Love is in the air. Can’t you feel it? Birds are chirping, clouds are dancing — there are just heaps of love everywhere. Valentine’s Day is coming up, by God, and it’s a full-throttle, double-barreled Super Bowl of love. And you’re going to be in love, dammit, because it’s Valentine’s Day and you have to be.

Because of your amorous intoxication, you’re about to make a tremendous mistake — you’re about to choke in the open net of love. You are about to buy flowers. Lucky for you, Iowa State, good old Jon Crosbie is here to save you from making a grievous error.

Buying flowers on Valentine’s Day might seem like a great idea, but I contend that you might as well present your girl with “The Postman” on DVD. I should probably point out that buying flowers normally isn’t a bad thing. Buying flowers for the hell of it is a great idea, and you should probably do it more often. On Valentine’s Day, however, the roses should stay in the ground.

The first reason for this is that during Valentine’s Day the price of flowers is obscene. Surely your $45 could be spent on something far more productive — like three parking tickets or a year’s worth of ketchup.

Another reason you should pass on flora has to do with its impending death. Soon your profession of love will be reduced to a withered lump of plant, decomposing into nothing more than a nitrogen source. Would your love, as Juliet Capulet so aptly put it, prove likewise variable?

Reason No. 3 is a question of the aforementioned symbolism. When you present flowers to a young lady, what have you done? I’ll tell you what you’ve done — you’ve lopped off the reproductive organs of some poor innocent plant and presented them as some sort of dark offering to the fertility gods. The plant can never make baby plants now, thanks to your desire to impress, you twisted bastard. Your pagan rituals make me sick.

No, hold on. I’m sorry, Iowa State, I just got stressed out because I realized that upon the printing of this article I’m going to have to come up with a fairly fantastic Valentine’s Day present for my girlfriend and, umm, I have not, as of yet, managed to do this.

Finally, you shouldn’t buy flowers on Valentine’s Day because in doing so, what have you shown? You’ve shown that you can read a billboard and that you are depressingly unoriginal. In this day and age of the empowered, right-hand-diamond-ring-wearing woman, we gentlemen have to do a little bit better than that.

Right now, all over campus, women are busy working themselves into a frenzied whirlwind of hair and fingernails and teeth, expecting the very best to come to them on Feb. 14. Settle down for a second, ladies, and remember that you are in no way exempt from this, either. You’d better come up with something brilliant as well, and this would entail a gift he wants but wouldn’t buy himself. Think the “Band of Brothers” DVD set or a brand-new plasma screen TV.

Gentlemen, I do apologize for ruining a perfectly good, easily purchased fallback present. In an effort to make amends, I’m offering a few suggestions. Listen up, young Casanova-like grasshopper, and follow the wisdom of my friend Brian Twedt who suggests the always romantic box of condoms. It’s far more socially responsible than your offering of floral gonads.

I myself would suggest buying your girlfriend season five of “The Simpsons” and then watching it with her. She gets a present and gets to spend time with you! This is romance at its very best.

For what it’s worth, gentlemen, I just really put the pressure on myself. I’m thinking fresh, new and original. A box of chocolates should do the trick.