This Valentine's Day, KISS.
Hold it, horny same-side sitters at South Dining Hall.
I didn't write that in all caps to encourage you locking lips over your spicy sea nuggets. KISS just happens to be an acronym for Keep It Simple, Stupid - an adage my high school English teacher pounded into us long-winded essay writers.
Hold it again, horny same-side sitters: don't zoom right over to the Question of the Day. This isn't a column about writing.
It's a column for lovebirds.
UR A QT.
Yes, you. Aww. Did you smile a little bit?
Now imagine that simple message stamped onto a tiny, chalky, heart-shaped candy. Even sweeter.
Necco's candy conversation hearts are the archetype of simplicity, a sort of KISS Shangri-La, if you will. (I should admit here that "if you will" is the ultimate un-KISS, however. What does that phrase mean, anyway? And why do professors use it, and that other pretentious expression, "as it were," every three sentences? "As it were," you say? As what was? Where, and when? Please, professors, tomorrow is Valentine's Day. KISS.)
Adorned with sweet nothings from BE MINE to TRUE LOVE to the latest addition E-MAIL ME (say, those folks over at Necco sure are hip to the technology groove), the .28 square inch gems pack a romantic punch.
For example, back in third grade, each student was required to give a valentine to every student in the class, if he was giving them at all.
(Or wait ... was this just true of my overly sensitive, feelings-obsessed Catholic grammar school? That may be the case, as this was the same institution that required us to wear index cards on yarn around our necks for three months proclaiming IALAC: I Am Loving And Caring. Now, I'm all for acronyms, but Ms. Perez the art teacher shouldn't be growling at third graders, "Either go back to your room and get your IALAC card, or I'm making you watch the Renaissance Art video again.")
Anyway, when a fellow third-grader offered me a Power Rangers card with a lavender DREAM GIRL heart scotch-taped to the top, I just about IALACked him right then and there. Imagine my horror when, as I was calculating our love potential through a game of M.A.S.H., a classmate showed me the conversation heart he'd given her: MARRY ME. Suddenly, the lavender residue on the back of my tongue didn't taste as sweet.
I'm telling you, these things pack a punch.
Someone once criticized me for the one-liners I graffiti on friends' Facebook walls. Of him I ask, how would the following look on a .28 square inch heart?
Since the dawn of time, man has loved woman; so, too, does my heart burn for yours with the fiery passion of a hundred burning suns. Blue as the sea are your eyes; like spun gold is your hair; redder than the sweetest cherry are your lips. It would give me the greatest of pleasure if you would be so kind as to bestow upon me the honor of your valentine-ship, as it were.
Huh?
Just KISS.
And okay, horny same-side sitters - if you want, kiss.
