Why You Love Me

I do not have a Valentine. This does not bother me. I even went and took the “you+love=???” quiz, just in case you don’t want to take my word for it. My result was “care factor zero.”

Given this, you might expect me to be down on the concept of Valentine’s Day. In reality I’m OK with it. I may be ambivalent about my own relationship status, but I’m all for everyone else finding someone. I like listening to people talk about their sweethearts. It strengthens my faith in humanity. It makes me happy. Therefore, I am devoting this post to love.

Despite the extraordinary number of quizzes out there begging to tell me all about who I’m in love with, we’re going to skip over those, because we already know that I’m in love with my periodontist (XOX Dr B.!), and I’m not the sort of girl who can handle more than one love at a time. I’m kind of traditional that way.

Instead I’m going to focus on who loves me. With a score of 65 out of 100 on the “Do people love you?” quiz, I learned that “some people probably love you.” That’s reassuring.

What counts as some? According to the “How many people secretly love you?” quiz the answer is three. You know who you are, even if I don’t.

As for those whose love I’m aware of, that would include my children, who tell me every day, and my father, but sadly, according to the “Does your Mom love you?” quiz, my mother doesn’t love me very much. It might include the misguided attentions of my downstairs tenant, though I think he’s less about love and more about convenience and cultural misunderstanding. There is the occasional student who gets inappropriately personal, but I’ve gotten reasonably good at deflecting those. (Note to any students reading this: I do not care about your sex addiction, nor do I want to know how great you think I looked in that outfit I wore last Thursday.)

Why do all of these people love me? Clearly it’s not for my awesomeness or coolness. Maybe it’s because I’m smart. I sure hope it’s not because I’m evil. That would just weird me out. Is it because of my high camel value? Probably not.

So what is it really? My personality, of course, at least according to the quiz. “They love how you act towards others and how you feel about life. You are a bright bubbly person who everybody loves.” This bothers me, because, well, first of all it’s “whom.” The correct phrase is “whom everybody loves.” Seriously, quizmakers, get your grammar right, and secondly stop calling me bright and bubbly.

Happy Valentine’s Day, anyway.

Too Old to Count

According to the "What's your Real Age?"quiz, I'm too old to count. You could read that phrase two ways. Either way it's not flattering.

So imagine my surprise when I visited the periodontist, and, in the middle of explaining to me why my bad gums are not really my fault, he adds the phrase "because you're very young." I must have looked as shocked as I felt, because he followed that up with "certainly you're younger than me."

This is a man who has a diploma hanging on his wall that shows he graduated from university exactly one year before I did, so I suppose technically he's correct. Nevertheless I must have continued to look shocked, because at this point he opened my file and actually checked my age.

"Oh," he said.

Know Your Type(face)

The website http://www.pentagram.com/what-type-are-you will determine your type with four simple questions. By type I mean of course typeface, or font.

My type is universal (which, sadly, is not available on blogger). Universal was created by Bauhaus typographer Herbert Bayer. Although the quiz did not ask me anything about my artistic preferences, I love Bauhaus. Most German art is oppressive (the romantic realism of Nazi art and architecture), or depressing (expressionism, anyone), but Bauhaus is clean, it's cool, it's intellectual, and, even after 90 years, it remains modern. I love Bauhaus. It is everything I want to be. There could not be a better type for me.

The Bauhaus was an art school founded in Weimar, Germany, that operated from 1919 to 1933 when the Nazis shut it down. Bauhaus is about minimalism. It's about stripping away ornamentation. Its focus is on form, and form should follow function. It's about refusing to follow tradition simply for tradition's sake.

Universal is a sans serif font. It has no unnecessary ornaments. And it laughs at tradition. It is a typeface with no capital letters, created by a man whose language capitalizes all nouns. It was created in 1925, and yet with no caps it is the perfect font for the texting generation.

Universal: minimalist, untraditional, and ahead of its time. Perfect.