Valentine’s Day is here! Yeah!!  . . . .

Such sentiments are why we need a sarcasm font (which I have decided inventing and getting adopted needs to be my new goal in life).   I could list a lot of reasons why a sarcasm font is needed here.

• Valentine’s Day is a totally made up holiday.  It’s named after a Saint that went to jail – how romantic.
• I heard a commercial that said “tired of the traditional dinner and a movie date.”  Does everything have to be extravagant nowadays?
• Should we really reserve one day a year for telling people how much we care about them?  That flies against the all the “seize the day” logic the Internet is famous for.
• Chocolate is NOT to be regulated to one day a year.  Period.

And by now you might be thinking “You just hate Valentine’s Day because you’re single.”  Both of those things are true, yes, but I’m not sure they’re exclusive.

I remember being in college and wearing a bright red shirt and walking about telling everyone to have a happy “VAL-entine’s Day” (get it?  cause my name is Val?  Get it?  Oh, I crack myself up!) and smiling all the time.  Then I was putting on a brave front;  I wanted to be in a relationship.  Valentine’s Day made me sad.

Don’t get me wrong, I still want that – though growing up means less drama to go along with it.  I don’t feel like my world is ending because there’s no one to buy me dinner.  I can buy my own damn dinner – and often do (I’m kick-ass company if you must know).

No, this year I just wish it wasn’t so hard.  I have great family and friends, don’t get me wrong, I just wish sometimes I wasn’t the one that had the burden of the effort.  I wish I wasn’t the one who always had to remember – scheduling, emailing, texting, facebooking, etc, etc, etc.  For one day I’d like to be the person who hears “Just wanted to tell you I was thinking about you – hope you’re doing awesome!”  I want to be the person that gets emails instead of sends them.  I want to know that I crossed someone’s mind.

That’s why Valentine’s Day – no matter how overpriced, cloyingly sweet, and stunted – still has hold of people.  Because the dinners and flowers and jewelry – what they’re really saying is “I Care.”  And that’s something everyone needs to hear every once and awhile.  Everyone.

I don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions.  I mean, I do them – every year I write myself a long letter (at varying degrees of soberness), seal it, and lock it away until I read it a year later (at varying degrees of drunkenness) to have a laugh.

But rarely do I follow them because they set you up for failure.  I have to keep them for 12 Whole Months – that just seems doomed.  So instead this year I gave myself a month off – January – to see what I wanted to do, what I could do.  It’s much less pressure to think that I could stick to something for 92% of the year instead of 100%.  That’s all still an A, right?

So, without further ado, here are the things I want to get done in the next 92% of 2013:

• Stop eating fast food – STAT
• No more gluten – lots of different types of flour to cook with
• Writing in this blog – once every two weeks is the plan
• No Procrastinating! (the only reason this made the cut is because I’ve actually been able to do it for the last month – I never saw this one coming)
• Learn social media marketing
• Keep writing – self-publish two books this year (one is already written but one needs to be decided on, stat)
• Clean my house – I really, REALLY, need to start putting things away.
• Be Happy!  (This one is harder – but may be the most important.)

So world, this is my plan for the next 92% of 2013.  I know a lot of people who have had quite a rotten January so far (the dreadful 8%) but buck up – that’s not even enough to turn an A year into a B, maybe an A- but hey, no one pays attention to the signs anyway.  🙂