bye bye to the too good to be true kind of love

shot on tz artistic with my sx-70

do you remember, when you were younger, how each year your teacher would dedicate an hour or two to having the class decorate brown paper bags with hearts and arrows and more hearts and more arrows? you'd do it in anticipation of feb. 14, the day when you would then tape the bags to the front of your desks and walk around the classroom slipping store-bought valentines into each others' bags?

well, i do. i also remember, at some point, i became really self-conscious about what it was that those valentines said. i can't say which grade i was in at the time. just that it had to have been elementary school. in any case, just like the year before and probably the couple years before that, i had gone to the store with my mom to pick out the perfect valentines. i thought i'd found them when i came across a box of x-men valentines. the back of the box looked promising: wolverine, gambit, cyclopse, storm, magneto. all the usual suspects. and they looked cool.

but when i got home and started addressing them, i ran into a problem. there weren't enough of the sort of valentines that a boy would give to another boy. you know, the sort that didn't imply love. the sort that were perfectly neutral. there was one in particular i remember. it had on it a picture of magneto and the words on the card said something like "i'm attracted to you." it was a play, of course, on magneto's magnetic superpowers. but to me, way back then, the idea of giving that to another boy seemed awful.

there were others like that, i'm sure, but that's the one that stuck out to me the most. so, i did what i figured any elementary schooler would do, and got out the whiteout. i started erasing the phrases that the card company had pre-printed on my valentines and began writing in new ones.

the next day, after all the valentines had been passed out, i started going through the stack. i opened up one from a kid named robbie (i don't know why i can remember his name). apparently, he, too, had settled on those x-men cards. but he didn't seem to have my same hang up. he'd given me the same magneto card that i'd stressed about the night before. only minus the whiteout.

it's weird the things you worry about when you're young and a bad valentine can seem like the end of the world.

anyhow, given that we don't make paperbags anymore, i'll post your valentine here, a song by edward sharpe and the magnetic zeros:



(for those who may have noticed, i'm using a new mp3 player on this blog, but i'm still uploading the files into my dropbox. that is to say, they're still available for free download. just right click on the band's name. otherwise, use the built-in player for a one-off listen.)