Today, my single friends and I will be eating, drinking, and celebrating our unattached status, while the coupled folks tear each other in a mad dash to get to Dillon’s floral on time for that last withered rose. Even when I was in a relationship, I never did get the fuss; why does the demonstration of love and devotion matter on this one silly day? More importantly, I’ve never understood the role of St. Valentine himself - the Christian martyr, beheaded for believing in the wrong thing at the wrong place and time. What do all the flowers, shiny rocks, and candlelit dinners have to do with him?

In that vein, here’s the perspective from the saint himself (via Mayor Wilkins, a moderator on the Something Awful forums), regarding this very mystery:

What A Fucking Crock of Shit

By St. Valentine, Bishop Saint of the 3rd Century A.D.

What’s up with this shit? I’m dead for a petty one thousand, seven hundred and sixty years, and I’m resting peacefully in my grave. I’ve rotted into nothingness, rotted into dust and beyond, my soul freed to rise to Heaven long, long ago. My corpse, my headless corpse, is nothing but a memory, a long-past vessel which once contained my soul, my essence. So I vaguely remember something the other day, something regarding my death being considered the death of a Christian martyr. I go ask the angel Benjamin, hey, what’s the deal with my beheading and all that? So he just smiles his holy smile and says, “well, Valentine, they celebrate your martyrdom every year on Earth!”

Hot shit! I thought. Wow! My own holiday! Celebrating my violent death at the hands of Roman troops, beheaded at the whim of Claudis II. Cool! My own holiday! So I briefly assumed mortal form in order to inhabit the Earth for a short period of time in order to see how you were celebrating my death, my martyrdom. Now I have seen it. Now I must ask - what the FUCK?

THIS is how you celebrate my martyrdom? By buying flowers and balloons and candy and cutesy shit like little fluffy teddy bears? With stupid cards with inane, meaningless messages on them? I got my head cut the fuck off, you assholes! I wasn’t mauled by a little fluffy bear! I was killed for secretly marrying couples while Emperor Claudius II demanded that no one would be married! Where the hell did you make the connection between a violent beheading and giving the gift of little hard candies with such stupid messages as “LUV U” and “BE MINE?”

I fail to see a connection.

Oh, am I angry! If my body were in any condition to rise from its grave, I promise that the world would immediately be presented with an angry, rotting zombie hell-bent on exacting revenge for this travesty! You are all guilty of a horrible, horrible heresy! You dirty sons of bitches, what is going on in your minds? Women! Where did you come up with the idea that my bloody, untimely death should precipitate the need for your husbands - or, nay, worse, your BOYFRIENDS - to lavish upon you little cuddly fucking teddy bears and overprices flowers and candy? I can somewhat understand the reasoning behind married people giving gifts to one another, although I cannot begin to agree with your choices. But people who are simply dating? People, I wasn’t secretly running a fucking dating service back in 240 A.D., okay? I was MARRYING people. Not setting them up on blind dates!

You women are all insane, I swear. As if the entire world revolves around you getting little trinkets and meaningless cards.

I read some of the cards. Are any of them meaningful? From what I saw, I can safely assume that they are all sugary sweet stupidity, fairly dripping with annoying auras of idiocy. Couple a brightly-colored card with a heart on the front and two people hugging with a little fluffy teddy bear holding a rose in one hand and a small box of chocolates in the other, and you have Valentine’s Day. My day. A day which celebrates my VIOLENT FUCKING DEATH AT THE HANDS OF AN ASSHOLE ROMAN EMPEROR. Does ANYONE besides me see what’s wrong with this picture?

Then there are the people who aren’t married, who aren’t in a relationship with someone. They’re made to feel as if they are inferior, as if they are worthless, as if they don’t deserve to live. I died because of love, folks, not because I wanted to make people feel like shit for not having someone. St. Valentine, the Patron Saint of Fluffy Teddy Bears and Hater of Single People? I say, single people, rejoice! You don’t have to spend a hundred dollars on meaningless shit just to keep your girlfriend or wife happy! This is the one time of the year when you’re lucky not to have a significant other, except for maybe Christmas. For if you mistakenly mourn my death instead of buying your girlfriend ten thousand dollars worth of things she’ll either eat or throw away once they wither and die, well, you’d best not be expecting her to continue to date you.

Fuck that.

It’s high time that you people realize what you’re celebrating when you’re giving out shitty little pastel-colored cards at school. You’re celebrating the slow, painful death of an Italian Bishop who defied a Roman emperor in order to bring lovers together in holy matrimony. You’re not celebrating the spending of millions of dollars on stupid shit for absolutely no reason other than a random date which dictates that you must do so because the calandar says so. Idiots.

So next year, remember me. Don’t buy your wife or girlfriend anything at all. If your girlfriend bitches, tell her why February 14th is Valentine’s Day. She’ll surely hate you for it, and she’ll never suck your dick again. But you’ll know you made a dead martyr happy. At least for a few minutes, anyway.

Happy S.A.D.! Whatever you do tonight, make sure you don’t catch the V.D. fever.

At a time when the studios generally seem to release punt movies, ones they are not really pushing for Oscar nominations or otherwise, we’ve been blessed with at least two exceptionally good films: Children of Men and Pan’s Labyrinth. I didn’t know much about either film going in, and I prefer it that way, though some others might want a bit of warning about the nature of the content. Pan’s Labyrinth is extremely violent, possibly the most violent film I’ve ever seen (though the effect might have been enhanced by the fact that I was not expecting it). Someone who is a wilting lily about such things, as I am, might find it very difficult to watch.

Pan’s Labyrinth is, as a give-away-nothing basic summary, a fairy tale set in a harsh backdrop of post-Civil War Spain, during Franco’s harsh military regime. Though not technically adhering to the principles of magical realism, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons in my mind between some of the images in the movie and passages of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Perhaps it’s the beautiful language, and the melding of brutality and beauty in the imagery. Another familiar element is the immense sorrow, more intense than any movie I’ve seen in recent times. The ending, without spoiling things too much, is very conflicted; it’s up to the viewer’s sense of optimism to determine whether or not the ending is a hopeful one.

The fantastical elements were wedded subtly, yet inextricably, with the bleak reality of the world. Not much is offered in the way of relief, comic or otherwise, which served the movie just fine in this instance - a cutesy, Dreamworks-esque cgi-sidekick would have been completely out of place in the movie. The monsters were absolutely terrifying; one creature (those who have seen this movie will know exactly who I’m talking about!) seemed as if it were summoned out of the subconscious fears of every child who ever lived in terror of falling asleep at night. And yet, the human monsters were much, much worse.

Another element I found intriguing about Pan’s Labyrinth is the strength of the women in the movie. Though the band of rebels consists of men, resistance in the movie seems to take on a feminine aspect, in the form of the two primary female characters: Ofelia, the child, and Mercedes, the kitchen maid. Ofelia resists by rejecting the norms of the world and retreating into fantasy, while Mercedes is able to aid the resistance through her role in the kitchen, the heart of the military complex. Women are neglected and overlooked in the chauvinistic military society, and the resisters use this to their advantage.

I highly recommend seeing this movie, but with a little warning: bring kleenex, and don’t plan on seeing it in the evening before you sleep. If you cannot avoid this, cleanse your soul with a little Cute Overload afterwards, and try not to imagine the sweet little puppies being bludgeoned to death