February 14, 2004

Happy &†#$%*!!! Day

You remember that Star Trek episode, don't ya? The one where the alien-chick-of-the-week popped THE question: "Kirk, what is love?"

Who the hell can answer that? (Kirk certainly blew it --in my opinion.)

About the only generalization about love that seems to be universally true is that you can't generalize about love. Oh, yeah, people do. All the time. And they're not necessarily totally wrong, but no generalization is going to be applicable to everyone in every situation every time. Not ever.

Hell, even generalizations that I came up with just for myself that seemed true enough at the time will then turn out to not be so in subsequent situations. It's enough to drive one to drink or at least to slap around some troubadours for coming up with the notion of courtly love.

And because today is Valentine's Day, the hills are alive with the sounds of people hawking or mocking the issue of love and related topics. If the people who thrive on celebrating (or selling) this holiday weren't enough, there's now also a huge backlash of dissident anti-valentiners who seem bent on providing something grumpy, thoughtful, or ironic as a so-called antidote to the traditional hearts & flowers overdose.

Can't turn on the TV or do one's usual rounds of reading without all of it smacking ya in the face.

Notable examples from my day so far:

Around 3 am-ish earlier this morning, I happened to go into the kitchen. To do so, I have to pass through the room where Laszlo's computer desk is. He was working on his computer and had the TV on in the background (he has a TV tuner on his computer). As I passed through, Laszlo noted sarcastically "CNN is doing a story on adultery in America right now."

I snorted and replied dourly, "Happy Valentine's Day."

We both laughed. As screwed up as we are, we still often take solace in the fact that we still aren't as screwed up as a lot of people seem to be. Hey. It's something.

____________

Afterwards, I meandered over to my own computer to answer my email and do a little reading. Arts & Letters Daily, which is definitely one of my favorite portal sites, has had practically nothing but links to articles on topics related to love in the last couple days. But as they're a portal site, that could well be not out of their own deference to St. Valentine's Day, but because of the glut of articles about love that appear this time of year. As I think Arts & Letters happens to usually find some fascinating stuff, mercifully the articles they chose to link to were of the more interesting variety (comparatively-speaking, at any rate). And a few of them got me thinking, such as these two: this book review from The Washington Post and this article on the science of love from The Economist. Part of what both these articles are explaining is the basis of limerance, a term and concept that still seems to be not that widely known although I've noticed it seems to be popping up a little more frequently in recent days in random articles and books.

Because I've been fascinated by this concept of limerance for sometime and have had to try to explain it occasionally to people when I bring it up, I've been meaning to write up something I could post here about it with the best of links I've been collecting on the subject.

So, after doing my little reading rounds, I had the not-so-bright idea that I should quickly dash that off in honor of today. But it's not a quickly dashed-off kind of subject, and I've now wasted 3 hours trying to do it. So, instead, especially because I need to get back to some other stuff I'm in the middle of, I am giving it up for right now and just wish you a Happy Valentine's Day (or Anti-Valentine's Day, if that's your wont). Turns out I have nothing to say on the subject today. As is evident by this vent.

____________

Here's a link, though, to a curious page on the etymology/mythology for Saint Valentine from the site Pandora Word Box.

It's an amazing and strange site. It subtitles itself by these subjects: Classic Mythology Etymology Medicine Arts Humanities. First time I stumbled into it sometime ago, I spent hours there and was rendered practically incoherent for a couple days.

Here's another page link from it that I particularly like.:

I am still overly amused by the brilliant captions they used under a couple of the paintings on this page: "Male evasiveness" for Picot's painting L'Amour et Psyche and "Feminine curiosity" for Louis-Jean-Francois Lagrenee's Psyche surprend l'amour endormi.

Like I said, Happy &†#$%*!!! Day