I have a love/hate relationship with Valentine's Day. I have memories of awesome Valentine's Days in high school where we had very grown-up dinner parties for my friends and their significant others, (Amanda made ziti) and I have a Valentine's Day memory from when I was living in Philadelphia where we had a perfectly pleasant evening until too much talking led to his saying he wasn't ready for a commitment, and I broke up with him...so it kinda runs the gamut.
Smitty and I don't really pay too much attention to it. Last year, we really wanted to eat at Olive Garden and figured going at lunch would be safe, as not to have a wait. There was an hour wait at lunch...so we went to Buffalo Wild Wings and had a delectable Valentine's Day lunch of wings and fried pickles. We don't go all out. We, as we are tonight, stay in, spend time together, and make a really good meal for us to enjoy. It's so much easier when everything just works. After YEARS of questionable dating decisions, I just "knew" when I met this tall fellow, that this was different. We were like peas and carrots...or gin and tonic...
I used to be the Queen of the Nightlife. If there was something going on, I was there..usually until 4 a.m. when people began kicking me out of their house. And since I met Smitty, I know why. Something huge was missing from my life, and I didn't even know it. And how grateful am I that I met him at a time when I had mostly gotten everything I wanted to do out of my system. I was engaged when I was 20. Glaring incompatibilities aside, if I had gotten married at 20, I would have missed out on so many things that I needed to discover about myself in order to actually be a good wife.
If I had gotten married then, I never would've worked at the Commercial Dispatch, and even though that job was pure nuts sometimes, I met awesome people I am still friends with, and I sometimes look back on it and actually miss working in newspapers, except it was chaos, and the hours are not conducive to a normal life. I got to live completely by myself...with Norton, who is still the best dog EVER. I got to pack up my entire life and move to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for a job I had no clue about without knowing a single soul in the city...that was character-building, people. I had a cab driver yell at me because I cut him off, I had girls call me a very unpleasant name for asking directions to the freeway, and I had swingers offer to let me be a "secondary" to carry a child for them..srsly...and they were my landlords, which led to my finding a new apartment..stat!
But I'm so not done with my list of things to do...I still want to learn to play guitar (that crazy, psychotic "teacher" in Philly will NOT deter me), I will write a book and be ridiculously famous, I want to have ONE baby...a boy..Smitty says if we don't have a boy, we'll keep trying, but I feel he must be joking...I am actually fine with a girl or a boy, but am pretty set on the "one" child thing. I think that's all we can handle. We're very self-involved people with no patience...well, he has no patience, I am a paragon of patience...(it's true..mark it)
So, I'm just saying...thank you, love gods, for my not getting married at 20 and living a full, adventurous life and continuing to do so with a man who makes me laugh, oh how he makes me laugh. I never thought I would actually find someone who honed in on things like funny voices that only I delight at and would do them...JUST to make me laugh. He makes me mashed potatoes when I'm sick and that's all I want even though he tries to force-feed me more substantial food, he lets me put my icy cold feet on him at night, he listens to my weird, deviated septum noises when my nose is being weird, and he always takes out the trash. I could go on and on for about 3 pages, but I won't. I'm lucky. Seriously lucky.
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