Happy Fear Day, Tune-Up fans!  (Or, Valentine’s Day, if you’re committed to living a life of mindless literalism and social norms and having people actually understand what you’re talking about.)

Before you all inundate me with messages about the glories of love and life and birds and bees and whatnot, let me pause for a second.  Love is great.  Love is glorious.  Love is also terrifying, difficult, and a royal pain in the ass.  Think of all the hundreds of billions of inputs that endlessly feed into making you who you are – the person who takes their coffee black, who prefers staying up late to getting up early, who prefers big groups to small gatherings, and will never under any circumstances wear pleat-front pants.  You and everyone you see every day are Olympic-sized swimming pools of memory-infused preferences and experience-born trigger points, some conscious and some so parked in your subconscious you don’t even know it.  In a way, there are seven billion unique languages on the planet.  And yet, in the midst of all of this, we meet people, we fall in love, and, sometimes, we find our languages have a common root.  Amazing.

This is what I ponder every February 14th that rolls around, and it always makes me think of those people who are in the beginning stages of the whole love saga.  No matter how much sang-froid one was born with, it’s impossible not to wonder about the future.  And because, in my mind, V Day is also Fear Day, it does kind of put one on the offensive.  Hit it, Patti Jo.  “You’re gonna be downright in shame if I find that you’re playing any game.  Make me believe in you.”