And I a maid at your window to be your Valentine.

I form a rare front: I don't participate in Saint Valentine's day in any traditional sense, nor do I despise it. My blasphemous position, encompassing none of the accepted reactions (love, hate, or loneliness) may be aided by my working in an industry that profits from it. But it isn't the whole of it. Sure, I'll spend the next two days splitting lobsters, shucking oysters, and otherwise fighting the sea in an unremitting fury, and, in two weeks, I'll spend the money tossed to me by terrified men on something bespoke and unnecessary. And I do have a marked fondness for martyrs, especially ones that the church has since declared most probably fictitious. 

But I like the feast because, on this one day of the year, the women who are kind enough to allow us to place things inside of them become gods. The vagina becomes a great beast, a thing that must be appeased with gifts. The ritual is clear: the vagina, for some reason, demands flesh dredged from the ocean floors in great quantities. It orders that all the flowers of the world be plucked and laid at their sheets. (Intensely sexual little brutes, flowers. You can see their bits. They even let you smell them. They hold season-long orgies with bees.) They require chocolate and fine alcohol and jewels dragged from mines by terrified African child-amputees. And, if they are pleased, we, unworthy though we are, are allowed to enter the temple.

Furthermore, allow me to tell you about my favourite customer. I met him only once. He was an older man, unapologetically  gruff. He stomped towards my case years ago on Valentine's day, sized me up, and barked, "I'm cooking for my wife," in such a way that could only mean that he had never, and would never, make such a statement again. He then began a battle. He paced. He stared down my fish. He looked at them and they, though dead for days, felt that surely, in some sea far from where they now lay, had done something horrible to offend this gentleman specifically. After pacing and plotting for ages he looked at me, and in the same rough voice as before demanded, "Where's your prepared foods section?" He didn't even realise he'd been defeated. It was perfection itself. And he's hardly alone: I'll spend the entirety of today drawing diagrams of the dials on ovens for men who, apparently, never wondered what that hole in the wall of their kitchen might be, and never realised that, through twisting knobs, one could cause the inside of it to get quite hot. This is the other reason that I enjoy the holiday: it is entirely and unquestionably heteronormative, and yet contains an inherent role reversal. In order to gain access to women's bits, some men endure women's work, often, it seems to me from my position behind the counter, for the first time all year, or for the first time altogether. And, although I'm sure they'll forget it, I hope they'll realise that women's work is hard.

Is this prostitution? Yes. But I like prostitution. We all deserve to be compensated for our talents from time to time. Enjoy your spoils, ladies. 

Lies We Tell To Children: Blasphemy.

My father was raised by Jesuits and fed on philosophy. His Catholicism was rich, historical, and dead. It was a tradition to be passed on, poetry and ideas, but, before he took ill at least, not a comfort, not something by which to be restricted. My mother was the youngest of five, the daughter of a Catholic and a Jew. She took her mother's Catholicism, but I'm not sure she ever felt as if she truly understood it until a few years ago, at which point she realised that the Church had few nice things to say about either of her children, and she left it. The knowledge that she chose us over a god is a gift so great I don't have the words to thank her for it.

When I was very young, I watched the Disney film Fantasia for the first time with my father. The final scene is an animated Christian afterlife which seemed, at the time, frightening and dull in succession. Before that, I was introduced to Olympus. There were creatures: horses with the torsos of bathing young women, dancing boys with the legs of goats. And there were gods! Funny drunken things, a bearded old man throwing lightning in his rages. And these chimeras were wonders, but stranger still was that my father knew every one of their names. The power of this knowledge seemed infinite. I learned the word pantheon at three.

My sister and I were both sent to a Jewish pre-school and kindergarten and spent a subsequent twelve years in Catholic schools. I was smart and obedient and shy, and so at first school was, like the afterlife I'd been promised, terrifying and boring in stages. The rituals and prayers, however, were mysterious, exacting. There were screaming prophets, strange pacts and sacrifices. I spent grade-school rushing through my work in order to have more time to read, and my favourite books were the lives of the saints, adventure tales of emperors and virgins and martyrs, and classical mythology, ancient songs of heroes and shape-shifting and rape.

Due to my parent's choice to condemn my sister and I to a youth of near constant religious training, we learned that these cosmologies, strict, contradictory, jealous, and all-encompassing though they were, were not exclusive. No culture, then, was stupid or dangerous or wrong. Everything was real. Everything was permitted. In religions and mythologies, then, there were no lies, only choices.

In which I talk endlessly of my own novelty

I have a new hero. The website is simple and clean, the essays are informative (if a bit dry), and it is, first and foremost, about delicious meat. Meat is of particular interest to me, because today is (still) Mardi Gras or Carnival, two terms whose names almost literally mean "prepare to suffer" when translated. Which means that tomorrow is Ash Wednesday, and beyond that, forty days of self denial and contemplation and looking down my nose at people who ignore their Lenten vows on Sundays (even though they're technically fine for doing so).

Oh, right, hey, did I mention I'm Catholic? I totally am! EW GROSS I KNOW RIGHT? And Lent? It is a crazy semi-pagan holiday (because there aren't a lot of those in Catholocism) where we Cat-a-holics give up something we enjoy to, uh, kind of mimic Jesus and also to kind of just live lives of quiet and dutiful self-denial, since we are all basically just piles of sparking, gooey ash anyway. But what really ends up happening (at least to me) is a weird mental hierarchy of suffering - I like to give up things for Lent that are more fantastic than just plain ol' desserts or coffee or swearing. This is because I view Lent as a competition, and it is also why I am a very bad Catholic.

I RLY RLY don't mean to bludgeon you over the head with this (because honestly, who really likes hearing about religion? YAWN), but bear with me (hee hee! Bear! With me! Send help!). Some years ago, I gave up all traces of sarcasm from what I did and what I said, vowing to remain completely genuine and true in my actions for the whole of lent, like some kind of monk or paladin or other suitable character class. It seemed like such a great idea, but in the end, I turned into an evil-minded troll of a man, because I had to just tell people that I thought their ideas were stupid and that they should be ashamed for having them. I didn't joke around, I didn't get invited to go along anywhere. I began to grow hunched and crooked and hateful and pale. Forty days of hardcore honesty almost ruined me, body and soul.

But it was still kind of enlightening. For starters, it reveals the necessity of polite lies or begrudging courtesies in dealing with other people. What are thank-you notes, after all, other than a way to just stay in someone's mind? The whole idea is that gifts themselves, humble or extravagant, (extravagancy being its own kettle of fish) are seldom delivered just for fun; more often they are tokens of courtier-like devotion to placate a host (I BROUGHT POTATO SALAD FUCK YEAH) or just to fulfill a grim duty. Christmas mornings everywhere seem to be hopelessly cluttered with hated duty gifts - we can't always get exactly what we want, after all. As children, we learn early on how to lie to our elders, how to put on fake smiles and tell some out-of-touch aunt or uncle how much we appreciate their once-yearly efforts to remind us of how much they really know nothing about us.

You thought I wasn't going anywhere near lies we tell to children with this, didn't you? HA HA JUST AS PLANNED.

The truth seems to be that Western society (okay, American society. On the East Coast. I acknowledge our foreign visitors! There, are you happy? NOW SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS) deception is necessary. Our social interactions and political systems all depend on lies to function at almost every level. I'm simply supposing that we learn the skill early on to placate our superiors - after all, why lie to an inferior - and that deception is not so much enacted out of self interest as it is out of respect. We shoulder the burdens of our friends and families, and try to lighten their load with a little fiction.

My Too Long and Not Interesting Return.

I return from my month of accidentally self-imposed exile. Let us never speak of this again.

I am mere moments away from attempting to hook up Verizon high-speed DSL onto the family computer, a task similar to stealing fire away from the Gods, or trying to walk on clouds, or something else that is very hard to do and technically impossible. I am honestly considering assembling a mighty crew of heroes, so that I at least have someone to feed to the cyclops, but I think that such a thing borders technically very close to a euphamism for gay seksing, which is something that is very far away indeed from hooking up internets, so I think I'll just give it a by.

In reflection, I don't even know why I want faster internets. All the online games I play anymore are either annoying flash games or nothing - even City of Villains lost it's allure to me. Perhaps because my connection to it was so slow. The important thing, I suppose, is that it presents me with a sort of precipice, that I am standing on a metaphorical edge of participating more fully with a world that I kind of hate. I realize that by being at least ostensibly Catholic (and more accurately, a kind of sarcastic nihilist) I should focus on removing myself from the world, and focusing more on the values that Are Very Important. So why is that so hard to do? It can't be that hard to live a celibate, drug-free life, wherein I am kind to others and lack the ambition to pollute myself with the ways of the world. I could give up eating meat today, get a haircut, join the Red Cross, and become a good person.

But therein lies the trouble. How good a person is that? Wouldn't it just be denying my personal impulses? The sermon at mass (TWO WEEKS AGO LOL) was detailing the importance of the sacrament of confession in the Catholic faith - how normal prayer and being a good person is enough to remove minor-league sin, but mortal sin can only be removed via confession. So honestly, Catholic Church, what is a mortal sin? Just about everything. Even thinking about committing a sin is apparently just as damning as actually committing one. Becoming Catholic can often seem like you're signing up for some kind of crooked deal, wherein there are a lot more restrictions than what you thought you'd be getting. And conveniently, the only way to remove these things is by going back to the very organization that is telling you that you're doing wrong.

I'd have a lot more blind faith if the Church hadn't been such an unholy terror in the past.

The point is, one must consider their interaction with the world, and how they're going to reconcile the crossovers between their public and private lives. I'm all for self-expression, but I acknowledge, very often, that there are some things which need to be withheld. Locke even stated something akin to this, that the rule of law must be paramount in a given society, so too must there be a kind of decorum for public interaction. I think that my two comrades at Elevennames can back me up when I say that the recent trend of the word "rape" being bandied about by videogame enthusiasts is, to say the least, distressing.

So here I am, left at the desk, staring at the DSL hookup box. Installing it (it's already paid for) will send me careening into a world that I'm not sure I want. Perhaps this is overmoralizing - to take the inevitable advancement of technology and assign to it moral undertones does seem a bit fallacious in the logic to me, a self-aggrandizing version of Gun Control. Guns don't kill people, after all, and computers don't create kiddie porn. In the end, one must participate in the world, and make ever escalating decisions that are inherent when the world is trusting you not to completely fuck something up because you're a perverted dumbass.

And really, shouldn't that be the Elevennames mission statement?

Participation in the world is obligatory anymore - to be seen as holding back is so baffling that it's almost uncategorized. Who doesn't have a cell phone in this day and age? In a few years, who won't have an iPhone, or it's cheaper equivalent? Personal accessories are a necessity to anyone who wants to communicate anymore. I'd worry more about corporatizing of personal communication if I wasn't certain that humanity is, if nothing else, too cheap to not pirate the things that it wants. It isn't a moral decision so much as it is a continuance of a series of moral trials, to remain a good person despite the temptation to be a bad one. I once heard from a very old Jesuit that the only real sin in this world is selfishness, and in the face of fast-as-DSL internets, the temptation to become a being concerned solely with his own entertainment is tempting indeed.