If you’re like me, your typical Valentine’s Day consists of sitting alone in your room, crying and rocking back and forth, struggling to watch your taped documentaries on the Son of Sam through the blur of your tears, only to fall asleep next to an empty bottle of Southern Comfort and a threadbare body pillow.
Even though Cupid didn’t strike again this year, however, there’s no reason to rip down random Valentine’s decorations, laugh whenever generally happy couples fall into a tiff or test the tinsulary strength of your wrist flesh against razor blades like some twisted product trial for the Consumer Reports From Hell.
Instead, channel your despair into something positive, something that will curb your solitude for at least one day this year:
1. Get something pierced. Anything. Not only will you have an excuse to show your newly pierced body parts to acquaintances and strangers, perhaps attracting the piercing fetishist of your dreams, it’ll give you something to tug on when your emotional pain just isn’t real enough (think of it as the safe alternative to self-mutilation). Plus, infections bring sympathy — always a plus.
2. Attend the benefit V-Day performance of “The Vagina Monologues” at 7:30 p.m. in the Agate Auditorium. For the student price of $7, you can watch a parade of characters discuss the ways in which life has sold them and their vaginas short. Uplifting, eh? At least spending the night in a dark room full of strangers is better than being alone.
3. Find a bed buddy. That’s not to advocate irrational acts of desperation, but surely you must have an equally lonely friend willing to spoon with you, bemoan your lack of significant others and fall asleep to old Smiths records. Sorry, hookers don’t count, and it’s unethical to ply your “lonely friend” with alcohol and roofies. After all, what good is there in feeling loved for one sweet night if you spend the next week in a holding cell?
4. Make a list of five people you’d like to date and ask them out, preferably with a bouquet of roses and a Valentine’s Day card professing your undying love in amateurish, middle-school verse (“Roses are red/ Violets are blue/ If you reject me today/ I just might kill you”).
5. Send candy to a stranger. Just to cheer him or her up, pretend you’re the secret admirer of someone you’d never even date in the first place ­ oh, who are you kidding? You’d date anyone around this time of year.
6. Go outside and sit beneath the stars with a great novel and a clip-on book light. And as you count the constellations, realize there’s an equal number of lonely people here on Earth. They sit alone on barstools and on bus seats, they hunch down in the theater and they’re walking down the streets. And remember, if you’re alone, you’re not alone.