Warning: Sappy Content Ahead (Vom Buckets Highly Recommended)

First, a few housekeeping notes:

I lost two readers this week. I'd love to say I don't care, but the fact is, I do. I do care that there is a strong possibility that two people were reading my blog this week and decided that whatever they THOUGHT I was? I wasn't.

However, I have also come to the terms that I'm not a clown. Nor am I a comedian or any other sort of professional entertainer. All I am is me, and if two people don't like it, I'm going to have to deal.

(or at least pretend that they both died horrible deaths and somebody kindly disabled their Blogger accounts.
Yeah.
That MUST be it).

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Yesterday was Valentines Day.
Obviously.

Some people love it, some people hate it.
I'll admit that I've had a lot of different feelings about Valentine's Day, ranging from deep disappointment to self-empowerment to head-over-heels love.

When I was in grade school, Valentine's Day meant special treats, a gift from my parents, and cards in my "mailbox" (usually a decorated brown paper bag attached to my desk, filled with as many valentines as kids in the class because my teachers mercifully declared that if you want to give even ONE valentine, you had to give one to everyone. Even the guy in the back corner who picks his nose and eats it.)

In highschool, Valentine's Day morphed into a day of suffering and depression, wherein I looked at the cool kids - the ones with boyfriends and/or girlfriends - and cursed the gods that I was not so fortunate to participate in such a holiday. The one year when I had a boyfriend? He forgot - FORGOT - that we were supposed to go out to dinner (at Olive Garden, no less...THE place for highschool romance). I yelled, he begged, and in the end, I dumped his sorry ass and never looked back.

In college, Valentine's Day was just another excuse to party (as if we needed another excuse). When I met my first serious boyfriend, I finally, FINALLY got to do all the Valentine's Day things I had dreamed of. There were dinners eaten and cards exchanged and gifts purchased, and while the guy didn't end up being The One, he certainly had a knanck for making me feel special. And pretty. And drunk (he was 22 and I was 18 when we met and he exercised his newly obtained right to purchase alcohol quite freely).

And then there was The Ex.
Oh, that guy.
Valentine's Days with The Ex started so well...with presents and fancy dinners and the whole sha-bang.
But by the time we celebrated our last Valentine's Day together, he was spouting off about how the Corporations were trying to control us and make us buy things and feel things, and I was doing housework and silently plotting my escape.

Let it be said that spending Valentine's Day with a borderline paranoid-schizophrenic is a little less than magical.

But now....things are different.

This year, Valentine's Day meant so many things to me.
A chance to spend some time with the man I love most.
A chance to show that I listen - very carefully - when he casually mentions things he wants or needs.
A chance to look back at my life and realize that the other Valentine's Days can't hold a candle to the ones spent with him.

And most importantly, a chance to look forward and realize - with great joy - that every Valentine's Day from here on out will be spent with my best friend, my companion, and the love of my life.

Happy Valentine's Day, Brian!