St. Valentine: love doctor or knife-wielding horror?

St. Valentine: love doctor or knife-wielding horror?

Sweat pants, turkey pasta make perfect relationship

Any writer who considers him or herself to be a humorist (which
unscrambled means thourism, which means nothing) can not stay off
the subjects of the opposite gender, sex, love and relationships.
As many may have guessed, I consider myself a follower of thourism,
and so I will make an attempt to address this pressing issue.

The summer between junior college and UCLA (no, my six years of
college have not all been spent here), I had a lot of time on my
hands – too much, in fact. I did quite a bit of writing in my
journal. Please understand it was a JOURNAL; men don’t keep
diaries.

I wrote a section called "Women and Love: What I Know About Them
Both." I was planning on drawing heavily from that writing to fill
this page (insert standard joke here about not understanding the
subject), but what that section amounted to were several blank
pages with a few nonlegible scribblings about beer or something
like that. As UCLA has brought me total enlightenment on the
subject, I am now much more qualified to discuss it.

There are several groundwork essentials that need to be put out
there. They are as follows:

1. Cosmopolitan magazine has all the answers, and everything in
those pages is 100 percent correct.

2. "Having a penis makes you a male, but it has nothing to do
with being a man" (a quote from a guest speaker in my women’s
studies class that I really liked).

3. "The stereotype that men disclose less personal information
is often a handicap to men, who turn this into a self-fulfilling
prophecy."1

4. As my father is so fond of pointing out, men always get the
last words in any argument: "Yes, dear."

5. Alcohol turns Mr. Happy into Mr. Limp.

6. At this point, if I throw in a few extras, I will fool the
people who are only browsing my article into thinking I know more
about the subject than I actually do, which leads me to No. 7.

7. The Reds won the World Series in 1990, and they have been
very disappointing since then.

Now that you understand the fundamentals, it’s time to dive into
the inevitable top 10 list on love, sex and
papier-mâché.

On second thought, top 10 lists (while often utilized by me) are
very difficult to produce. They are laborious beyond belief, and I
unfortunately will not be able to give one in this article. You
will be forced to settle for a top five list. However, you already
got seven, so take your 12 and shut up.

1. Pick-up lines are essential for standard operating procedure.
Neither sex should feel left out of this topic. We all need lines
to hook those fish in the sea whom we find attractive. You have to
be different; you can’t fall back on the good old lines from years
past, such as the ’50s "you look neato in that poodle skirt/leather
jacket" (depending on gender) or the ’70s "pass some more LSD, I’m
coming down and I just really don’t think disco is that good."

One of my favorites is going up to the person of your liking,
scratching his/her head, and saying "My butt itches." This actually
worked for a friend of mine, but kids, please don’t try this at
home. Another involves one person in sweats approaching the target
and having his/her friends yank his/her (damn – typing in a
politically correct fashion gets annoying) pants down. Also
attempted by a friend, but not successful.

2. As for the question,
Why-the-hell-am-I-a-guy-standing-around-a-
keg-at-this-lame-ass-sword-fighting-party-wondering-where-all-the-girls-are
problem, I found out the answer to that question, which has plagued
mankind since at least the Boston Tea Party. ("Wherest art all
thine women this eve?") Early last quarter, while spending a Friday
night (during my couch tour ’95) with my temporary roomies,
Allison, Kelly, Gail, Sharla, Lauren and Kristi, I stumbled on the
answer to the dilemma.

They were deciding what to do for the evening, and the
conversation went like this: "So, you want to go to the movies?" "I
don’t like the movies out now. Do you want to go to the parties?"
"Parties around here are boring. Would you like to go sky diving
tonight?" "No, adrenaline rushes don’t thrill me." By midnight, the
girls had decided to just pick up some alcohol and hang around the
apartment. This situation was probably repeating itself all over
Westwood, turning the parties into Knights of the Round Table
conventions.

The same conversations for guys go something like this: "Hey Joe
(not Joe Bruin, that would be blasphemy), do you want to go out and
get drunk and hit on girls?" "OK."

3. Valentine’s Day is made into a big deal, but it is not. Most
probably canceled their dates on that day this year because they
were too upset that Chuck had resigned, so they couldn’t
celebrate.

St. Valentine was actually the saint of open heart surgery, but
marketing companies working for the Hallmark corporation grasped at
whatever they could, turning the heart into the organ with which we
love, instead of the genitals – oops, I mean brain.

Let me briefly recount my Valentine’s Day shenanigans in 148
words or less; if you actually count to check me, you’re a loser.
My friend, Cynthia, and I (both being dateless, by choice, of
course) decided to make dinner together at her apartment and then
study. We decided to make pasta (because we are in college and
that’s all we know how to make), and I told her I had some ground
turkey in the fridge that we could put in the sauce.

I went over to her apartment with my meat in my hand (please try
to keep your mind out of the gutter), and I rode up the elevator
with several other guys dressed in suits (I was only wearing
sweats). They were toting $50 bouquets of flowers, and I was
holding $3.92-worth of ground turkey. I didn’t feel left out;
Valentines Day should be about making pasta and wearing sweats with
the ones you love, and nothing more.

4. People should learn to get past what I like to refer to as
"The junior high school dance syndrome." It’s when boys are on one
side of the room, and girls are on the other side (figuratively
speaking, of course, because I enjoy speaking figuratively because
I don’t know what it means to do so).

People need to learn to lighten up and brush up on their
mingling skills. So many people are uptight in social situations,
and I firmly believe that it is to be blamed on political
correctness and the Internet, where it is possible to be completely
"close" with someone before you ever even see his/her face. In some
cases, this may be beneficial.

5. The amusement park philosophy: Essentially, if you want to
see what your relationship would be like with a person, just spend
the whole day with him/her at Wally World (make sure it’s not
closed for repairs).

It starts out with both participants being happy and excited,
anticipating what is to come. Thrown in throughout is eating, which
couples do a lot of during any relationship. Roller coasters are a
big part of both; ask any of my ex-girlfriends.

After the initial happiness of the early-morning excitement
wears off, both people get a little cranky, and that’s when the
arguing starts: "I don’t want to go on the tea-cups," or "I can’t
believe you cheated on me with that bitch/bastard (PC again)"- same
thing. Then, things smooth out a bit and before you know it, things
end and you’re on to the next amusement park.

I’ve hit the fourth page and in my editor’s terms, if I
continue, there will be a problem, so I will cease my wisdom for
now. Let me leave you with this, however: Holding hands on campus
is the strongest show of commitment among college students that
I’ve ever experienced.

1 Birkenstein, Brian. "Personal Disclosure." 1996. women’s
studies 165 term paper, p. 5.Comments to
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