St. Valentine’s Day memories of note
1987: This girl, the daughter of a friend of my mom’s, lives in the neighborhood just south of ours. She is also home-schooled and every year for Valentine’s Day her parents throw a gigantic party because it’s their favorite holiday. I don’t know any of this girl’s friends–and truthfully, I don’t even know the girl that well. Her name is Alice, very old-fashioned. She looks like I imagine Laura Ingalls Wilder would look if she ditched the petticoat and got a pair of purple stirrup pants. We go on a scavenger hunt around her neighborhood, looking for items starting with each letter of the word VALENTINE. I trail behind everyone, feeling ridiculous in whatever outfit my mom has made me wear (no purple stirrups for me). I remember longing to be home reading a book, or playing with my brother who, because he is only four, has not been invited to the party.
1989: My third grade class has an afternoon Valentine’s Day party. Someone’s mom has baked vanilla cupcakes with pink frosting and sprinkles; the cake part is colored with red food dye to make them more, you know, Valentines-ish. I have my eye on these babies all afternoon and as soon as my teacher peels off the foil covering the pan, I’m in line with my hand and napkin out. I end up eating three of them and sneaking another one under cover of my desk. One of the girls in my class eats a bunch of them too and gets sick. As she’s running out of class on the way to the bathroom down the hall, she covers her mouth with her hands and starts barfing all over the place. The puke is super thick and the same color as the cupcakes. Everyone screams “EEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWW!” and scrambles to get away from her. My legs turn to jelly, I’m so relieved that it isn’t me. I squeal along with everyone else.
Later that evening I’m at ballet class and end up getting sick. I make it to the bathroom, throw up and keep throwing up. The bathroom floor is like ice, and I remember how hard it felt on my knees, the cold seeping through my tights. There are bits of red food dye in my vomit, or maybe it’s blood. I don’t come out of the bathroom because I feel so ill, and am sort of crying (something I still do whenever I throw up) and I don’t want people to know I’ve just puked. My dance teacher doesn’t come look for me, and I only know that class is finished and I need to go get my coat because the building janitor comes into the bathroom and flicks off the lights without finding me kneeling in the back stall.
1993: My friend gets four carnations and candy grams from different boys. One is from the cutest boy in our class, and another is from a guy who is almost four years older than her–a high school junior! I get one–from my other friend Nikki, whom I don’t like as much, and who wears those L.A. Gear light-up tennis shoes. I think it might be that day, or maybe later on in that month, when I try smoking a cigarette for the first time. I stand with a group of the “bad girls”, and Nikki, under cover of a concrete retaining wall behind the school. I don’t cough at all, but then, I may not have fully inhaled.
1998: I have just broken up with my boyfriend of two months (maybe even less). He still gets me roses, which makes me feel awkward. I think they’re from a gas station. When I ask him why, since I have just dumped him, he just shrugs and says, “I guess it was kind of a waste of money.”
2001: I am waiting tables at a small local restaurant and get stuck working Valentine’s night instead of going to a pajama party/local show with my current boyfriend. He sends me flowers at work, which is nice. As the evening gets more hectic, I become embroiled in some kind of stupid power struggle with my boss and restaurant owner, Bill, who has commanded me to charge my tables extra for teensy ramikens of butter or sour cream for their baked potatoes. Thirty cents extra for something that should come automatically with a baked potato! I refuse to do so. After several times of Bill yelling at me to add these charges on my tickets for various tables, he catches me spooning shredded cheese into a ramiken for someone and demands, with lots of expletives, to see my ticket so he can write the charge on it. Here’s the dramatic part: I throw down the ramiken, grab my ticket and scrawl “CHEESE” in huge black letters across the pad, and hold it up in front of Bill’s face, yelling, “See, Bill? CHEESE!” Bill makes a sort of lunge for me and knocks a stack of plates to the side, where they totter dangerously on the edge of the prep counter. I want to say one smashes to the floor but I could be making that up. Bill does have a criminal record, so I sort of dart away from him and he yells at his wife to get me out of his restaurant. His wife demands that I give her my apron; I throw it at her and as she’s pushing me out the back door, I scream, “HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY, BILL!”
As I’m walking back toward my apartment in a huff, smoking furiously, half elated to have left a shitty job but wondering what I’m going to do about money, I remember the flowers my boyfriend sent me are still in the restaurant office. I march back into the restaurant, and in front of a line of patrons and a full dining room, loudly demand, cigarette in hand, to get my f–king roses.
2003: This is probably the best one yet. I perform “My Angry Vagina” in my university’s production of “The Vagina Monologues”. One of the girls in the cast, who’s just gotten engaged to her boyfriend, makes a pass at me afterwards. It’s awkward. On the other hand, my then-boyfriend/fiance is so proud of me that it almost makes me a little proud of myself. The next day we go to a tattoo artist and I get my third tattoo. A couple weeks later, my boyfriend dumps me for Jesus.
2004: It’s my first date with someone. We go out for Thai food with two other people and then to see a play that one of our friends is in. I’m not sure how the rest of the evening went. I can’t remember if I gave it up then or held out for the second.
2007: I stay home from work with a bad cold. Midway through the day, as I’m checking my work email, I get a notification from NYU that I’ve been accepted into their Master’s program. I know it’s clicheed, but I’m so utterly astounded that I start to feel light-headed, like I could faint. I applied to NYU on a whim, almost feeling angry with myself as I wrote a check for the application fee as a good way to waste eighty dollars. I call my brother, even though it’s super early still in Hawaii, to tell him the news. I call my dad, who says, “Oh? Did you apply?” But even that feels OK, because I know at last that my life is going to change.
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February 14th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
2004- That is still, hands down, the worst rendition of Cabaret that I have ever seen.
February 14th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Was it Caberet that we saw? For some reason I thought it was some play about a woman with breast cancer who used the word “soporific” a whole lot. But yes, I concur about the former. Although it was so bad, it was almost kind of awesome.
February 28th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Hey, have you ever considered adding an archive of your old blog entries you have on your myspace? I’ve always enjoyed reading them there. They may make a good addition here.