Valentine's Day

What's your take on Valentine's Day? Corporate exercise, or meaningful reminder of romance?

It is a corporate exercise; it's also a holy day of romantic obligation. It's also a day of torment. Mother's Day is a torment if your mother is dead. Valentine's Day is a torment if you don't got one. And at some point in our lives, we will be tormented by Valentine's Day even if we're relatively lucky in love. It's just like Christmas. Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces, primarily by TV commercials. I find, though, that if you avoid TV, you don't succumb to the despair. I wouldn't say that holidays are manufactured by corporations, but they're certainly exploited and mined by them. If you're not a big consumer of television, I don't think it's too much of a torment even if you don't have a love interest.