As prominent candy displays have been reminding us, this coming Friday is Valentine's Day. While a number of UW students will find themselves swimming in overpriced flowers and obscene sweet nothings, those less fortunate will instead yearn for candy conversation hearts with more appropriate messages like \Hate U"" or ""Die.""
If you fall into the latter category, fear not! Singles, although V-Day is but a few scant days away, there is more than enough time to head to the University Book Store, 711 State St., and peruse their plethora--nay, virtual cornucopia, of romance manuals to aid in the pursuit of your very own shnookums.
Valentine's Day can be especially difficult for those who have just ended a long-term relationship. Especially if you have been involved in a chain of serious attachments, being without one on Feb. 14 ranks just above bleeding from the eyes, nose and mouth as a desirable situation.
If this sounds familiar, it may be time to flip through Carina Chocano's amusing work, ""Do You Love Me or Am I Just Paranoid? The Serial Monogamist's Guide to Love."" As the author notes, ""There is nothing like ... a moribund relationship to make a person feel like a half-dead whale flopping around on a deserted beach after everyone has gone home for the winter."" Fortunately, Chocano also offers a number of tips for meeting, acquiring and keeping a new love. Step one is ""Lower your standards,"" in which she reminds readers that, ""If you include your nightmares, the person of your dreams is within your reach."" With only four days left, this is important advice. Chocano also treads such themes as friends, parents and how to blame Dad. Her bemused voice and personal anecdotes make her book the ideal blueprint for navigating what she terms ""Bohemian love-torment.""
For those who are more serious about discovering who, in fact, wrote the book of love, the earnest message of ""Best Advice for Finding Mr. Right"" may be more appropriate. It brings out every love clich?? ever uttered, under the guise of ""real women shar[ing] their secrets,"" for more credibility.
This book warns against lowering personal standards in a pathetic attempt to heave oneself at that attractive boy in political science, and instead tells the reader, ""In trying so hard to find the perfect relationship, maybe you just aren't giving the perfect relationship the chance to find you.""
While some may find solace in digesting such saccharine stuff, others might prefer to get lost in a romance book the old-fashioned way--with a confusing metaphor for male-female relations. In which case, ""Single Men are Like Waffles, Single Women are Like Spaghetti"" is a perfect fit. Focusing more on gender differences than finding a soulmate, authors Bill and Pam Farrel do very well at reducing confusing, complex issues into equally confusing, simple analogies, with support from such classic romance films as ""Star Trek III: The Search for Spock"" as an added bonus.
For those a little too Ethernet-happy, ""The Rules for Online Dating"" may be a constructive handbook, especially for followers of the authors' monster bestseller, ""The Rules."" The technologically advanced sequel extends the established rules to include choosing the right screen name in the daunting quest for true love.
On the other hand, singles faced with too many options and the need to sift through other available singles, should consult Jill Conner Browne's sassy southern manual, ""The Sweet Potato Queen's Book of Love."" It offers advice on who to let go, citing men with bad hair, plastic surgery (""Implants masquerading as major muscle groups is unacceptable"") or people who are inconsiderately sweaty specifically.
Of course, self-help is not for everyone. For those who prefer to live on the vicarious side, love has been a prominent theme for most of humanity's written history. Novels like Margaret Mitchell's ""Gone with the Wind"" and James Jones' ""From Here to Eternity,"" have set the standard, but the State Street Walgreens offers quite the bouquet of traditional Harlequin bodice-rippers. Either way, come Friday, a book can be a comfort for those whose Cupid's arrows have missed. Because as Groucho Marx once said, ""Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too hard to read.\
