I realized today that I had stopped writing mushy stuff on Valentine’s Day and Tom’s birthday because people were taking it as an excuse to badger us about when we were planning to get married.
The funny thing is, now that we’re engaged, I still don’t have an exact answer to that question. But the answer is… Soon. Really.
So, Happy Valentine’s Day to my fiancé, the only man in the world worth tolerating wedding planning for.
So Valentine’s Day is Tuesday, which means ’tis the season for lots of bitching about how it’s a “greeting card holiday” and “romantic crap makes me sick” and “I’m going to wear black” and “why do I need a special day to show my partner I love him/her/it, because I should be doing that all year long” and yada yada yada.
These people are full of shit.
Seriously.
We shouldn’t wait for a special day to show our mothers and fathers they’re important either, and yet we have them anyway. We shouldn’t wait for a special day to show our loved ones that we’re glad to have them in our lives, and yet we celebrate birthdays. We shouldn’t need a special day to be thankful for all the good things in our lives, and yet we still make a big feast on the fourth Thursday of November. You get the idea. Of course we shouldn’t wait for a special day to tell our partners how important they are to us, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to have one anyway.
So get over it already. It’s no more a “greeting card holiday” than Mother’s Day is, and Valentine’s Day has 2000 more years of history backing it up.
But you know, if you don’t like Valentine’s Day, that’s okay. But admit the real reasons why. It’s not because you think it’s an invention of the Vast Hallmark Conspiracy, but because a day dedicated to the joys of romantic love makes you uncomfortable.
Maybe it makes you uncomfortable because you feel put-upon at having to make a special effort to do something nice for your partner. What the hell is up with that? Is your partner too expectant of a grand gesture for your liking? Time to re-evaluate your choice of partner- it’s not that he or she is a bad person, it’s that grand-gesture people should be with grand-gesture people, and homecooked-meal-and-cuddling people should be with homecooked-meal-and-cuddling people.
Or maybe it’s that you’re not paired-off and all this mushy stuff makes you uncomfortable. Okay, fair enough, but why not just admit it? It’s a big, fussy day aimed straight at a type of relationship you aren’t currently participating in, so you’re feeling left out. It’s a perfectly normal way to feel, but pretending that your dislike of Valentine’s Day is about anything other than that just makes you look bitter. Not attractive, yo.
The scene at Shootz on Carson at the end of the Superbowl. The craziness quickly spilled out into the street, where people completely failed to notice how COLD AND SNOWY it was.
For your enjoyment, it’s the text of the Macworld wedding ceremony, written by Andy Ihnatko. It’s a wonderful mixture of serious and silly, and I suspect that the couple were even more touched by it than I am.
Shawn and Lesa are here for one reason only. Their commitment to each other is so strong that simply continuing to share a life together no longer seems sufficient. They now insist upon celebrating what they’ve built with each other via the most public, overt, and unequivocable gesture possible. Ladies and gentlemen, they wanted thousands of databases and record systems all over their town, county, state, and the federal government to contain the words “Mr. and Mrs. Shawn and Lesa King.”
My throat is burning. I sound like a frog. I smell like a bar.
And none of the Pittsburgh bloggers in my feedreader have updated since before the game last night.
They’ve all been sleeping it off too.
Pictures to come.
We caught the Superbowl at Shootz Cafe and Billiards in the South Side of Pittsburgh. My darling brother even came out to join us. Fun stuff.
Aside from the obvious, here are my few scattered thoughts on the Superbowl-
- I congratulate the producers of the pre-game entertainment on choosing dancers who look like they have, indeed, had a sammich. Also, while a Motown medley in, well, Motown is a bit obvious, they did a good job of choosing contemporary performers who actually have some talent to sing along with Stevie.
- Someone needs to tell Aretha how horrible that coat looks on her.
- OMG, cigarette smoke makes my throat close up.
- Perhaps if there had been some passes completed by the Steelers in the first quarter, I might not have been so tense.
- Oh Mick, that hip shaking thing you do was hot 40 years ago, but now it’s kind of creepy and dirty-old-man-like. You and the rest of the band (including Animatronic Keith!) can still rock it out, but you need to accept that as Classic Rock Stars, you no longer get to be Sex Symbols. Especially with the way all those substances you abused affected your aging process.
- Could there have BEEN more commercials? And was it just me, or did most of them suck this year? Am a particular fan of the MacGyver Mastercard commercial, though. But the Hummer commercial was just… disturbing.
- And, oh yeah…. GO STEELERS!
When I was in college, Jon Kolb (formerly of the 1970s Steelers) was one of the football coaches at my school. He also worked as a PE instructor, which is how I came to have the following experience.
I was doing a few weeks of Nautilus workouts as part of the freshman PE requirement, and Coach Kolb was the instructor. He was spotting me on one machine because my legs weren’t long enough to let me feet rest securely where they belonged.
So as he was holding my feet down on the footrest, I leaned forward with the weights and saw his hands… “Wow! That’s a Superbowl ring he’s wearing!”
Tomorrow, I’m taking off with Tom, Mike, Amy, and Mary Katherine (who I am apparently the last one to have met) to drive to Pittsburgh to watch the game. We’ll probably watch it in some yinzer bar, perhaps eat some sammiches, and crash for the night before heading back Monday. I’m so excited…
OMG, I so totally need a puzzle alarm clock. It won’t stop beeping until you put the puzzle pieces back.
