bktheirregular

Yeah, yeah, Valentine's Day. Isn't it romantic? Look at all the promotions! Buy cards! Buy flowers! Buy conflict diamonds to show your significant other you care! (And if you don't have a significant other, then why are you breathing air that can be used by people who can give us lots of money?)

Yeah, I'm not exactly a fan.

Granted, these days, my objections are less personal in nature.

The ugly:
- Sleep deprivation. (Partially caused by starting a load of laundry at midnight Wed night, thereby being assaulted by the sound of an 800-rpm spin cycle at quarter to 1 in the morning.)
- Athens traffic. Ye. gods.

The bad:
- Clients who are asking for a due-diligence report on their books, refusing to provide electronic copies of some records (thus turning a twenty-minute cut-and-paste into a task that'll probably take a solid week). Ah, well. The firm's billing them per-lawyer, per-hour.

The good:
- Got through vday without feeling the urge to introduce Athens to Chicago-style vday celebrations.
- Third-hand report that the office is happy with the work I've been doing.
- Got a ticket for back home, for a good price - Athens-NYC doesn't cost that much more than Athens-Berlin, for some odd reason.

Looking forward to seeing The City again. Even if it's only for a couple of weeks at Easter.

It's one thing to dislike V-day. But there's such a thing as going too far.

Saudi Arabia bans all things red ahead of Valentine's Day

I've used up half of my three score years plus ten, and as far as romance is concerned, I've got the skill-set of a fourth-grade introvert. Every year (save last year, because I was too damn busy at the time to even realize it), I get this sense that I want to find a hole in the ground and crawl into it, and every year, I'm hauled out by family who think of that day as worthy of celebration, and people who think "oh, it's SO ROMANTIC, you were born on Valentine's Day," and I'm thinking Ripley and Hicks were right, nuke 'em from orbit, it's the only way to be sure---

--sorry. V-Day has infiltrated Athens, it seems. According to one of my co-workers, it's only happened in the last ten years or so.

I hate being systematically treated like some odd class of inferior being. I hate being told through every outlet that I have to be doing X, Y, or Z, or else I'm some sort of freak.

And I'm aware that I'm probably projecting a lot of my own personal issues onto the whole V-Day fiasco, but those frustrations have to either fester until they metastasize, or be vented in some manner or other.