Who Needs Boys Anyway?
Valentine's Day can be fun for singles, too. Second-year College student Elizabeth Linsley and her dorm hall went out for dinner at the Biltmore Grill last year to celebrate what she called "Singles Awareness Day." "One girl bought us all roses, so we each had a rose," Linsley said. "Another girl wrote a poem for all of the girls on my hall." The hallmates dressed up in red and pink and enjoyed the night, guys or no guys. "We hit on the waiters and split dessert," Linsley said. "It was fun."
Three Strikes and She's Out
Despite numerous attempted romantic gestures, Cupid always seems to miss his mark when it comes to first-year College student Amy Van Deusen. "Three years ago, my boyfriend gave me the cutest, sweetest little puppy," she said. "That night, the puppy left me 45 piles of Valentine's presents on the kitchen floor." Two years ago, Van Deusen's boyfriend took her out to an elegant restaurant, but dinner was on her. Last year, Van Deusen went out for yet another romantic dinner. This time, Van Deusen found herself traipsing home on a two-mile walk through the snow when her date's car broke down. This year, she has decided to spend Valentine's locked inside her room. She put it best when she said, "Me and Valentines, we just don't get along."
Toot to Say I Love You
Feb. 14 means different things to different people. For some, it's just another day in the middle of a very cold, though very short, month. For others, it means endless shopping, a monstrous budget and a trick or two up their sleeves. For second-year College student Ashley Taylor it meant finding the perfect (farting) man. Taylor met with her boyfriend at 8:30 a.m. last year to exchange Valentine's Day gifts before her 9 a.m. class. Obviously having given careful thought to his gift, Taylor's boyfriend presented her with a gift certificate for a massage to help her through a stressful week. What did Ashley give to her sweetheart to let him know how much he's loved? "I gave him a figure of a little man who pulls his pants down and farts," Taylor said. "He thought it was hilarious." Just for good measure, she threw in some chocolates too.
Mom's Sneaky Plan
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Second-year College student Ryan Hymel wanted to find a special way to ask his steady girlfriend to the prom. He took her out for dinner to a Chinese restaurant on Valentine's Day. But this was Chinese with a twist: Hymel had secretly purchased his own fortune cookies and, in an elaborate procedure that involved tweezers, inserted his own typed message into the cookie. When the waiter brought their fortune cookies to the table, Hymel quickly switched his personalized cookie with the restaurant's, while his date was engrossed in her lo mein. When she broke open the cookie, she found an offer to the prom instead of a fortune. "Operation Cookie" had a happy ending. Hymel's girlfriend said "Yes!" and then found flowers waiting for her in his car after dinner. Hymel's cookie charade, however, earned him the scorn of his male friends, who told Ryan, "Man, you're making us look bad!"
Happy Valentine's Day - Dad
Second-year College student Amirah Shareef was in her senior year of high school, and every year on Valentine's Day other students had gotten candy and flowers delivered to the school from admirers. Shareef was sitting in class, musing about her history of never receiving any of these tokens of affection, when a voice from the class P.A. system blared, "Amirah Shareef could you come to the office? We have something for you." With the whole class "oohing" and "ahwing," Shareef left for the office. "I was like, 'Oh my God, someone actually sent me something!" Shareef said. "I started thinking about all the guys that I knew liked me." When she got down to the office there was a huge bouquet of colorful flowers waiting for her. But when she looked at the card, she saw that the floral arrangement was, in fact, for her father - from none other than one of Shareef's own teachers. She was merely the delivery girl. "I was like, 'Damn,'" Shareef said. "And at that moment I really did not want to walk back to class."
Unsettled Love
Second-year College student Nina Aquilina thought she was in a normal, non-committal high school relationship. But then Bill, the boyfriend, took a dramatic turn and, as she put it, became stalker-like. "He would call my house three to four times a day," Aquilina said. "He wrote me a lot of notes telling me how much I meant to him and that I was his heart and soul." After dating for only two weeks, Aquilina broke up with him. Later that year, when Valentine's Day rolled around, Aquilina was eating dinner when a delivery of flowers interrupted her. "I was really excited to see I got the flowers until I saw who they were from," she said. "He sent a dozen red roses with a card reading, 'I love you, Love Bill.'" Disgusted, Aquilina went back to the dinner table when she started to feel sick to her stomach. "I tried to contain myself," Aquilina said. "But the thought of those flowers just kept playing on my mind and all of a sudden a wave a nausea engulfed me and I took off running to the bathroom." Although she started throwing up in her hands on the frantic rush to the bathroom, she finally made it to the safety of the toilet. "The next morning the flowers were gone into the garbage," she added, needlessly.
A Clean Break
First-year College student Noelle Yang spent one Valentine's Day flirting with disaster. During her sophomore year of high school, Yang spent the big day on a ski trip with her boyfriend and the rest of the school. A ski trip seems like it might be a romantic setting, but in this case it didn't turn out that way. While snowboarding over a big jump, Yang took a fall. "I landed splat on my face," Yang said. "I had to go to the hospital. It turned out I had fractured my wrist." At the school Valentine's dinner that night, her fellow students tried to make her feel better - by singing her a song.
- Vignettes compiled by Cavalier Daily Associate Editors
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