If you want to read a pretty love story for Valentine's, don't bother stopping here. Go read about the love affair of Catherine the Great & Grigory Potemkin. Apparently, altho their emotional & intellectual connection sometimes faded, their sexual chemistry never wavered. When Potemkin died Catherine said, "Nothing will ever be the same. It is impossible to replace him since another person like him would first have to be born..."Yesterday I went to see The Gates at Central Park, along with the rest of New York. I wish I could say that I saw the unfurling, because that sounds so appropriately majestic. It was new & bright & it went on for ages; something about the regularity of spacing & the neat rolling rows of perspective lines felt affirmative. It looked very Olympic & sportive too, orange & fluttery & proud. All of the people walking between them seemed suddenly citizens of the same city, all there to see the same massive thing in the park. It was very pretty just to be in the park in winter at all, with the big topiary animals & globes wrapped in Christmas lights hanging from the trees at Tavern on the Green. Round the bend, & we were between a statue of a falconer on a hill & a bridge that overlooked a mostly frozen lake & a group (gaggle? I don't know) of ducks. We watched them waddle about the ice to where it stopped & became water. They circled the surface a bit & then took turns filing off the edge to skim away. I thought it was like the question from Catcher in the Rye had been answered. I mean, after all that, it seems to me that the ducks just stay there.
Afterwards we went to see my roommate at her diamond shop. She let us try on blinding bright rings worth tens & sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were very beautiful & very brilliant, but I kept thinking about the hold that they had on people & how inflated in value they were. It isn't to say I (probably) wouldn't accept one. But definitely not as an engagement ring. Engagement rings, diamond or no diamond, bring up all kinds of conflicting meanings as it is. Slapping a big, over-priced, overblown, "must-have" rock on top just makes it a little bit gross. So yeah. Happy Valentine's Day blah blah blah.
