how to be single on valentine's day (or the day before)

Step 1: Get hungry.
Step 2: Decide to whip up the world's best pizza dough.
Step 3: Not so fast, dude.  You gotta let that stuff rise for an hour.  Check your e-mail, play some solitaire.
Step 4: Take enough dough for a small pizza, refrigerate (or freeze) the rest.
Step 5: Roll out dough.  Realize that--heeeeey--the dough is vaguely heart-shaped.  With a pinch or two, it could be a pretty respectable heart.
Step 6: Go with it.

Step 7: Add sauce.

Step 8: Place your toppings randomly, because you're a grown woman, damnit, and just because your pizza is shaped like a heart does NOT mean it needs to have a face.
Step 9: Glare at the jar of olives.  Stand your ground.
Step 10: Cave.  You were raised by a preschool teacher, for pete's sake, and if you want to give your pizza a face, then BY GOD your pizza can have a face.
Step 11: Go nuts.

Step 12: Bake at 400 degrees for 10 or more minutes.  Eyeball it.
Step 13: Remove pizza from oven.  Realize you have no bloody clue how you're going to slice the thing.

Step 14: Improvise.  Enjoy.  Think about the cute socks you're going to get tomorrow from your mother, The Cutest Woman On Earth.  Wonder if, somewhere out there, people are receiving items other than socks for Valentine's Day.  Laugh.  Because, really.  What's better than socks?