not wanting to want flowers

Last weekend, a radio DJ announced a pre-Valentine’s giveaway for “a year of See’s chocolates” (which sounds a little gross, and like a terrible burden to me), and said in a playful way, “Boys, just a word of advice this year. Like the Boy Scouts say: be prepared.”

I got all angry and immediately changed the station. For the obvious heterosexism, for starters, and for the explicitly articulated social expectation that it should be boys who have to do something for this love day. (I mean, I dunno where I’ve been the last 26 years, but I’ve got me a valentine this year and all of a sudden I heard it in a brand new way.) I love me a big ol surprise, or enjoying plans that someone else has done the legwork to put together, but taking the time to celebrate love shouldn’t just one partner’s responsibility. Plus, why does anyone have to buy anything for their boo in the first place so they know they’re loved?

I told Kevin all this later that day, feeling great about my progressive attitude, and a little smug, frankly. I told Kevin that flowers and gifts and all that shebang, wasn’t something I wanted him to worry about, and meant it.

And then, on Valentine’s Day when we met up, Kevin had taken my words to heart! I must let the record show that he got me a hilarious and perfect card and I…… left his at home. But then, later that evening, while he and I were eating leftovers on his couch (on account of my earlier declarations, and also busy-ness), I made a few jokey side comments that I was questioning his roommate’s decision to go with the (imo!) decidedly unromantic gift he got his boo. Kevin raised his eyebrows at me. “Don’t be mean!” he might have said.

I’d totally been caught. Buying into the gross consumerism of the day AND being judgey at the same time! Worst combination ever.

This post is my penance, I guess. And, also, a plea for some advice on how other people handle such messiness. There is no moral to the story.. Except that you (I) can be critical of and yet simultaneously completely invested in the society you (I) live in.

Or, basically, in Saipua’s words: “Girls who say they don’t want flowers are lying. It’s complicated.”

Filed under: Uncategorized, boys, flowers

important paragraphs

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

 

It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

“On Self Respect,” by Joan Didion

how am i only just coming to this one now?

Filed under: Uncategorized