When I am old, I shall wear purple...

I am a hopeless romantic. Really -- I am. I swoon at the thought of Rose saying "I'll never let go Jack...", I burst into tears at the end of The Notebook, and I love it when Johnny proclaims that "No one puts Baby in the corner". However...
I hate Valentine's Day.
I am a generally optimistic person; therefore, when I say that I hate something, I actually mean it. I haven't always hated Valentine's Day. Back in Elementary School when we covered shoe boxes with red and pink construction paper and all swapped Valentines as we licked heart-shaped cupcake icing from our fingers I LOVED Valentine's Day. I also looked foward to receiving a bear, balloons, or candy from my Daddy and Grandpa; I still do. However, once you hit 6th grade, there are no more shoe boxes. There are no more cupcakes. There are just couples; couples who bring flowers and candy and bears and cards and annoying singing stuffed animals to school on that horrid commerical holiday to give to one another.
Here I am, in the 11th grade, and things have not changed. Don't get me wrong, I love my life -- I have an amazing family, fabulous friends, and many gifts from the Big Man upstairs. However, I walked into K-Mart the other day and was instantly surrounded by pinks, whites, reds, lace, bears, dogs, chocolate, hearts, cards, and balloons. And they were all laughing at me and my current relationship status. They all laughed, pointed, and said, "She will be a cat lady!" On my way home, I began to think of cat ladies (yes, very strange). It's the sterotype of that 70-year-old woman in the cottage in the middle of the woods whom everyone knows and visits occationally because she has never been married and of course she has an obsession with some sort of domesticated animal (cats, dogs, birds, fish -- is that domesticated? -- etc). Then I thought of a poem I once read called "When I am old, I shall wear purple":

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobrietry of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people's gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickles for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beer mats and things in boxes.
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.
~Jenny Jacobs~

That's when I realized that I have my whole life ahead of me -- full of adventure and surprises -- and that maybe Valentine's Day isn't so bad after all. So for now, let the bears and balloons get a good laugh. Because if what lies ahead of me is an old cat lady, I shall be incandescently content and I shall wear purple...