I emerged from my apartment at 7pm, having finally slopped myself off my living room floor and taken a shower, because I was hungry and I smelled like closing time at a pub. But, mainly because I was hungry. Oh, I also got dressed; public nudity generally not being acceptable, even though it might make picking a mate a far less risky business (clothing being a deceptive art, often resulting in disapointment, especially if you're not drunk enough). Although, the most time I currently spend naked is the ten minutes I spend in the shower, or as I hop in front of my impotent heater when I get dressed.
The supermarket is alive with the voices of harpies screeching out Valentine's specials on chocolate! chocolate! chocolate! For a country that is thought of as the waistline haven, they do like their sugar. I don't know how they stay so slim. There are fried, sugarpumped, fibreless orgies everywhere. At first, I thought Japanese women just didn't eat. Now I realize that they have secret glands that take all the excess calories and pump them into their hair to be used for Anime hairstyles.
I loathe Valentine's Day. It is a cursed day, invented to make everyone miserable. Singletons are reminded how lonely and pathetic they are, and how long it has been since they've had a good, solid fuck. Sex has become a fantastical creature, perfected by the imagination, meant for people with smaller bums and bigger breasts. All the disappointments, the tequila cocks and the premature ejaculations are erased from the mind; until all that is left is an Eden of smooth skin and mind obliterating orgasms that you may not enter.
And for those dating or in a relationship, someone is going to lie about how it means nothing to them ( but really it's very, very, very important) and someone will believe them (thus fucking up royally for not being psychic, and hence being cast out of aforemeantioned Eden). There's just too much Goddamned pressure.
Valentine's Day in Japan is a little different. Firstly, it's only women that give out chocolate to men. Wow! If this had been the case when I was a teenager, I would have been spared many years of high school humiliation, when the only Valentine's gifts I received were from a well-meaning, but misguided mother.
However, this tradition is not without its drawbacks. They have a term "giri chocolate", meaning "obligation chocolate"-meant for all the men in their life that politeness dictates they give to (like work colleagues). Although, this sounds like a recipe for a giri chocolate being interpreted as a "I'll show you my sushi, if you'll show me yours" chocolate - which results in the That guy in the office (the one whose hair is a permanent oil slick and smells like wet clothes) thinking that the Wikkan Love Spell he performed in his bathroom (he still lives with his mother) involving freshly squeezed semen and raw eggs, has actually worked. Leading to missing underwareand dead mice in your potplants. Ultimately ending in an untimely dismemberment (in a lace wedding dress, of course) in a bathtub as you're consumed over three weeks in the form of sausages, pies and sushi so that you may both be joined forever in wedded bliss.
