Happy Couple's Validation Day

My husband is a wonderful man. He is a much kinder person than I am, and I try to learn from him daily while he puts up with my self-pity, self-criticism, short temper, compulsions, defective housekeeping, vegetarianism, allergies, mercurial religious/ethnic identity, habit of calling all appealing creatures "puppy," hostility toward the practice of waxing, insistance on muting the best baseball/football/soccer/hockey/tennis/curling events on TV, nighttime paranoia followed by a morning ritual he once compared to trying to wake up an angry wolverine, and inability to drive.

So, you see, it is in no way a reflection on Michael's value as a husband or on my appreciation of him that I decided to make Valentine's Day a girls' night. Perhaps I'm being a little jumpy here because when I went back to New York for the summer everyone thought we were getting divorced, or perhaps it's cause my dad mounted such an effective guilt campaign to win the holiday back from my mom's girlfriends. But I've always felt a festival that congratulates people on pairing off was not only superfluous (since they get congratulated for it all year long) but outright destructive (it's the day out of the year you're most likely to settle for some schnook just to avoid the pitying look in the eye of your cashier at Blockbuster). Therefore even if Mike had not been working tonight, I probably still would have invited the girls over.

Mona, April and Gigi-in-Spirit joined me after work, and we immediately set to work on that staple of any Girls' Night In, assasinating each other via video game. April brought her X-box over to hook up to my TV so she could show us a game called Halo--specifically the level she had customized so that you could win by fatally shooting your friend a mere 5 times instead of the usual 10. Her name in Halo World is She-Wolf, so Mona dubbed herself Beowulf. I was torn between Virginia Woolf, Paul Wolfowitz, and Wolf Blitzer, but in the end they all had too many letters and I just went by Vixen. It turns out watching April and Mona play video games isn't that different from watching Jeff and Scott play video games, except that from time to time April will put down her handset and say "no, no, go find a semi-automatic weapon, I'll wait." Then it was my turn to play and Mona killed me 10 times, only managing to kill herself thrice in the process. She tends to confuse her trigger finger with her grenade-throwing finger and blow herself up. I tend to get confused about which way is down and find myself looking at the floor or the ceiling while Beowulf stands right in front of me and blasts me with her plasma gun.

To round off the evening we watched G.I. Jane and tried to be big about Viggo Mortensen's shorts. Then Mona taught us belly dancing. See? If you must celebrate Valentine's Day, it should be all about your peeps. If you need a holiday to tell someone you care about them, you need to relax a little.