Valentine's Slay

It's Valentine's Day and, in fact, has been all day. Lust -- I mean, love -- is in the air. I could not possibly forget this. Never, ever. Not on Valentine's Day at a high school.

This was my first Valentine's Day spent at high school (last year it fell on a Saturday, and I ended up doing something actually productive); I had no idea how crazy people get on February 14 when there's actual "love" going on. A girl I know got a hand-made valentine from her boyfriend... on retina-burning pink posterboard, complete with a teddy bear and probably some flowers and chocolates or something. Of course, there were balloons left and right. Even my English teacher got flowers during class.

And this week, the school is selling people their results of the personality/love test from several weeks ago. I, of course, being a sucker, went to buy my printout today.

"Kalilich," I said -- for that is my last name. "K-A-L," I added, as I usually do to help people who might otherwise start looking among the C's.

"Hmm..." or something to that effect, said the seniors at the desk. "Are you a sophomore?" they asked.

"Yeah," I said. For I was, and still am to this day. And they were looking in the box that had the sophomores' results.

After fruitless searching, one of them asked, "Who's your third hour teacher?"

(She actually said "third block"; we call them blocks because here they're much longer than an hour. But I'm going for the general idea here.)

My third hour/block was the class in which I had received the questionnaire in the first place. Seeing the connection, I answered: "Miss Grant."

"Oh, another Grant," she said to a supervisor standing nearby.

Apparently somebody didn't hand in her class's questionnaires, or something happened along the way, resulting not only in my not being able to receive my results and find out once and for all who I'm compatible with, but also some poor girls' not knowing that I'm good for them. (This is all theoretical, of course.) So that sort of blew my Valentine's Day to bits. Well, I had already been feeling down, so let's just say it didn't help any. My life is like an empty box of chocolates. I always know what I'm going to get: nothing.

At Tricks of the Trade, you can read a helpful tip for people in many professions. Recent entries include tricks for the chef, stage hand, farmer, corporate middle manager, and funeral celebrant. Even though you may have a boring life and/or job, you can still enjoy these tricks of various trades to see how professionals -- and others (for example, I've never heard of a professional funeral celebrant) -- manage to do what they do.