Single Person Awareness Day...

Someone on one of the forums I read recently posted a thread about "what kind of candy are you going to buy your valentine", so naturally I gave a (partially) tongue in cheek reply. Another single person in the thread referred to it as Single Awareness Day.

Ehh. It's not like there aren't already enough reminders about my inability to seem to find anyone female interested in voluntarily spending time with me. But v-day is yet another reminder, another chance to wonder what is wrong with me.

It wouldn't be so bad if it was just confined to one day. But V-day has become Christmas for people with S.O.'s, and companies seem to start hawking stuff for it in early January. And it's not just the obvious mass-marketers and the chocolate and stuffed animal retailers - I buy a lot of tech stuff, and stay on email ad lists for the vendors I buy from because I occasionally get a good deal from them. Which means I end up getting emails from Apple and Geeks.com and a ton of other companies I wouldn't think of as a place to buy a gift from that wouldn't result in having to sleep on the couch, if I had someone in my life to make me sleep on the couch.

The other thing is that the new model for valentine's day gifts in the consumer electronics sector seems to be take a random piece of electronics, make the outer case pink, and sell it as a V-day gift. Next week's Best Buy circular features a pink Asus ePC under the heading "Get the right price on a real sweet surprise for your Valentine". Are there really that many women who would be thrilled to get a netbook for Valentine's day? And where are they?

I find myself in an awkward situation - a free-market capitalist who finds himself annoyed by the way retailers treat holidays. When it comes to Christmas, it's because the months of hype overshadows the important parts of the holiday - family and religion. When it comes to V-Day, it's obviously more personal - annoyance at the constant reminder of being involuntarily single, which seems to be regarded as somewhere around leprosy in modern society.