And They Say That Romance Is Dead...

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It's here! The most romantic day of the year! It's the day that everyone stresses about for weeks, either due to the frustration of planning the perfect evening or the sadness of lamenting having no perfect evening to plan. Although Cupid's pungent pheromones know no geography and his arrow flies true even across the greatest of distances, this year was a Valentine's spent alone for the great and wonderful me. And while there wasn't a lot of open hostility being thrown around, tensions felt higher than the street hookers here in darling ol' Geneva.

The day began as any other, with me oversleeping my snooze alarm by a good half hour and rushing through my morning to try to make up for lost time. After breezing through my morning shower, including only falling into the wall half asleep twice, I slowed down only to wipe up the spilt soy yogurt that splattered on my laptop while I was trying to catch up on NFL lockout news. Unable to clean up after myself, I left the container on the 2 x 2 IKEA side table I use as my dining room / living room / study / desk / footrest and raced to the office. I kept busy all day, biding my time for my hot date that evening. I came to the office prepared to take care of business and really get my hands dirty. Yup, my evening plans were way overdue, and you have no idea how excited I was.

I was gonna do laundry. Now, I'm a gentleman, and a gentleman never tells how long it has been since he last did laundry, but I'm willing to admit it was at least two standard deviations from the "statistically acceptable" median. Needless to say, this laundry had to get done in a bad way.

This isn't a euphemism. I really really had to do my friggin wash, but I realized only after scoping out the laundry places near my office, conveniently located in the middle of the red light district and surrounded by hash dealers and prostitutes, that it probably wasn't safe to leave my stuff in the dryer and trust that it would be there when I got back. My laundry card for my building was outta cash though, and only my landlady could fill it back up...I was in trouble.

Then, as it has so many times before, I was saved by pub trivia. Yes, a random 5pm email from a coworker informed me that instead of sitting in a laundrette in sin city, I could "rock out with my reading glasses out" at pub trivia. As some of you know, I've often been the least effective member of many championship pub trivia teams, so off I went, dirty socks and all, in order to woo the ladies with my incredible knowledge of useless crap. After a few rounds, my team was still hanging tough, but by round 8 we had dropped back far enough behind the leader to know we couldn't possibly win. I don't take pub trivia too personally, so I was OK with us falling apart at the seems and figured we could skate by on clever answers and overpriced Magners.

But oh how wrong I was. I guess the Valentine's spirits brought out the edge in people! Everyone's humor seemed a bit more pointed, everyone's tongues slightly sharper. The hostess spoke is such a rapid fire English-dock-worker accent that all we could make out were her plaintive invectives against the loud revelers at the bar. "Wouldyashutupandbequietsotheregularscanplaytrivia!" she'd belt repeatedly. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for keeping quiet during pub trivia, but cmon - it's Valentine's day and they're all wearing suits, let them have a goddam party at a goddam bar if they want. And perhaps worst of all, when the trivia wrapped up, everyone just got up quietly and shuffled away. The place turned into a ghost town! What about all the ladies I would impress with my mediocre skills?

Defeated once again, I closed up shop at the bar and downed the rest of my drink with the scragglers. Not the worst Valentine's ever, I thought to myself, recalling the sniveling pity party I threw myself 2L year when I had the flu and was still getting over a break-up, then recalling further every single Valentine's I ever had before the age of 19. My night was over, but I was mostly OK with it.

So I marched my way to the tram, stopping only for two shots of rail whiskey and a late night falafel. Hey, even if I didn't have a real date, at least I know how to show myself a good time.