Well, another Valentine's Day has passed. For reasons I needn't repeat, it is not my favorite holiday on the calendar, but it is a good excuse for making up playlists. Lots of material to choose from.

This year's mix, posted to 8tracks in the waning hours of V-Day, is titled Inamorati Anonymous, in honor of the fictional society of love-spurners from my favorite book. (Yes, the 8tracks widget requires Flash. Sorry. Yay! 8tracks now has HTML5 widgets!)

If those songs are too bleak for you, last year's Girlfriends & Boyfriends mix espouses (somewhat) cheerier views on the subject of love.

And while we're on the subject of love songs, this seems like the perfect opportunity to bust out a Nick Hornby passage I've been dying to use since, I believe, the days when I first contemplated starting this blog.

What came first—the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?
People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands—literally thousands—of songs about broken hearts and rejections and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don;t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.

I'm not sure how seriously Hornby means us to takes his character's speculations, but there are days when I can certainly sympathize with the sentiment. On the off chance there's something to it, consider this your warning: listen to my musical recommendations—especially the love songs—at your own risk.