Grumpy Old Man

As the years roll by, certain aspects of the culture in which I live annoy me more and more. The highly commercialized nature of national holidays, perpetuated primarily to artificially increase demand for goods you can otherwise get easily and cheaply the rest of the year, is one of those things that is really beginning to bug the s*it out of me. I was incredibly annoyed last year when the week of Halloween, you couldn't tell there was in fact a major national holiday happening between then and Christmas. And now February brings the triumvirate of hate that I have now for Valentine's Day.

It's a holiday that is steeped in idiotic commercialism--the late-night commercials for custom Teddy Bears I saw the other night was particularly galling, but diamond ads remain the very peak of the misogyny in advertising. It still reminds me of Kim and her high-maintenance desires for complicated romance rituals, always with a little twist of detail she expected without actually telling anyone--never mind that no one had ever heard of that detail because it's something her mom made up for her a child. And then there's the way that the whole holiday grinds at singles. My situation is far from the isolation it once was in that regard, but I'm certainly not on track to having an SO anytime in the foreseeable future. All this for a made-up stupid holiday just to sell flowers, chocolate, crappy overpriced insincere greeting cards, and diamonds at prices even more artifically inflated by the evil of the De Beers price control!

Maybe I'm just bitter...

Ok, I know that it's because I'm bitter.