Happy (Belated) Single's Awareness Day!

Not sure where the term for this holiday came from. It's usually celebrated by the watching of exchanges of kisses, candy, and other things between others whilst thinking thoughts that fail to distract one from what one is watching, and mostly not partaking in.

Oh, I know, that sounds bitter. It isn't meant to. Honest. No, really, I'm more than happy to be single on Valentine's Day. I figure, I'm in better shape than the guy down the hall who found out that the reason his girlfriend didn't answer her phone for his V-Day call was because at that moment she was in his brother's car, um, well, celebrating the holiday. I think. No, about the /me being better off than him, not about the story. She sent him a picture at midnight of her day's activities. He was a bit distraught, understandably, but he decided to be better than her and did not send the picture to her father, as has been done in the past on such occasions.

Gah. So, here I am on SAD (the official acronym for the holiday), just doing my normal routine, working on my computers and homework and listening to music, when Avril Lavigne's beautiful voice rings out from my iPod and catches my ear:

If I could say what I want to say,
I’d say I want to blow you...away.
Be with you every night,
Am I squeezing you too tight?
If I could say what I want to see,
I want to see you go down...
On one knee.
Marry me today.
Yes, I’m wishing my life away
With these things I’ll never say

--Avril Lavigne, "Things I'll Never Say"

I think, "Dammit, I was doing so well." I decide then to change the music to something more apropos to the holiday, and soon the sweet sounds of her "Get Over It", followed by my "Power" playlist, including Evanescence, Foreigner, and (most important) Green Day (the suite from "Jesus of Suburbia" to "Are We The Waiting?") wash over me, letting my empathy find a different, better emotion to latch onto than longing.

Ah...much better. Hitting the play button on the iPod to set it playing from the collection as a whole, I'm dismayed to hear what it has chosen for its first track:

This morning I woke up with this feeling
I didn't know how to deal with.
And so I just decided to myself I'd hide it to myself
And never talk about it and didn't I go and shout it
When you walked into the room?
I think I love you!

--David Cassidy and The Partridge Family, "I Think I Love You"

"DAMMIT!" So, I turn on U2's "Numb", and feel better again. I'm telling you, this empathy thing, definitely got some downsides to it, but it's kinda nice to be able to absorb the emotion from music...

...and then after a while of listening to various things, my iPod decides to play TSO's _ Beethoven's Last Night_, an album which ordinarily I'm delighted to hear. However, one of the tracks near the end, "After The Fall", is sung by Beethoven's former girlfriend/fiancee/significant female presence, Theresa, whom he cast off due to his perceptions as to how she would feel if he instead told her that he was going deaf. The song takes place as Theresa gazes upon Beethoven coming out of a bar, many years after the event, and, well, dammit:

You can live your life in a thousand ways,
But it all comes down to that single day
When you realize what you regret,
What you can't reclaim but you can't forget.
If I could just fall back into my life,
And find you there inside this night,
And let eternity just drift away.

--TSO, "After The Fall"

So, I did the only thing that's been known to me to turn off, even if only temporarily, my empathy: I went along with it and slowly turned it to my own purposes (namely, figuring out this devilishly-hard programming assignment).

Ah...catharsis at last.

Then Tim took us on a trip through the girls' houses, handing out candy and taking pictures.

Fuck.

/me needs to get someone, or figure out how to moderate his empathy better.