Katie Meiners Is (Still) My Girlfriend (Thankfully)

One of the bad things about writing a blog is that eventually the more you write the less likely you are to remember when you've already written something.

This happened to me today when I went to write my touching Valentine's Day post, only to discover that I already wrote a crappier version last year. So now I will attempt to write about Valentine's Day without stealing too much from things already written.

Here goes:

My poor girlfriend.

She complained to me once that I never write about her in my blog. That spawned me writing this ridiculous post where I grabbed a bunch of of random biographies off of Wikipedia, pieced them together, and then replaced all pertinent names with "Katie Meiners."

I am lucky enough to have a girlfriend who either has the sense of humor or the kindness to say that she liked the post and that it was funny. Whether or not that's true, I don't know.

For such a funny, beautiful, intelligent young lady she certainly puts up with a lot though.

I'm not an inherently romantic person. I've tried, I swear. I tried in college writing sonnets and getting flowers and leaving love notes and all of that and it all repeatedly got me nowhere or gave me headaches. So my senior year I decided I would stop all of that. My college mind, in its primordially cynical state, reasoned that girls don't actually like nice guys. They like guys who ignore them completely.

That's right, I admit it. I had baggage.

So I started ignoring women completely and, lo and behold, Katie and I met. She hunted me down at a Halloween party - apparently part of my allure was that I was so aloof - and voila.

These results seemed to validate my thesis: that girls like guys who ignore them completely, which in turn reinforced my inherent lack of romantic sensibilities, and Katie (bless her) has had to put up with my nonsense ever since.

Periodically, though, she does plead with me to do something, anything, romantic.

"Why?" I think to myself, "So that I can prove to the Hallmark machine that I love you by buying a bunch of crap that's going to wilt or eventually be thrown out?"

(What a dick)

But then, one day - this was a while ago - I decided out of the blue to get her flowers. Just to try it out. Or, really, I probably did something stupid and I was trying to patch things up. And so I gave her the flowers and it made her so happy. Like, visibly so happy.

"What is it about some stupid plants wrapped in paper," I thought, "that made Katie so happy?" And I thought and thought and thought and I came to a very simple, very obvious conclusion. A conclusion so simple that we take it for granted. It's almost a cliche.

It wasn't the flowers that made her happy per se, although flowers are definitely pretty, but the fact that I had gone out of the way to show my girlfriend that I care enough to buy the damned things. And it's the act of showing that care that proves to her that I love her.

It was my Grinch moment. The moment my heart grew however many sizes and then I lifted the sled up over my head.

It's such a simple idea, this concept of showing people that you love them, and yet a lot of perfectly good loving people don't bother with it.

So what is Valentine's Day? Is it a day to run out and buy a bunch of crap that nobody really needs so that Hallmark can continue to turn a profit off of our ridiculousness? Is it a day for women where men have to bow down to them and present them with offerings?

Cynical mind says yes.

But I'm beginning to think that Valentine's Day is for people like myself. It is a calendar reminder to show your loved ones you love them.

Holiday rant over and out.