Let's Return To Third Grade

Valentine's Day went downhill after third grade. In third grade, everyone in the class spent the morning making sticky, heavily-glittered mailboxes. Evan Silverman's mom brought cupcakes, and after littering the floor with envelopes and trading orange hearts for purple, we retired to our desks, blissfully nauseous.

Indeed, the day's most traumatic decision was whether to write "love" or "from" on my valentines to the boys in the class.

The holiday was carefully regulated by adults intent on social and economic equality. We were told that if we wanted to bring a valentine for someone, we would have to bring valentines for everyone. And so, popular or scorned, we all got the same number of valentines and the same number of chalky heart candies. It was my first real introduction to communism.

But all too quickly, this rigid social control evaporated. By rough and rowdy seventh grade, Valentine's Day had become distinctly laissez-faire.

No more mandated valentines. No more watchful parents. The day's outcome would now be determined by the caprice of the free market rather than careful engineering.

I, for one, was not happy about this.

But when the day actually arrived, the invisible hand had shoved ten unsolicited valentines into my locker. Content with my lot, I looked to see what everyone else had gotten.

The pretty girl with the locker next to mine had received an enviable eighteen valentines. The guy two lockers down from me had gotten boxers and candy. And one lanky, acne-studded kid in our class had found just two lonely valentines lying on the floor of his locker, one of which was from our English teacher.

Stratification was becoming increasingly evident. I wasn't sure if I liked this new system of distribution. My suspicions were confirmed by another potentially humiliating version of the free market, the Valentine's Day dance.

Having attained the gigantic height of 5'6" by the age of thirteen, I was not exactly prime slow dance material. My smile (a mouthful of metal) and my hair (in the process of growing out) didn't add much charm to my shiny visage.

To make matters worse, I didn't seem to possess any of the feminine wiles favored by my peers. I didn't wear colored mascara or own a Guess denim skirt. My mother wouldn't even let me get my ears pierced.

As a student council member, I was mostly able to avoid the horror of the situation. I spent my time filling punch bowls, taping up trails of crepe paper and distracting chaperones bent on separating the couples dancing a little too close.

But inevitably, the deejay would play "Lady in Red" or "Wonderful Tonight" or some other weepy teen dance tune, and I would have to roam the dance floor, pretending that I was looking for someone, or go hide in the bathroom until the song was over.

All told, I was painfully impoverished when it came to the adolescent currency of slow dances.

The beautiful thing about the free market, though, is that it encourages innovation. My American history class hadn't taught us about Social Darwinism for nothing.

So I decided to reassess my goals and change my tactics. I wasn't counting on getting shorter or blonder or cuter, so I decided to create a new niche for myself. I was an avid reader of Sports Illustrated, and I was great at dispensing love advice, even if I didn't have the opportunity to use any of it myself.

And it worked. By ninth grade, I was no longer broken-heartedly inspecting the color of the onion dip. I still made the occasional punch bowl run, but could now return to a respectable number of partners. But I still didn't like the wild new system. I resented its disorganization, its unpredictability and its unfairness.

Call me a communist, but I wanted to go back to third grade.

Even now, with a definite date for Valentine's Day, I wouldn't mind harkening back to the days of control--when we all set time aside to make our valentines and our mailboxes, when we would all get the same number of valentines and everyone would spend their evening discussing the relative merits of chocolate-covered cherries and Hershey Kisses.