The Staff of Make it Missoula asked our Bloggers to chime-in for Valentine’s Day. We hope you’ll find of each of them inspiring in their own unique way. Be sure to check out our Valentine’s Day Contest. In 25 words or less, tell us of your most memorable Missoula Valentine and you’ll be entered into a chance to win a $100 gift certificate to The Red Bird Restaurant.
By CC THE TRAINED MONKEY
With Valentine’s Day looming, the folks at Make It Missoula thought it would be a good idea for their bloggers to submit a romantically themed piece to show off our “softer side.”
I had to chuckle because everyone who knows me knows I’ve been dead inside for years. Valentine’s Day plays as much a role in my life as hitting myself in the head with a hammer does. It’s bad enough just being a regular loser 364 days of the year, I gotta be SUPER loser on that day.
I liked Valentine’s Day much better when I was a kid. It was all-inclusive. Nobody got left out. We had a little party at our school. Everyone got a cupcake and a glass of pop and a few candy hearts that said “Be mine.” Everyone decorated an old shoe box with strips of red and pink tissue paper and everyone put a card in it – because you had to give everyone in the class a card. It was very cut and dried, and yet, even back then, there were politics involved.
Nowadays, there’s a wide variety of Valentine’s Day cards on the market for your kids to choose from: Disney Princesses, comic book heroes, reality show celebs. Back then, there was one box. In the whole United States of America, they manufactured one uniform box of Valentine’s Day cards. Every single box had the exact same 3×4 cards in them.
Here’s where the politics came in. Since we all knew what cards we were dealing with, each card came to have a specific value. Some were higher than others. The kitty, the puppy and the rabbit where way high up on the food chain. If you got any of those cards, you knew the person who gave them to you really liked you. Maybe even loved you.
But, if you got the skunk…
That’s right, the skunk – the death card of the pack. It was a cute skunk. It even had a flower in its hand. But it was just lipstick on a pig. There was no disguising the true meaning behind that card – I think you have cooties.
Now, in every class there’s always that one kid, he has many aliases: Paste Eater, Fart Face, Geek Monster, but he’s all the same guy. Or girl. Every year that kid had a box full of skunk cards and one nice one from the teacher, who felt a little sorry for him – not a lot, just a little ‘cuz, seriously, there was something wrong with that kid.
But I wonder, even though that guy was weirder than a bowl of chicken lips, were his feelings hurt by all the skunks we gave him, or was he just happy to be included? If he’s bitter about it to this day, I would just like to say to him, “Weird Kid, I’m sorry I gave you all those skunk Valentines. But you have to concede you were pretty freakin’ weird. Nonetheless, karma has come back to haunt me for what I did to you. You will be happy to know that no one sends me Valentine’s Day cards, not even ones with a skunk on them. If you would like to return the ones I gave you, I would gladly accept them – mostly on account of they’ll be worth money someday when I’m famous, but you don’t need to know that.”
Well, now that that weight has been lifted off my shoulders, maybe my luck will change. And, if you don’t have a Valentine this year, my wish for you is that your luck will change too. See, there it is, my soft side. Happy now?
Happy Valentine’s Day
CC the Trained Monkey
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BIO: Carol Chrest is a bitter old spinster living in Los Angeles. When she’s not working ridiculous hours at her cruddy day job, she writes screenplays. She drinks.