A Good Day To Be A Bad Guy

Whew. This is it. This is big. This is absotively posilutely gigantic. My own blog. And it's Friday the 13th. Phreeeeeow!

If you must know, I am mindnumbingly bored and trying to kill three hours before me and a friend go for this play called "Six Characters In Search Of An Author". It's by some dude called Luigi Pirandello and it's apparently his best work. Now I didn't know any of the above until I happened to mention the play to my dad, and he, being the walking talking Encyclopaedia that he is, enlightened me. (There will be lots of posts later about how incredibly smart and knowledgable and generally fantastic my parents are, but this is not it).

Anyway, so after I spent the last four hours checking my email about a million times I decided that something drastic needed to be done if I was to get through the rest of the day without slashing my wrists. So, inspired by a couple of friends who host blogs of their own, and by a vague general feeling that writing stuff down would be cathartic, I decided to inflict this upon you, my poor reader.

Oh, as a complete non sequitur - "Sweetest Thing" by U2 is an amazing song!

OK, so where was I? Oh yes, starting my blog. Well, by an amazingly serendepitious coincidence, today happens to be Friday the 13th. Now this most dreaded of days has special significance for me and another psycho buddy of mine because of something that we did to a mutual non-friend back in our high school days. The exact details escape me at this moment, but I do know that a "potato" figured in it :) In any case, I couldn't have asked for a better day to start another evil venture. And my joy is compounded by the knowledge that tomorrow is that other most-hated of days - St. Valentine's Day.

Now there's a hoot if there was ever was one. The sheer stereotypicality (is that a word?) of it boggles the mind. Think V-day and what are the first five things that come to mind? I'm willing to bet good money that everyone, yes everyone, will come up with the following: Pink, heart, card, chocolate, gift, flowers. (OK, so I cheated and threw in a sixth. So sue me.) Have you walked in to a store recently? Any store will do. They're all decorated in ghastly shades of pink, with heart-shaped balloons and cutouts and posters everywhere. You could go to the hardware store or that perceived bastion of rugged masculinity - a monster truck dealer - and I guarantee you it'd be the same story.

WHY???? Why are V-day and romance synonymous with feminity? Can't a normal red-blooded steak-eating beer-drinking male be a romantic without resorting to the pink heart-shaped card accompanied by the heart-shaped box of chocolates and the heart-shaped diamond pendant? Can he not, in short, be romantic without being feminine at the same time? Because if he can't then here's a newsflash: men, purely by virtue of being men, are completely, inutterably, irredeemably incapable of expressing love. In which case, and follow my reasoning closely here - Valentine's Day and all its attendant glitter are an eyewash, ladies! There is no such thing as male affection. Never was and never will be.

But that obviously isn't true. So what's going on here? One word. Hallmark. But you already knew that.