The little cynic.

I haven't posted in quite some time, and there is one good explanation: Integrated Human Physiology. This course started exactly 2 weeks ago, and it has made February a little... rough. I think that I'm adjusting to the pace a little better now, though. Hopefully, I can get my blog posting frequency back up! And now, without further ado...

This Saturday was Valentine's Day. A random sampling of my friends revealed that several did nothing special, several went out on romantic dates, and a few even had overtly "anti-Valentine's Day" parties. All of this frenzy around V-Day got me thinking about how the holiday was celebrated earlier in my life. Of course, this train of thought pulled me up to the Elementary School Station.

As I've gotten older and bitterer, one thing that I've enjoyed doing is identifying glimmers of cynicism that could have been harbingers of the cranky twenty-something to come. Two of the most obvious warning signs were likely the facts that my childhood favorite shows included Murphy Brown and Absolutely Fabulous, programs with extremely dry humor. (But seriously, which elementary or middle schooler has Murphy Brown as a role model? Whatever.)

In thinking about Valentine's Day recently, I remembered an antic that I pulled one yesteryear. I think that it was in fourth grade. Following social custom, I had a stack of pink and red valentines--you know, the ones with the perforated edges enclosed in little envelopes with bad-tasting adhesive that you had to lick. I must admit that I had a penchant for overthinking things even then. So of course, I had read all of the cards carefully and selected specific ones to give to each person in my class.

And then, something dawned on me.

I didn't actually want any of these people to "be mine" or any of that gooey figurative nonsense. Gross. So I took out a pencil and went to work, engraving each card with an apporpirate word negating its sentiment. The most commonly used word was "not." The result was akin to the following:


My actions caused considerable confusion in my class. "Why'd you do that?" was a common inquiry in the following days. As I recall, my response was something like a noncommital "Um, I don't know." Maybe I honestly didn't know then. But my being a little cynic may say a lot about the person I've become now.