set my heart on fire!!!! immediately!!!!!!!!
on loving valentine's day, astrological dabbling, my tchotchke obsession, and embracing healthy selfishness.
When you’re in your freshman year of college, living in a dorm — which, for some people, is the first time in their lives that they’ve really been away from home — Resident Assistants, as they’re called, will sometimes organize opportunities for families to send their kids stuff that the staff puts together to help them adjust. My freshman year RA (who ended up snitching on me for “soliciting” because I had a joke sign on the door advertising tarot readings and then disappeared under mysterious circumstances during the second semester) decided to reach to all of our parents and ask them to write a Valentine’s Day note to us. It’s a sweet idea, right? So, my mother, bless her heart, began her note like this:
Hi Elise,
You know I think most holidays are fake, and with Valentine’s Day, it’s no different.
She went on to say she loves me, which I appreciated since I also love her, but I’ll never get over how amazing that intro is. Most of you don’t know my mom, and therefore have no idea what her delivery would sound like (which she’d 1000% do with a straight face — maybe a crinkle in her brow before she asks why I’m laughing and then starts laughing herself), but trust me, it’s funny.
I open this edition of the newsletter with this anecdote because she’s right, of course: Valentine’s Day is — like all now-secular holidays, to varying degrees — made up. It’s a cash grab. It’s something to fill that one seasonal aisle in Rite Aid between New Year’s and St. Patrick’s Day. It’s a reason to buy candy. It keeps restaurants afloat through the spring. It ensures the world will be overpopulated with my fellow Scorpios forever as long as people forget to take their birth control night of. I actually thought about investigating the broader history of the holiday to write an explainer here or something, but I’m going to be very real with you all: I don’t care. Frankly, I’m not interested in what the original St. Valentine was all about! Was he a good guy? I’d hope so, but if he’s esteemed within the Catholic church, there’s a good chance that he wasn’t! So! I’m not going to dig, and I’m not going to research, because I don’t care.
But I do really love Valentine’s Day.
Am I ever in a relationship when Valentine’s Day comes around? Of course not! Do I ever go out or make plans on the day? Almost never! I don’t need to get into my actual romantic history or how I’m forced to roll my eyes on the dating apps or how young men at large need help, big time or how even if they got that help, I’d still be a difficult person to be in a relationship with because I probably need help too — trust me, all of that it has nothing to do with what I love about the day at its core.
I guess my obsession lies mainly in the iconography. In my mind, my Valentine’s Day is probably a cross between the actual holiday and my absolute favorite holiday, Halloween — more Nick Cave’s “Do You Love Me? Pt. 1” than “My Cherie Amour,” if you get what I mean. More the Timber Timbre guy singing, “I’ll be dreaming every night of you / Shaking at the sight of you” like he’s recording live from Twin Peaks than a certain more famous guy singing, “Love me tender, love me true.” More The Shangri-Las singing about their dead boyfriends than….anyone singing about their alive boyfriends, frankly. More Set My Heart On Fire Immediately than anything in the world.
As Ann Powers, one of the greatest rock critics of all time, wrote in her 1993 Village Voice piece entitled “Houses of the Holy”: “Even as the mind dissects the chocolate box semiotics of romance, the body can feel lovesickness as sickness unto death.” Is any of that sustainable or realistic? Probably not, and I know that. But it’s the dizzying, stupid delirium I’m here to celebrate! Not Instagram posts where you and your boyfriend show us what you ordered at Cheesecake Factory! I mean, god bless! I’m sure Kyle is enjoying his pasta, but I don’t care, beloved!!
And because I’m me, I have to inform you that there’s an astrological reason behind this fascination of mine. Don’t worry, I’ll keep it brief.
If you know any astrological sign, you probably know your sun sign — this sign is only one of the three major placements in your birth chart, meaning you only have a third of your own basic astrological story, which is why horoscopes just based on that one placement are bullshit. All of my major three placements are traditionally considered to be “intense” (or that’s the word everyone likes using, either way), but I have this one second tier placement that always seemed out of place to me: my Libra Venus. Your Venus placement usually correlates to your behavior in relationships or what you look for in terms of connections with others, but also to your relationship with beauty and aestheticism. Needless to say, I was always confused because no one has ever accused me of exhibiting any overtly Libra-esque traits (charming, well-balanced, conflict avoidant), but someone pointed out to me that Libra (along with Taurus) is the sign where Venus is in power; apparently, this means people with that placement have a certain kind of honed visual/aesthetic sense.
I did some more reading and figured out that my placement was in the 8th house — the house ruled by Scorpio — and things started making a little bit more sense: it’s not only the native house of death and rebirth, but, according to a semi-legit source, “tomb robbers, escaped prisoners, demons, vampires and wolfmen,” as well as the occult or the esoteric at large. Combine the two, and there’s an obsessive need for everything to look…well, haunted. It was probably my biggest astrology ah-ha moment to date. We’ll get further into my witchcraft practice at a later time, friends.
To be honest, all I really know about the original St. Valentine is that he was martyred and made patron saint of love, epilepsy and beekeepers. Just the visual idea of all of those things co-existing side by side makes me swoon. That’s what Valentine’s Day is all about, people! Bring on the fucking bees!!!!
To me, this ties back into my love of…well, let’s not call it hoarding, because I think it’s something else. I wouldn’t call myself materialistic, but I am a definite disciple of the tchotchke — my Russian great-grandmother supposedly called knickknacks of this kind “shoucky poucky” (I have no idea if this is real slang or how to actually spell it). It’s kind of what I was talking about a few newsletters ago about my version of spell-casting: I find great comfort in imbuing small items with so much personal meaning that they become sacred to me. In bags and on shelves and in dusty corners, there are small ceramic animals or ribbons or tin wall hangings that mean more than anyone could ever understand. They feel like tangible adoration that I can physically hold against my chest.
I have a specific penchant for these things that appear to be either old or vaguely unsettling or ornate or cheap — hopefully at least two of those things at once. I think of myself as a collector, but not one with…you know, an actual valuable collection. It’s like collecting evidence of my life and movement, of my city, of my self-possession. I couldn’t tell you what the fuck I did with the one (1) ugly necklace my middle school boyfriend gave me, but I still have all of the collages I’ve made since then, cutting up magazines articles and pictures of artists and my friends and scraps of my own handwriting to visualize what the inside of my head looks like.
I’m actually sort of superstitious about my own handwriting too — like the essence of my being is trapped in it or something, I don’t know. My thoughts and feelings are contained in the way I write things, rather than the content I actually write. I could write something as innocuous as “I can’t believe she hasn’t called me back, it’s so weird,” but the specific scratch of the pen? The way I’ve smeared the fresh ink by throwing the notebook across the room and letting it slide down my comforter, ruining it? It contains the terror of the situation. There’s hindsight at play here, sure, but I can feel the pit at the center of my chest when I wrote it, like I’m holding the twist of it against me. The fact that it was important enough to write down on paper proves a little piece of my soul is cut out and bled into that ink. I hang those things on my wall with the other tchotchkes sometimes.
I’ve had a few notes that I’ve hung up like religious idols. I’m not sure where I saw the phrase initially (probably Florence Welch’s book, now that I’m thinking about it), but for a while I had a small note taped to the wall in my last apartment reading “NO ONE IS NOT LOVED.” It became my mantra, and I’d repeat it to myself every time I felt that lonely pit open up in my chest again. It sounds pathetic, but it was reassuring to think, “Someone right now, somewhere, has to love me. They can’t not. So they do.” I wrote it down, believing that would immediately make it true, and hung it next to my desk in my bedroom. That’s where my father saw it while visiting and laughed at it. “What the hell does that mean?” Later that night, he worked it into a completely unrelated joke somehow, which is always a sign that he thinks something is ridiculous. No one who is struggling can ever have their thing to cling onto; he’s like a child who needs to pry it out of your hands to prove he’s stronger and doesn’t even need to try. “Hey, I don’t know if you guys know this….but have you ever considered that NO ONE is not…”
I imagined the snap of the neck, but didn’t hear it, so I kept a straight face in the moment. I hid the note in a box the second I got back to my room and my family left, and I couldn’t tell you where that one-time-idol is now. I think there was another scribble in that Florence book that said “I don’t want anything now or ever again.” Maybe I’ll adopt that one next.
To get back on topic, all of this worship of the fake holiday is not to say I haven’t had tough Valentine’s Days before; I remember one year where most of my other friends had significant others — or at least other plans if they were single — and the lack of a “galentine’s day” celebration (as people online call it) had me feeling miffed. The feeling wasn’t one of jealousy, but a realization of my own loneliness at that time. A reckoning, if you will. My living situation that particular year had been a strange one — and this was the February right before the pandemic started, so it had nothing to do with the isolation to come. My roommate at that time had her own issues and her own life stuff going on, and I don’t want to air her personal business out here, but let’s just say that even though we were friends, I never felt I had a place where I could just collapse and be.
Because we were all busy, I felt completely cut off from my other friends, stuck in this room with this person who I didn’t know how to confide in. To be frank, I sort of lost my mind. The day was surrounded by weeks of probably the closest thing to a nervous breakdown I've experienced to date. It was this specific set of circumstances that triggered it, I guess. I still don’t know how to really explain it. In fact, I kind of only came out of it at the beginning of that March with a weird sense of rebirth: I felt more comfortable in my body — like I’d truly grown into myself for the first time — and more optimistic about the future. Of course, the world shut down two weeks later. So much for my instincts.
That one depressive (not melancholy or meaningful, just literally devoid of feeling) Valentine’s Day sort of turned the whole thing around for me — like it invoked a break in the darkness. The following Valentine’s Day, I made tons of handmade decorations. I got dressed up. I refused to be alone. I watched Rosemary’s Baby in the morning and genuinely grinned my way through it, because John Cassavetes fixes everything. I drank and took pictures with my friends and we watched When Harry Met Sally at night. I thought about how I had never run into Billy Crystal at Strand and how that was really weird, if you think about it — everyone has seen someone famous at Strand except for me! Suspicious! Anyway, it had me thinking about this “preservation of the self,” in heavy quotes, that I take on with the tchotchkes. That year, I kept the Valentine’s Day decorations hung up wayyyy longer than necessary. Definitely into April or May. They became like idols in themselves.
I like to take Valentine’s Day as an excuse to be selfish at this point. Once, way back before anything else I’ve described here happened, I shared my concern that I am a selfish person with my friend. “Yeah, but that would make sense, wouldn’t it?” they said, without even thinking about it. “It sounds like you have to look out for yourself a lot of the time. If no one else is there, it’s just survival for you.”
If have no idea if that’s the truth or if it’s just something they said to be nice, but that happened at least seven or eight years ago, and I think about it more often than I’d like to admit. It comes up whenever I’m faced with this idea of romance, or lack thereof. The thing is, “lack” feels like the wrong word. Especially right now. Whether that honorable selfishness applies to me or not, I do put aside February 14th as one of my tchotchkes: an altar holding of my former selves, imbued with meaning because they contain me and my wonder. What a notion.
I wish all of you love and bees. Extra bees, if possible.
To celebrate, I made a themed playlist for you all. They’re love songs, but love songs that are either ugly or angry or stupid or eerie or gorgeous or a combination of all of those things. Hopefully my embedding attempts work. <3 Enjoy. Listen and fall madly in love with yourself, please and thank you.