Valentine’s Day is one of my favorite/least favorite holidays of the year. I simultaneously love it and dread it.
Like this:
Or sometimes like this:
But no matter which end of the spectrum you fall on this February, here are some approaches that might help you enjoy it more:
1) GERTRUDE STEIN VALENTINE PARADOX
While cutting up an old Scientific American to make valentines, I stumbled across an article entitled “Stein’s Paradox in Statistics.” It began: “The best guess about the future is usually obtained by computing the average of past events. Stein’s paradox defines circumstances in which there are estimators better than the arithmetic average.” The rest of the article has since been lost to antiquity and glitter – but this fragment made me think of two things: Gertrude Stein and the possibility of love.
Isn’t the hope for love something like Stein’s Paradox in Statistics? We hope that the future might hold something more surprising and lovely than the mean arithmetic average of our past mistakes and experiences. And that maybe there are some better estimators we might not even know that will help make this present (or future) chance the best one yet. And perhaps this feeling has statistical merit. Happy valentine’s day!
And I know that this paradox was not in fact invented by Gertrude Stein – but what if it was? I can think of no better place to look for clues than in her stunning, strange, and very lovely “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson.” (You can Read the poem in its entirety — or imagine you are sitting in her parlor and have Gertrude read it to you herself — which is what I recommend.)
2) ANTI-VALENTINE
If Valentines themselves give you hives, you might try making an Anti-Valentine. It’s not about hate, it’s about preventative medicine. Here’s one definition:
* ANTI-VALENTINE ??? (n) a curative measure like an antidote, most often administered during the month of February; a kind of medicinal tonic, often melancholy, bitter, or dark – traditionally constructed from paper, glue, and epistolary materials
You can begin crafting your anti-valentine at any time – and you you can always decide later whether to send it, hide it, put it on your mantel, post it in a public place, or burn it in your winter fire. The main point is the act of making it — especially if you can make it in a communal setting with other anti-valentine and/or valentine makers.
3) LUPERCALIA
Or try celebrating a different holiday altogether. For example, the Roman festival of Lupercalia (Festival of Wolves) occurs from February 13th to February 15th. Focusing on purification and fertility, this day traditionally involved much drinking, carousing, and a ceremony of lustration (lustratio) where young men (Luperci) clad only in goat skins ran around the Palentine lashing people with “good luck” strips of goat.
Buona fortuna!
And with that – I wish you all a good holiday: love or no love, paradox or antidote, goatskins or wolves.
