6 million

Number of Americans who will propose on Valentine’s Day.

14 million

Number of Americans who will propose in 2014.

17.6 billion

Amount that Americans are projected to spend on Valentine’s Day, in dollars.

4.52

Amount, on average, an American pet owner is projected to spend on their furry valentines, in dollars.

1) Greeting Card Association, 2, 3) American Express, 4) National Retail Federation

Homesickness reveals childishness, dwelling on the past seems indulgent, and longing for it is just plain weak. Or so the conventional thinking goes. The Western Canon would have you believe that nostalgia is the cause of all human suffering, emptiness, sadness—“a sufficient reason for a weak man with broken nerves to go insane,” as Chekhov wrote. My mother would have you believe that it’s the cause of all human laziness, restlessness, masochism.

Sick at college and sick of college, I called her a little over two years ago and told her through dramatic sobs, “I want to go home, I want to go home—but not to LA or to our house, I want to go to some home I can’t picture or explain, a home that’s already gone.” I had thought it was in her job description to indulge her 19-year-old daughter’s bewildering heartbreak over absolutely nothing, but she responded, “That doesn’t make sense.” Before hanging up, she also said, “You’re fine.” I was and I wasn’t, and maybe I did need to hear that, but in either case I was not alone in that experience of nostalgia. I’m also not alone in thinking that, though its reputation is all about suffering, the emotion has its upsides.

Nostalgia was initially introduced as a disease that befell Swiss mercenaries in the 17th century, when the mercenaries were banned from singing the traditional song of Swiss herdsmen because it caused too much “mal du pays” (homesickness). In the Civil War, American army bands were similarly banned from playing “Home, Sweet Home” and some 5,000 soldiers were diagnosed with nostalgia—74 deaths were attributed to it.

It continued to be considered a pathological maladaptation until the late-70s, when researchers in psychology and neuroscience started gathering more and more evidence of the emotion’s benefits. Contrary to the advice I’ve collected over the years as a highly nostalgic child and adolescent—variations of “let it go,” “live in the moment,”—recent findings about this “sentimental longing for the past” are ultimately hopeful. The pain of returning home, even a home that no longer exists, and maybe never existed, turns out to be healing.

On a very basic level, nostalgia builds what researchers like to call self-continuity—the idea we need to have of ourselves as a cohesive whole, as beings that make some kind of sense. We tiny humans can’t viscerally understand time and space without our self-narratives, and we create those stories from revisiting all the ones we’ve lived.

Because returning to the past is how we find existential meaning in our lives (or fabricate it, if you’re feeling cynical), people who tend toward nostalgia have a greater sense of meaning in their lives than those who don’t. The nostalgic among us also have lower anxiety levels, and lesser fears of death—both in and outside the lab. Going backward in memory to the past makes us more hopeful about the future, and happier in the present. And aside from helping to keep us psychologically well, nostalgia also literally makes us feel more physically comfortable, a University of Southampton paper found. We respond to the cold the same way we respond to emotional cold; we get nostalgic, which makes us feel warmer, physiologically and psychologically.

The implications of this understanding of nostalgia as beneficial are boundless. Even being aware of the fact that nostalgia effectively and systematically combats loneliness is helpful on an individual level. Once I understood my strange and compulsive longing for some conception of home as a stretch back toward childhood, and for safer-feeling high school years, I could recognize that familiar longing as a heartening sign that I had felt whole, and fulfilled, that I would again when what I called my “sophomore slump” passed. Nostalgia protects and can even boost mental health in this way because as much as nostalgia is always about longing, it’s also always about belonging. Emily Dickinson’s catchy first line, “Where Thou art—that—is Home—” truly is the case for our psyches.

We can give ourselves self-worth and our lives meaning whenever we want thanks to the sometimes unbearable and sometimes relieving weight of our memories. Yearning for an unidentifiable home does “make sense,” but my mom was still right about what we are in the moments when we are overcome with nostalgia: fine—finer, in fact, than we were before it came along.

418

American public high schools where condoms are available to students (out of almost 100,000).

20

Percentage of newly HIV-infected 13-24 year-olds.

26

States that teach abstinence as the main method of pregnancy prevention in high schools.

0

Amount of impact that abstinence-only education has on rates of abstinence.

55

Births per 1,000 girls in Mississippi, the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country, where abstinence is taught if sex ed is taught at all.

Sources: 1) Advocates for Youth 2) Centers for Disease Control 3) Guttamacher Institute 4) Mathematica Policy 5) CNN

Are you a man who has had any sexual contact with another man since 1977? In the words of the FDA, “even once”? If so, you are permanently banned from donating blood thanks to a regulation first established thirty years ago this year.

This was 1983, when it was legal to fire teachers for being gay, legal to ban gay rights groups on college campuses, and legal to discriminate potential blood donors based on their sex lives.

And it remains legal today. Men who have sex with female prostitutes can give blood after waiting a year, as can prostitutes. Donors who have had sex with someone with AIDS are also asked to wait a year, provided that they test negative for HIV. But a man in a long-term, monogamous relationship in which he and his partner have been tested repeatedly cannot give blood. A man who had sex with a man once in 1977 and recently tested negative for HIV is also evermore eliminated from the donor pool. So what the FDA ban basically amounts to is the discrimination of potential blood donors based on sexual orientation.

I have given blood regularly for over four years, in three different states and from several blood banks. I have never been asked about my sexual preferences or practices.

You might think, “there has to be a scientific reason for this rule,” as I did when I heard about this regulation—a factual, rational, serious, non-arbitrary, reason. The government claims that the prohibition isn’t about sexual orientation, it’s about safety. Safety, seemingly, against the promiscuous, unpredictable, and dangerous gays of America. Also, did you know that anti-women legislation isn’t about gender, it’s about the greater good?

The so-called practical reasons that were once given were discriminatory and unacceptable, but now they are simply non-existent. The FDA continues to use the rationale that gay men are still disproportionately affected by HIV to classify all men who have sex with men in the highest risk category of blood donors. Even if you gave into the rather preposterous notion that adult men who have sex with other adult men as a whole cannot practice safe sex, and thus, cannot be trusted, there still remains a major gap in the FDA’s logic. Though HIV tests were once unaffordable, in terms of both time and money, today, all donated blood is tested for HIV, with near perfectly accurate results within a fortnight.

In 2006, the three major blood donation centers, American Red Cross, America’s Blood Centers, and AABB publicly asked the FDA to remove the ban because of the blatant lack of scientific backing for it, and reaffirmed this position in 2010. This summer, the American Medical Association called the policy “discriminatory” and “not based on sound science.” The FDA has heard appeal after appeal, publicly reconsidered again and again, and the body continues to uphold the regulation.

Given the lack of sound scientific reasoning for this ban, one can only conclude that the law serves to discriminate against a portion of the population. The federal rule was passed at a time before the AIDS virus was even identified, when many were calling the syndrome “Gay-Related Immune Disorder” or, more casually, “the gay plague.” America was afraid. Afraid of being contaminated, afraid of their kids being exposed to such licentiousness as that which had caused what had to be a moral punishment, and not a harrowing tragedy. A section of the population was left intensely isolated by this backlash, and the FDA rule continues to enforce that barbaric partition by, in effect, labeling men who have sex with men as presumably diseased.

There’s no gay plague. There’s no straight plague. It’s time to let go of prejudicial laws based on cold, uninformed fear. It’s been time.

The damage is not just in principle but in practice as well. According to the Red Cross, someone in America needs blood every two seconds. This summer, as it often does, the national organization saw an urgent blood shortage, and many blood centers have dipped to emergency supply levels in recent years.

An unthinkably enormous supply of blood has already been lost in collection, is in fact being lost in collection today. An individual donor that donates every two months would, over the course of a lifetime, donate the amount of blood that, statistically, saves over 1,000 lives. A UCLA study showed that turning the lifetime ban to even a 12-month deferral would bring in over 200,000 more pints of blood each year. One pint of blood is estimated to save about three lives by all major blood centers.

With the defenses of “but it’s science!” no longer standing, is our government really willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives every year in the name of what essentially amounts to sexual policing?

Most outrageous arguments against marriage equality

5
If the institution ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

4
Social Security

3
Homosexuals have been known to sex, drug, and rock ‘n’ roll it up. Save the children!!!

2
Giving people more basic, human rights isn’t
“radical” enough.

1
What if Noah had let pairs of gay animals on the ark?

As a child, I went to extremes. I ran before I learned to walk. I was never tired and always hungry. Every summer afternoon I desperately needed to run in the grass and pick flowers for five hours, except when I just as desperately needed to read in my room alone for five hours. The perceptible helplessness of very old people made me cry hysterically in public, as did the joy on the faces of couples taking their wedding photos in the gardens by my house. I loved everyone, except when everyone was insufferably boring.

I was born with this extreme personality, at least according to my parents, who also hold that my little sister, with her normal amounts of crying, eating, and pooping, was a lovely palate cleanser two years later. But much of my emotional intensity also developed over time, largely because of a curse I carried from a very young age: the affliction of migraines.

They were nothing if not unpredictable. Sometimes I’d get three in a week and then go five months without even the hint of one. Whenever it came, I would inevitably break from the world I was in—the friends I loved at the time, the book I was reading, the thoughts I was having. In bed with a migraine, there was space for only the darkness and the silence, and maybe a cold towel on my head. Sounds, lights, and interactions with other human beings were excruciating, and nauseating. During a single episode I could simultaneously lose vision, sight, and tactile feeling. At a certain point, my migraines became immune to the typical migraine medications and I moved onto Vicodin. At another point, my migraines became immune to Vicodin. These were not just awful headaches; they were disabling neuralgias.

I was seven years old the first time I thought about suicide. Being remarkably emotional never prevented me from being equally logical, and I was lying in bed for something like the fiftieth hour of a particularly bad migraine, close to but unfortunately not completely unconscious with pain. Out of this total haze came the singular vivid thought that if this state were my life—if I didn’t definitely know that the pain would relent eventually—the only reasonable thing to do would be to kill myself. It’s not that I ever really considered it, or understood what that even meant. I knew it would get better, because it always had and it always would and it always did. Still, physical pain drove me to the cliffs of existential awareness at such a tiny age, which, in retrospect, seems unfathomably unfair.

At the time, though, I really didn’t have any complaints. I was an extraordinarily happy child—“well-adjusted,” as they say—and it simply never occurred to me to complain about my migraines when they were over. On some level I must have assumed that everyone had her secret sufferings, ones that didn’t necessarily need to be discussed. Ironically—but also, in some way, unsurprisingly—these lapses in my brain chemistry most profoundly affected me by fueling my eternal optimism.

Every day without a migraine was a pure gift from the world with love and squalor to me. The sky, the trees, the faces, the words, the cake—everything I’d lost for a few days felt both real and mine again. Not being paralyzed meant freedom, that days were dazzling, that life genuinely felt so easy, that I was effervescent, sometimes disarmingly and sometimes annoyingly so. The fact that I could be rendered powerless without a moment’s notice to incessant and oppressive pain turned into gratitude. And into humility: because I didn’t feel control over these migraines, I never tried to create the illusion that I had control over anything. In accepting the world as unthinkably wild, I had no reason to worry.

I don’t know how many days I’ve lost to migraines in the course of my life, but I know that the hours spent in blackness and stillness were never truly lost; they’ve added up to something, given back. It was easy to be overjoyed when it seemed like the only possible barrier was a bodily ailment, and to be fearless when the worst that could happen already had, and would again soon enough. The low lows, in other words, were worth the high highs.

Somewhere along the line, gradually but also suddenly, I stopped having migraines. I was intimately acquainted with physical pain when I could not yet handle emotional pain, and as I began to learn the latter, the former magically receded from view and from memory. I can only recall a few migraines in middle school, and not a single one from high school. During this same time, my seemingly boundless energy met its very real bounds, and my seemingly invincible happiness proved decidedly vulnerable to fissure.

I still tend toward empathizing and behaving extremely. But the sad and thankful reality is that the pathological intensity of my two-year-old, 10-year-old, and even 18-year-old selves is peacefully distinct from myself today.

***

This summer, I went to see my grandfather in Seoul shortly after he suffered a paralyzing stroke. This was the man who taught me to ride a bike, to cook eggs, once made me an abacus, gave me my first lessons in astronomy. Except, of course, that it wasn’t. This was simply not the man who had told me countless stories of love and war, so many stories that they turned into numinous pools of words and images that we treaded together like it was always summertime.

With blank, empty eyes, he showed no signs of life except via the brassy green lines on the vital signs machine. He could not speak, could not read, and was so thin and worn that I barely recognized him. And he certainly couldn’t recognize me, or anyone (not even my grandmother, his wife of 50 years). His right arm was bruised where the ICU nurses had tied it down to his bed to prevent his whacking away at his uncomfortable breathing tubes. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing, but he’s going to kill himself doing it,” one nurse told us in Korean to assure us the makeshift cast was absolutely necessary.

Maybe trying to kill himself was indeed the only reasonable thing. We knew just as well as the nurses did that the pain would not relent for my 93-year-old grandpa. He was lost to the world, and not just for a day, or two, or even a week. He was definitely, plainly, wholly gone, which I realized then as I sat next to him silently in the hospital, holding his limp hand and watching him blink. I knew we were just beginning, beginning to wait for him to die.

I tensed up physically, forcing myself not to cry, not to break down, not to start grieving for him just yet. When my dad and I got back to the apartment we were staying in, I went straight to my room and, again, I did not cry. I had just spent time with a dying person I loved for the first time in my life, and my mind was tired. I fell asleep reliving a lazy July day that he and I had spent together in my backyard at home in California, picking the strawberries we’d planted months before and eating them without washing them, asking him to push me on my swing set even though I could swing on my own, walking to the park hand in hand and secretly wishing he didn’t have to walk so slowly with his sheeny oak cane.

I woke up in the middle of the night with an incapacitating migraine. I spent the next two days immobile with pounding pain, without even my thoughts, since I couldn’t bear to have any. But a strange and small part of me found this familiar aloneness refreshing. Like at lunch with a cruel but old friend, I couldn’t help but feel a nostalgic comfort. That endearment toward migraine, or at least my relationship to it, does not by any means exclude my revulsion at the pain it has caused. Yet the complicated, intimate combination of love and hatred that I harbor for migraine crosses time and space in an irreplaceable, precious way. In a way that’s otherwise unique to my relationships with my family—including my grandfather, who died in his sleep this winter.

I once read that acceptance is a small, quiet room. I know now that grief is a long, narrow hallway on the way to that room, and that it sometimes takes catharsis to brave entering the house at all. Because I repressed my weeping, that chaotic reservoir of emotion built up and left my body a different way. We all have our external outlets for internal heartache, don’t we?

Because I could not cry for love, love kindly stopped for me—the carriage held but just ourselves, and two old friends of my mind: my grandfather, and my migraine. One I adored and one I abhorred, but without even meaning to, I carry both their hearts with me.

I like to think that it’s always summertime somewhere in the world.

Welcome to a new Herald Reviews feature: the staff list. We assume that since you are a human being, you want to know what we are doing all the time—and, in particular, how we are choosing to participate culturally every week. Wonder no longer! We’ll let you know what’s up and what’s down in five easy steps. This week is all about bridging the gap between February (that’s that shit we don’t like) and March (that’s that shit we like).

What we’re listening to: More Adventurous by Rilo Kiley. Remember that other gap you crossed on a bridge called middle school—also known as casual hell on earth? From crushes to kisses, from sports bras to first periods, this was the change in tide we will never forget (because we are simply too scarred), and Jenny Lewis is the lady we will always remember (because we are truly too in love).

What we’re reading: Sticks and Stones by Emily Bazelon, PC ‘93, LAW ‘00. Every midterm season we somehow forget that books can be important and enjoyable at the same time. Yale’s own Bazelon looks at a bullying culture that’s rapidly taking to the Internet; the product of her many years researching and writing on the topic is both beautiful and brave.

What we’re watching: Clueless. That’s gonna be us so soon, you guys. The snow is melting, the days are getting longer, and any minute now we are going to be chilling by some waterfalls in skimpy swimsuits. Even if it’s metaphorical waterfall chilling, people will probably go, “is this a Noxzema commercial or what?” But seriously, we will have way normal springtime lives for college kids.

What we’re looking at: the Joseph Albers prints in the YUAG. These colors! They’re like that pretty girl at your high school who wasn’t loud about being pretty, and so every boy thought she was the most underrated, which by definition makes her no longer underrated. Sometimes you just need something pretty to get you out of a February funk, and the heaven-pointing shapes on these prints are sure to get you on that up and up.