I feel vaguely obligated to do a Valentine's day post ...

... but I remember being single and how much Valentine's Day always depressed me, since I inevitably broke up with my boyfriends before it and I was never a particularly sociable teenager, preferring the company of adults and butterflying from one social group to another, which was lonely but relatively drama-free.

Yet Valentine's Day is a big jewelry occasion.  So it relates.

Kind of.

Let me see if I have a single picture of jewelry with a heart on it to post ...

Nope!  I had something at Christmas, but it's very Christmassy.  Well, who cares.

See?  That button at the very back is heart-shaped.  No, I promise.

I wonder what went so wrong in taking this photo ... I might have tried to take it indoors.  That's never good.

Last Valentine's day, Megan and I went to the Living Desert zoo so I could do fieldwork for one of my anthropology papers, "Conservation and the Narrative of Stewardship."  Afterward, we lugged our sunburnt selves around Palm Desert for an hour trying to find a place with room not at the bar since I was not yet of drinking age, and not with $30 entrees and mandatory valet parking, and we wound up in a Coco's with all the other gay couples who live in the Palm Springs area, and we ordered a fruit-and-cheese appetizer platter but it was the first day it had been available so they didn't know how to cook it and it took three tries to get the Brie baked properly, so we were in the restaurant for well over two hours grazing on improperly cooked cheeses and talking about the White Man's Burden savior narrative and the conflation of the animal body with the exoticized body.

This is one of my best and most treasured "couple memories," and it involves no chocolates, no jewelry, no expensive tickets, no dressing up nicely, no Valentiney things at all.

Conclusion: I'm obviously really bad at this, and I'm okay with that.