Growing up kind of sucks.The day that has inspired — all over the globe for hundreds of years — everything from cheesy poems to pink chocolates, from mythological flying men with archery sets to 3-D horror movies, from passionate nights between the sheets to miserably lonely acts of bleakness, will again arrive Saturday.And I can’t help but think back to when things were easier.Maybe I’m beating the nostalgia horse to death here, but days like these can break the floodgate since this is the first age we can truly look back on how things have changed.And it leads us to remember that growing up kind of sucks.Think about grammar school — making the little boxes or pouches with small paper hearts glued all over them. We’d set them out on the end of the desk, and everyone would have a pack of 24 cards with images from their favorite pop culture icons. Sometimes even the teacher would have picked out cool ones with stickers and whatnot.In one box, Scooby-Doo and Sammy Sosa wished me “Happy Valentine’s Day.”Even the classroom would change, the blackboard border changing from the arbitrary letters and numbers with colorful balloons throughout to a more romantic border, boasting full red hearts and mini-Cupids.That classroom border dictated how we felt — full of red and yellow leaves in autumn and grinning Jack-o’-Lanterns for Halloween.Things were just easier.Everyone reaches the point where it finally hits that as we grow older, we lose our innocence. I realize it’s a painfully overused cliché, but just because it’s cliché doesn’t mean the moment is any easier.We go from having Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” played at our kindergarten graduations to learning in a college course it’s a song about marijuana.We go from reading the subtext in our Carebears Valentine to dropping a couple hundred on dinner.The term “sleep-over” has certainly changed for us since Valentine’s day in ‘90s.All of which is great, but I worry we lose a bit of our innate innocent sensibility in a mad dash for something more.But I don’t think so.Everyone is so busy drinking until the room spins, then hoping to collide with someone else, we don’t even stop to worry about what’s being lost.This is all getting a bit melodramatic. I don’t need to be told that.But this Valentine’s Day, let’s take it back a moment. Because it doesn’t seem to me anyone is having any fun with all of this. Everyone just seems annoyed, hung-over, stressed out and sick all the time.Once, I wrote we love Lil’ Wayne because we grew up with him.Another reason is Lil’ Wayne still acts like a child.He understands that everything is easy, so long as we remember it is.So slow down.Anti-Valentine’s Day parties already seem to be popping up everywhere on Facebook. All of these are of course peppered with “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” quotes. And why not? It’s one of the best movies made in the past 10 years, and it’s a good view of what our apathetic generation feels about a day that, on the surface, seems too stupid and vapid to waste our time on.And so long as the parties remain jokey, there’s obviously no harm done. We are a generation that enjoys mocking anything and everything around us so we can hold it steady.Perhaps, though, we should take our tongues from our cheeks and try to enjoy the little pleasures that a day like Valentine’s Day — however insipid they may seem — bring to us.Because, one way or another, whether you think it’s stupid or wonderful, Valentine’s Day is a celebration. There’s never a good reason to pass up a celebration. Of anything.If you’re with somebody, celebrate that fact. Take a trip to the top of the Shaw Center, drink some $3 champagne and enjoy your city.If you’re not with somebody, enjoy your freedom. Drink $3 champagne anyway because who cares so long as you’re having fun?It just seems, especially with everyone babbling about how we won’t have any money or jobs or, you know, economy left in a few years, we’re all beginning to forget why we do most things we do in the first place.There is no need to disparage. Just have fun. Growing up kind of sucks.But it probably doesn’t have to.- – – -Contact Travis Andrews at [email protected]