As someone who got totally screwed with a Christmas birthday, I refuse to give up a single other holiday. So I celebrate Valentine’s day and all of its commercialism. I don’t care how made up it is or by whom, I don’t care how stressed out it makes people trying to make dinner reservations, and I don’t care about people who are too cool for such hokey things as paper Valentines and candy hearts. “Bring it!” I say.

I hope you have a car crash. I hope your roof leaks and that you have to spend thousands of dollars on a plumber. I hope that you lose your job. I hope that your husband has an affair and you get divorced, that your dad has a heart attack and dies, that your mom gets dementia and kills someone driving the family Buick, that you get robbed, and that your house burns to the ground with your most treasured family heirlooms inside. Finally, I hope that one of your children dies of cancer and that the other suffers a traumatic brain injury leading to a lifetime of diaper wearing and drool wiping.

I’m sorry. I am really really sorry to be wishing all of these awful, terrible things on you. My stomach hurts and my throat is tight as I write these things. I don’t even know most of you and yet here I am wishing that bad things will befall you. It’s not that I’m a masochist, I promise, I just suffer from something called the gambler’s fallacy.