xoxo

I'm not sure which is more disturbing, that I willingly chose to wear pink today in observance of the universe's most contrived holiday or that I actually found myself smiling (and not just on the inside, and smugly) when I saw the queue of post-pubescent males in the Safeway floral department at 4pm today, waiting to fork over a fistful of cash for a crappy bundle of overpriced roses that will die in two days anyway, not because they want to, but because they have to.

Even during the years when I've found myself single on V-Day, I never really cared much. Certainly not enough to be bitter about it. I wear black about 75% of the time anyway.

But this year is different. Not only did I make a strangely jubilant and out-of-character wardrobe choice this morning, but if its possible, I care even less about being alone tonight than I ever have before.

M3 is three states away from me right now for business. Accordingly, I'll be spending the first part of this evening at the office, the second half eating dinner and watching a DVD. And I will be perfectly and entirely content with my agenda, or complete and utter lack thereof.

Because instead of lamenting the absence of someone special in my life or personally going to great, artificial, exhausting and generally rather costly lengths to leave a certain impression upon my allegedly special someone of the moment -- the only two options I ever thought plausible until this very evening -- today is, as it turns out, simply another day.

In email this morning, M3 apologetically announced that he hasn't and wouldn't "be doing anything to make today special or wonderful" for me, claiming his very recent bout with food poisoning as rationale for his failure to execute any V-Day plan whatsoever.

He couldn't have been more wrong.

Because on Sunday afternoon, at the end of five perfect days together, it was entirely M3 who prompted us to devise a plan that might somehow allow us to spend just a little bit more time together.

And so, I submit...

A super cute boy who's rump uncannily resembles two very ripe cantaloupe melons making such an obvious expression of his affection is *far* more romantic than getting some crappy box of milk chocolate-covered cherries or an arrangement of sickly roses with those plastic tubes at the bottom either of which would undoubtedly have been accompanied by a card that he probably would have ended up spending an inordinately long time picking out because we haven't yet said The Words which would make card shopping on the one day of the year devoted to following a prescribed methodology of expressing The Words by giving materialistic representations thereof, rather than actually *saying* them, it seems, really rather difficult.

Plus, at the bottom of his email today was a little heart fashioned out of a not-quite-symmetrical series of question marks.

Beneath it: "Be mine?"

Uh, done.