To Do List For Valentine's Day

My 'to do' list for February 14th:

1) Wake up. Cook hearty breakfast in promising hope of a successful, positive day. Burn toast in deflating display of foreshadow.

2) Drink too much coffee. Feel jittery, let spirit slip away into cooling melancholy and loss of ambition. Cut self shaving. Don't finish shaving.

3) Check answering machine repeatedly throughout day, each time becoming more aware and dispirited by lack of messages. Check to ensure machine is plugged in properly.

4) Turn on TV or radio. Be inundated with Valentine’s Day messages and examples of characters and people who are in love and ultimately, in better place than you.

5) Have first glass of rye.

6) Talk to mother on telephone, making effort to sound indifferent to significance of day, despite sensing concern and sympathy in her voice. Get off phone quickly and sigh in relief.

7) Cook dinner for self. Prepare such meek and lazy bachelor-typical items as mushroom soup, Kraft dinner or instant noodles. Eat meal directly out of cooking pots, sitting on sofa dressed only in boxer shorts and robe.

8) Resume drinking rye.

9) Drink more rye in greater quantities.

10) Dig out boxes containing photos and memorabilia of last girlfriend. Drink another rye. Rifle through with an unsettling mix of nostalgia and dejection.

11) Empty rye. Call Dial-A-Bottle and order more rye. Watch re-run of The Crocodile Hunter while waiting (note: this will be the highlight of the day). Upon arrival of rye...yep, you guessed it…another drink.

12) Quickly lose clarity of vision, sense of reason and control of emotions. Vengefully, tear up photos of ex-girlfriend, screaming ‘fucking whore!’, immediately followed by regret, sorrow, crying and attempts to repair photos with Scotch tape.

13) Another rye. Dry heave.

14) Call ex-girlfriend. Desperately and incoherently plea that you “loff yoo sooo mush – yoo awr my soul maid!!”. After many attempts to reason with you, she hangs up.

15) You call back crying. She refuses to talk.

16) You call back again and scream that you hate her “more than inoperable cancer” and that you hope she “dies slowly and painfully alone, choking on a chicken bone, you fat, skanky, disgusting, untrustworthy cumguzzling cockjockey!!!”.

17) Hang up. Throw up. Pass out.

My 'to do' list for February 15:

1) Wake up.

2) Resume life as usual.