the first article written from the silent, pulsing core of the Mac Mini, a sleek little beast ready to unleash its little lothario heart on the world. I'm slowly getting used to all of these windows with rounded corners, and have aided my own acclimation to this new experience by hooking up the mouse and keyboard that I've used for the past four years, all worn smooth from my constant caressings and covered with stickers and paint and my manly oils. It's only appropriate that I come here, into this uncomfortable territory, to speak of Valentines Day. The most thoughtless and exclusive day of all days, like a knife thrust into the already cold corpse of February.

Relegated to the beautiful, the stupid, and the unbelievably lucky, we the loveless are forced to stay at home and finish our Quantum Leap marathons all alone. We do not get glitter-encrusted cards. We do not get romantic nights on beds of rose petals. We do not have gentle memories to relive and smile warmly about. Well, glitter gets everywhere, rose petals stain the bedsheets and I've got some pretty complicated diagrams and a soldering iron to take care of the part of my brain that still manages to remember things.

If I sound particularly bitter, allow me to note that my own particular Love Express, making all local stops, has suffered an unfortunate derailment in the not-too-distant past, tearing the internal organs out of most passengers and leaving the survivors changed forever. And without their vintage NES controllers that they had since they were seven, which is perhaps a more painful loss than a kidney or two, and has taught them a lesson about sharing and generosity, and to never employ them ever again. Even if it IS to aid a cute redhead whose ass you totally kicked at Balloon Fight anyhow.

One year ago, I made a promise to come back again this year and lay my own unique brand of waste to whatever antiquated Valentines Day cards I had left in my rucksack of tricks. It's rare that I follow up on any creative promises or goals efficiently, but I've dug up the cards from behind a stack of action figures I'd bought a long time ago when I seemed to be collecting anything with breasts sculpted onto it. Who else here has a 'More Than Mortal' Brigid figure? Okay, now who here has even heard of this ill-fated, breastful character? If you have, please gain 15 geek points, but sadly, subtract 35 'real life' points and start using a tissue instead of your sleeve.

We start with a Pokemon appetizer, since Pokemon is the thing that simply will not die, no matter how many hours you leave it in the microwave, even if you use that spinning tray thing to make sure it gets evenly irradiated. More specifically, let's start with the 'Pokemon Valentine's Day Cards and Envelopes Collector's Series 2', because children are worthless lumps if not being mandated to collect something. We're not even talking the original 151 Pokemon here. We're talking about the 734 that they added to drive children mad with avarice, shanking each other for a Hoppip, bodies found dangling from the monkey bars with notes saying, 'I just couldn't live without that Ho-Oh. Not a satisfying life anyhow. A desiccated husk of a life into which I'd unhappily collapse in a near catatonic state.' Even smart kids like Pokemon, apparently.

Note that more recent Valentine Cards take a more progressive, noncommittal stance on love. It's uncommon that they request or command or even mention love. Instead, like disappointing softcore pornography, they completely fail to close the deal. The traditional 'Be Mine' is replaced with 'Just flying by with a Valentine's Day HI!'. Something as needlessly expressive as 'Be my sweetheart!' has now transformed into the utterly common, 'Happy Valentine's Day!' Long gone are the days of V-Day, flimsy-cardboard card ambiguity, the nights of lying awake and wondering if little Michelle gave you the 'You have my heart, Valentine!' card with a secret message, and then flying into a jealous rage when you realize that there were probably three more like it in the box, each picturing the exact same Ninja Turtle. Instead of 'love', we get a bold 'whatever'.

The Pokemon cards fail to be as ridiculous as they could be, relying upon the particular talents of the pictured Pokemon as launching points for the inevitable puns. An owl-like Pokemon? Emphasize the word 'WHO'. A Pokemon that inexplicably looks like a cluster of eggs? Use words like 'EGGcellent' and 'EGGstremely', or possibly the e'er popular 'joke/yolk' similarity. The pink radish guy, who has no discernible talents, remains punless. It's certainly a statement when you're so completely useless that one cannot even make a pun about you. In giving this particular Valentine to its recipient, you are saying just that. It's the valentine that you enclose in the envelope with a wad of spit or old gum.

The backs of these cards double as a Pokemon ID game, in which one is given the silhouette of a creature and asked to identify it, much like the cartoon show that I claim to have never watched. If I were in a position to give these cards to people, I'd have made the following improvements. If I managed to keep my friends after giving them these, they're keepers.

I think we've also had the shared experience of being incredibly hesitant to give that one gross kid in the class the prerequisite valentine. There is no valentine to express the total revulsion that one feels at the forced interaction, even on paper, between you and that kid who went home with the headlice at least twice. No valentine could possibly be indifferent enough to unmistakably say 'whatever' to that kid who swallowed his retainer right in the middle of the '6' multiplication tables and made your class late for lunch. It's in this spirit that I present a couple original valentines to express these sentiments. Like always, ANR compensates for the shortcomings of the universe.

 
[Print these and give them to losers!]

But enough about me! Let's talk about you. What do you like? You like the WWF? I don't claim to understand it myself, and these Valentine cards don't aid in my understanding at all. However, in a quest to understand this rough 'n' tumble world of sweat and awkward mangrabbing, I dropped a decadent 29 cents on these cards. One might presume that the three designs on the box were but a small sampling of the 34 cards contained therein, but alas, 3 designs is all you get, all in ridiculous repetition, with the addition of two larger teacher cards. It's the eternal koan... how many wrestlers does it take to tell you that I love you? Well, maybe it's not a koan, because American Greetings deftly informs us, 'Three', but one truth remains... Valentines Day never had so many rippling pectoral muscles.

Like a trifecta of latent homosexuality, Stone Cold, The Rock and Mankind all bring you les messages d'amour. The Rock raises an eyebrow and imperiously commands you to KNOW YOUR ROLE, which implies more than I'm willing to discuss in less than two paragraphs. It's a damned picture of a man in his underwear, giving a provoking stare, surrounded by hearts and pink writing. How do these things make it past intelligent editors? How do the blatantly sexual implications of the phrase 'know your role' make it past those vigilant censors, those who protect our children from unwanted sensory input? This card pretty much says 'you're my bitch', or 'time for a pimpslap!', or better yet, 'on your knees, you dirty whore!' I've just implanted myself into much more Google search madness with those phrases.

Granted, the back side of the card states, 'You're my valentine!', but I choose to take these things at face value, because if you look too hard, these things might start making sense, and sensibility isn't as funny as insanity. Especially tourettes, because random profane shouts are pretty great. The New Yorker recently did a survey of some of their past Valentine's Day cover images and remarked that the later covers reflected a disturbing trend towards weaponry and violence being used in images meant to convey the impression of love. While it's not an image of Cupid assembling a sniper rifle, the mix of violent power and Valentines Day seems, well, unsettling.

Let's not forget the lovable Mankind, who breaks it right to the point. "Here's your Valentine, straight from a dirty sock." After that, nothing more could possibly be said. Perhaps this is the perfectly honest Valentine. The one and only. It rivals my own constructions in its compact, harsh honesty, much like a well-aimed fist to the kidney.

At this point in the writing, Valentines Day starts in five hours. I'll be working for seven hours tomorrow, and I forsee that there will be a large basket of Kit Kats on the front desk, of which I will consume many to choke my sorrows away with my increasing body mass. Blood may not be able to get through my arteries, but neither will loneliness. In reluctant celebration, I had to stand at the large outdoor sign today and slide into it a series of plastic letters that read 'BE OUR VALENTINE' and a line of paper hearts, which is hard to do when you're trying not to gag while simultaneously being jealous of the Library's brazen request of multiple valentines, potentially stealing one which you might want for yourself.

It's not going to be a great day, but you can pretty much safely assume that 363 days in advance.

We complete the discussion of Valentine Cards with an appropriate trilogy of Star Wars cards accumulated over the past few years.

I'm not even sure what to say about this one. It's kinda like giving someone a 'Holy F*ck, it's Christmas!' card, with 'mighty blasters' as the saccharine, watered-down testament to everything that went wrong with the Star Wars franchise. This card does more than it knows it does. It invites a whole new genre of greeting card, the 'excitedly noncommittal' style.

'Jesus Christ, it's Arbor Day!'

'It's the damned day you were born! Howbout that?'

'Your mother! ... died, and you have my condolences.'

Let's see... what else do we have here? Oh, we can't forget about the Jar Jar valentine!

Who is the lucky party which determines how everyday phrases are truncated into abbreviations of themselves? Linguistics theory states that the gradual changing of the popular lexicon will transmute words into other words. Words gain and lose meaning with time and through the canals of society, and over time. Four years ago, nobody knew what 'bling' was, and now, unfortunately, we all do.

So it is with honest rage that I question Jar Jar's impudence at presuming that he can just walk into our civilized human society and just... change words as he pleases. If I hear a single child not refer to this wicked holiday by its full name, I'll remove one inch of their tongue for every letter they ignore. We do not refer to Christmas as 'Chris', and we have never spoken of Halloween as 'hallo', or even 'ween'. God, I can taste my bile. Can you? I'm going to send my bile in a jar to George Lucas.

A year or so later, and we had Episode Two V-Day cards, featuring many of the same characters, excluding the two halves of Darth Maul's corpse, and with the addition of Jango Fett. Jango's card reads a lame 'Always a pleasure... to be your Valentine!', instead of something more wonderfully appropriate. A suggestion? 'Don't lose your head, Valentine!' C'mon... that would be awesome, especially since you can't turn 'Mandalorian' into any clever puns. Oh, or how about, 'Valentine, you're one in a million!', since, you know, all of the Clone Troopers were clones of him. American Greetings, here's my resume. My clever cheer will surely thrill thousands, and not make all too many people want to die that much.

I bought the Episode Two cards with the intention of giving them to all of my college friends. They were just lame enough to be cool, especially when I drew my own details onto them. Ink in some nipples over Amidala's strategically torn short, use Mace Windu's huge, shiny cranial expanse as a canvas, and anything is possible. After filling out two of these cards, I realized that I had exhausted my supply of friends and probably stared miserably into space for an hour or two. God, college was wild.

Finally, we reach the classy Classic Star Wars V-Day cards, in ten rich flavors, including Emperor Palpatine and Lando, and some using actual movie quotes in gross miscontextualization! The cards are a collage of each character from the various movies. Never before have Mynock Hunt Chewbacca and Hoth Chewbacca been seen together, and displayed under a Photoshop filter that makes everyone appear to have severe skin disorders. If there was ever a way to get geeks to relate, that would be it.

From the eerily possessive and nefarious, (It is unavoidable. You... are now mine!), to the rampantly suggestive, (You'll find I'm full of surprises.), to the barely comprehensible, (Let the Wookiee win!), Star Wars has the ability to express the entire spectrum of love.

Even, as you can see, the rare self-deprecating kind which cost me my last love. Our conversations went something like this:

"Wow, I can't believe you really like me!"

"How could you say something like that? You're so manipulative?"

"What? But I..."

"I'm keeping your Nintendo controller forever!"

"Can I have my gypsy jazz CD back?"

"No, but watch me blog about 35 other guys immediately following our brief and torrid affair!"

And this is why I love Valentines Day. To conclude the first segment of this article, here's my design for your very own Valentines Day Card Mailbox, just like the ones you used to hang over your desk in elementary school. Place it on your door to express your personal distaste for the travesty of this holiday.

Go to part two of this sham, and for now, let's commiserate.

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