My perpetual hate on for Valentine's Day: high five!

Every year I go through this. I think VDay is my most hated day, with New Year's bringing up the rear. Hey, I'll be honest: I'm jealous when I see some squealing girl touting a bouquet of red roses as she climbs on the bus. I feel a bilious resentment rise up as I walk home, alone, staring into the windows of various, darkened restaurants and watching loving couples smarmily (if George Bush can make up words, so can I) gaze into each other's eyes. But do I really, really want that? No. Why? Let's dissect it.
The women that have presents delivered to them at work like the attention that their coworkers lavish them with. They like the fact that they are loved and they have the material goods to show it. Those flowers, those chocolates are the significantly cheaper version of an engagement ring which says: I belong to someone that wants to spend money on me and has thought of me on this particular day. In reality, this day is made for all the couples that are inept in every other aspect of their relationship. It's made for the guys that say, after you get together for dinner on a Wednesday, that they'll call you to make plans for Saturday night and then don't. And then forget that they said that they had in fact promised to call. It's for the guys that forget your birthday and exist in your life as you achieve momentous things, but are too self-absorbed (or ignorant) to praise you and celebrate those particular days. This day is a day for simpletons. You can't not know that this day is coming: it's so commercialized it's fucking ridiculous. Valentine's Day is for people that can't figure out the day to day, that have no originality and that think it genius to get reservations at some trendy restaurant where you'll be packed in like sardines and will have relatively little to say to one another because this day is a day like EVERY OTHER. What are you celebrating? You're celebrating love? You need a particular day to do this?
Wow. This sounds really bitter. I don't think I'm bitter. As it stands, right at this exact moment I'm very, very happy. I just get frustrated by the concept of this particular day. Do you need to be told, reminded and cajoled to lavish someone with love? And who is congratulating themselves on a job well done by having flowers or edible panties delivered to their loved one at work? And yes, I shouldn't be mad at the idea of ineffectual daters capitalizing on this day, but rather should direct my overall anxiety and puzzlement to the corporations that benefit from -and have created a monster out of - this particular day. It's just this: your flowers will be wilting on February 15th. Your expensive dinner has, at this point, made it's way through your digestive tract and is now... well, you get the picture.
Valentine's Day can be the easiest course of action. It's like paying for dinner, but not really paying attention when someone tells you that they had their personal best 10k that morning. It's like telling someone that they're amazing, but then not listening to what they have to say.
This Valentine's Day I will do what I always do. I will succumb to those feelings of inadequacy that I feel whenever coworkers get flowers, whenever someone other than me gets engaged, when people cram their tongues down one anothers' throats in my presence. For that one day I'll feel sorry for myself for whatever inane and banal reason. I'll secretly resent that no one is taking me for dinner. Then I'll get over it. I'll go to my running clinic and get a high five from Michael after I finish doing planks on the sidewalk outside the store.
It's all about the high fives.