Happy Valentine's Day (almost!)

And so what will I be doing on this, the most romantic of all days?  Reader, I shall be sharing pizza with my accountant while we make the arrangements to close my business.  It isn't such a bad thing really; I might be slightly good at what I do (did!) but it turns out I'm terrible at actually running a business.  It's all that schmoozing, you see.  I hate it with a passion.  The best thing I could have done with my business, in retrospect, is to have done all the nuts-and-bolts work behind closed doors whilst someone else; someone nicer and more "bubbly" (I have been described as "bubbly" just the once, circa 1996...curiously you don't usually hear of anyone over thirty being described as "bubbly" do you?  Or men of any age, for that matter), did the marketing and schmoozing and the (spit!) networking.

Networking for networking's sake just kills me.  As my heaving throng of regular readers will know, even the word "networking" bugs me royally in its implication that you're only talking to somebody, and they you, just to see what use you'll be to each-other.  It's the human equivalent of dogs sniffing each-other's backsides.  And it's so uniform...in every sense of the word; everyone's dressed in boring business blacks and greys, talking about the weather and the traffic and last week's share prices and how hard it is to find good staff these days...ones who really have initiative, y'know?

Am I being churlish, saying that?  Probably.  But I always find myself wanting to rebel against all the cavernous monotony of it;  much like when I was seventeen and studying Sociology in college, wanting to disrupt the lesson by just going up to the smug-faced lecturer and pouring my bottle of water all over his head while he was in the middle of explaining Durkheim's theories on suicide.  What is it that makes some people actually do that, and others to only think it?  Insanity?  Instinct?  Whatever; I do find myself edging closer and closer to actually acting out some of my more rebellious thoughts these days.  I look forward to getting older all the more because of that.

So anyway.  Valentine's Day.  Yeah...whatever.