Just hypothetically speaking...

Today I was searching for some ideas about what to do on Valentine's Day around these parts if all of your interests and emotions aren't encapsulated by CW teen dramas like Dawson's Creek and Gossip Girl. (Let's say, hypothetically, that I'll have a date. I don't write about those kinds of things on this blog so you'll have to speculate.) So I googled "alternative valentines day" and it returned a lot of unprofessionally published and edited articles by bitter, bitter single women and cheap-ass men about how much "V-day BLOWS" and how your girlfriend should be happy with chocolate-flavored condoms because she better consider YOUR needs, too, brah.

I am of the opinion that every holiday "BLOWS" so I don't harbor any special hostility toward one aimed at people in relationships. It's still better than a holiday aimed at taking candy from strangers and dressing in terrifying rubber masks, or one that wastes the last few precious seconds of a fleeting year by counting backwards from 10. My intention was to find some sort of ingenious idea to take your date, who might-- just hypothetically-- be a handsome musician, to hear live music and maybe drink a hilariously tacky pink alcoholic beverage. Or maybe, like at UChicago, there is a free reading of the Vagina Monologues put on by the students. Probably not in the South.

So I smartened my google search to include the words "chapel hill," because I know that there are at least 5,000 sorority girls and their fraternity boyfriends who are federally mandated to love Valentine's Day. My search returned an account of an incident that occurred on February 14, 2007 on the student union quad at UNC. The story is here. Basically, a student discovered his girlfriend was cheating and he invited the entire campus to see him dump her on the quads, luring her there on the premise of having her serenaded in public. It turned out to be a hoax, but watch the video of the event, and pay attention to the crowd. Near the end of the video the boys begin chanting "Slut! Slut! Slut!" and that's when I realized that this whole incident is symptomatic of something very unattractive in Southern romantic notionry. I'm still pondering the extent to which I'm disgusted or amused by the way Southern people think about other people, and how much of my perception is a unique experience because I am a creep magnet.

Anyway. If any of you have any amazingly creative ideas for what two people-- hypothetically, me and a hypothetical cute date-- might do on Valentine's Day that won't make me gag, I would LOVE to read them.