Monday, February 12, 2007

National I'mAOkayByMyselfTine's Day Coming Up, Folks.

It’s heading up on Valentine’s Day this week, or as we in the World of Beth refer to it, I’mAOkayByMyselfTine’s Day. See, it’s not about being bitter and angry and angsty about couples and soul mates and people who have someone to spoon with as they fall asleep at night (hi, there are 364 other days for that). It’s more about being….a-okay with yourself and your single guy/gal life for at least just one day a year.

QuirkyAlone.com even offers a lovely list of activities for us to do this coming Wednesday, which they’ve deemed “International QuirkyAlone Day.” (Harrumph, that’s got nothin’ on being AOkayByYourselfTIne’s Day in my mind, but whatev….)

Ten Ways to Celebrate International Quirkyalone Day

1. Explore a new part of town—be a tourist in your own city.
2. Throw a slumber party. Particularly fun to rent is Dirty Dancing.
3. Rearrange your furniture.
4. Buy yourself new underwear (throw out all the old ones form the 90s.)
5. Be creative alone, doing whatever it is you like to do (write, paint, sew, upholster furniture, surf, make art of out dryer lint).
6. Be creative with friends and/or a boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse. Have an arts and crafts party or cook a meal together.
7. Buy yourself or a friend a bunch of daisies. Daisies are the official flower of the quirkyalone movement.
8. Volunteer for a cause you believe in.
9. Get cozy in bed with a book. Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics would of course be a good choice--and/or Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (perhaps the original self-help book for quirkyalones) and/or The Vagabond by Colette and/or The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap by Stephanie Coontz and/or even The Flaneur by Edmund Wilson.
10. Come to or host a quirkyalone party!

Finally, there was this this piece in the Boston Globe a while back about the rising popularity of single folks, as well as an update from Newsweek on the 20-year anniversary of their famous statement that a 40-year-old single woman was "more likely to be killed by a terrorist" than to ever marry.

Get out there and be A Okay By Yourselves, folks!

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