The World is Sick

I am so Bored

As is customary, I am dedicating a post to Valentine’s Day. Of all the things that human beings could celebrate, we have to celebrate an emotion that wasn’t invented until the middle ages, and wasn’t involved in marriage until the 20th century. That’s right, there wasn’t any such thing as marriage based on love until very recently in human history. It was all match-made based on bogus and arbitrary qualities that “professionals”(with as much credibility as wine tasters, I might add) deemed to be important. I’m looking at you, astrologers. Your precious constellations no longer sit on the paths of the sun’s risings. They haven’t done so for centuries, and all of our zodiac signs should mean different things today.

I probably sound quite bitter and angry, but that is only because I had to endure 7 hours of time wasting in blistering heat, watching the bloody Winter Olympics repeats over and over and over again. Bugger.

I just wanted to say that there are so many other things we should celebrate. The day that Darwin published The Origin. The day that Tesla accidentally killed someone with his lightning death machine. Whatever, all I’m saying is that we should recognise things that have actually helped us, instead of things that have caused torrents of misery, heartbreak, and lightening wallets. I know there are a lot of significant events related to important discoveries or ideas, and it wouldn’t be feasible to celebrate them all. But really, look at all our holidays. Two new year’s days; fine, to mark a cycle. Easter, Good Friday, Christmas, Deepavali. In other parts of the world, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Jerusalem day, Passover… Am I making this clear enough? All our holidays and festivals happen to be based on things that the celebrants of each one would not agree upon if asked.

I’ll stop ranting now. I actually intended to make this post a well-written article style informative text, but watching the same Swedish guy in tights ski down a slope four times is very unmotivational.

Anyway, I shall present to you a story. Yes, it’s related to the occasion.

There once lived a princess named Psyche. She was Greek. Or Roman. I forget which. Psyche was the most beautiful woman in all of the known world. So beautiful, that she caught the jealous attention of Venus, the goddess of all things kinky and involving fuzzy handcuffs. For some reason only conceivable in the fathoms of the female mind, Venus decided that the best way to deal with her envy was to get her son, Cupid, to use his golden arrows to make Psyche fall in love with a hideous monster.

While resistant at first, Cupid eventually complied to his mother’s wish. He visited Psyche during the night, preparing to scratch her with the tip of a golden arrow. However, she woke up. This startled him, for although he was invisible, Psyche’s gaze was locked upon his eyes. In a panic, Cupid accidentally scratched himself with the arrow, causing himself to fall in love with her.

Upon reporting this to Venus, she became angry. She placed a curse upon Psyche, such that she would never meet a suitable husband. Why she did not do this in the first place, I don’t really know. Cupid was greatly upset by this, and so he refused to fire another golden arrow for Venus.

Several months passed, and not a single man, woman, nor beast fell in love or consummated. This concerned Venus, for her reputation as a goddess of fertility was at stake. Eventually, she submitted to Cupid’s demands; to have Psyche for himself.

The earth was restored, but somewhere down there Psyche’s parents were beginning to worry why no man desired their daughter for a wife. They consulted an oracle, who told them to bring her and leave her at a mountain, for she was not created for mortal men. Upon doing so, a great wind swept her away and brought her to a hidden palace in a valley. There, she was tended to by invisible servants until nightfall, when Cupid arrived to -one can assume- have amazing godly sex with her. However, he also demanded that he never be seen, and that they only looked upon each other in the cover of darkness. This happened several times.

Eventually, Psyche became pregnant with Cupid’s child. Psyche’s sisters, jealous(this seems to be a really common theme here) of her, planted ideas in her head that the thing she was meeting every night was in fact a monstrous serpent that planned to devour her and the child. They told her to wait till Cupid was asleep, and then to light a lantern to discover tell for sure.

For the sake of a storyline, Psyche went along with this plan and prepared a lantern by the bedside. Upon lightning it, she recognised the form of Cupid, accidentally pricked herself with a golden arrow. This sort of makes you wonder if Cupid ever thought how dangerous it would be bringing a quiver of arrows to bed. Psyche was consumed with desire, and leaned in to kiss her immortal husband. As she did this, a drop of oil fell from the lantern and landed on his face. He woke up, realised that he had been recognised, and flew away.

Man, this story is long.

So anyway, to take revenge on her sisters for being such conniving… people, she went to them and tricked them both into thinking that Cupid had chosen them to be his bride. She told them to go to the top of the mountain and jump off, to allow the winds to take them to him. They went to the mountain and died.

In an effort to find Cupid, Psyche went to a temple of Venus. There, Venus set an impossible challenge for her. First, she was tasked to separate a basket of mixed grains before nightfall. Fortunately, some ants took pity on her and performed the task for her. Enraged by this, Venus set a second challenge: To obtain golden wool from bloodthirsty, carnivorous sheep. This time, Psyche was advised by a river god to wait until noontime, when the sheep were asleep, allowing her to pick strands of wool off the bushes unharmed.

Venus was really not happy about this. She claimed that all the stress regarding Cupid and Psyche was making her lose some of her beauty, and told Psyche to retrieve a box of it from the Queen of the Underworld. Because I feel like I’ve been typing forever, I’ll skip the details here and say that Psyche managed to do this, but is overcome with temptation. She opened the box, hoping to take some of the beauty for herself. Instead of beauty, she finds an essence of sleep, which caused her to fall into a coma. Cupid came, used his divine magic to wake her up, and then went to Jupiter to plead for help. Jupiter and the other gods decided to allow the union of Cupid and Psyche, and also granted her immortality.

At the end of all of this, nothing happens to Venus for being such a bitch in the first place. This isn’t a very good story. In fact, this entire story sort of ruins any good feelings one might have about Valentine’s Day. I’m sorry for taking your time.