valentine’s day – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

First, the pointless griping: Film director Bong Joon-ho apparently won a pile of Oscars last night. I have not seen Parasite, which as far as I know features no American superheroes, although my wife has expressed an interest in streaming it once such a thing is available, but I have no reason to disagree with the award given that I saw virtually none of the nominated films, and in fact I’m saying “virtually none” here because I have no idea what was actually nominated for anything and it’s therefore possible that I’ve seen some of them.

Man, I remember when the Oscars were a big deal, personally, and I was seeing 40-50 movies a year. I really miss that, believe it or not; I just don’t have that kind of time any longer, and living in South Bend instead of Chicago means I’m much more limited in what I can see.

Anyway, point is the Goddamned Snowpiercer post is surging again; it’s gotten about as many hits today all by itself as the entire site typically gets in two days, and as it’s only 6 PM I suspect that ratio will be increasing fairly radically by the time I go to bed tonight, and the bump will probably last at least another few days. That post will never, ever die.

So:

My wife’s birthday is Thursday;
Friday is Valentine’s Day;
The 29th is our 12th/3rd anniversary; we were married in 2008 so it has been twelve years, and we were married on Leap Day so this will be the third actual real anniversary we should have.

We typically make a fairly big deal out of Real Anniversaries, although the last big celebration was for our 10th anniversary when we went to see Hamilton in Chicago. We are … somewhat bereft of ideas for any of these things this year; I asked my wife if she wanted to do anything either for her birthday or for Valentine’s Day an hour or so ago and I could see part of her soul die when I asked the question. Before you jump on my case, be aware that neither of us are either especially romantic people or big celebrators of arbitrary dates; we don’t make a big deal out of my birthday either, and Valentine’s Day has always been treated as more of an annoyance instead of an actual thing. So chances are this weekend is not going to be all that big of a deal.

But I wanna do something for our anniversary, dammit, and my first choice– going to Chicago and having dinner at Alinea— got shot down on account of being insanely, grotesquely expensive.

This is where you come in, Internet. What shall we do for our 12th/3rd anniversary? Give us good ideas; we’re broken and don’t have any.

Let’s be honest: if we were having coffee, we would absolutely be talking about politics in one way or another, but I’m not super interested right now at 10:00 in the AM on a Sunday in talking about politics. I’ve entered the Two Weeks of No Romance period of the year, guys; my wife’s birthday was yesterday, today is Valentine’s day, and this being Leap Year we actually get an anniversary on Feb. 29th this year. We’ve been married 8 years, but this is our 2nd anniversary.

What do we do to celebrate these august (heh) events? Well, nothing, really. My wife and I both agreed that Fat Tony’s death was the best birthday present the universe could possibly have arranged for her, we’re dropping the boy off with his grandparents and going to see Deadpool today, and as for our anniversary … hell, we’ll come up with something. What did I get her? Nothing. We aren’t gift people. (For the record, she didn’t get me anything for my last birthday either, and we didn’t exchange gifts at Christmas.) What will we be getting each other for our anniversary? Chances are nothing, although we’ll certainly go somewhere and do something fun together.

Valentine’s Day? Bah. Neither of us care.

I married correctly, is what I’m saying here.

This was an odd week. I got nothing done on either of the two fiction projects I’m working on during the week, a combination of exhaustion, depression, and what was probably a very mild flu completely taking me off my game from Monday through Thursday. I had my son at home with me all day on Friday and somehow between Friday and yesterday managed to get something like four thousand words done on the new Benevolence Archives novella I’m working on. Sunlight is still a little stalled, but I ought to be able to get back to that this week and I still have high hopes (ha!) of being able to get it done before C2E2.

Note that at one point I wanted it available at C2E2. So that tells you how good I am at keeping on schedule for novel projects, if you weren’t already aware of it. For what it’s worth I love the hell out of the BA story that’s responsible for my recent distraction.

The Walking Dead is back tonight, and I have the boy again tomorrow (he gets a four-day Winter Break weekend) and so somehow I have to manage to avoid spoilers for 24 hours. This will be harder than usual, I think. I’m glad the show’s back, although I think The Expanse may have supplanted it as my current favorite TV show.

(Are you watching The Expanse, fellow coffee-drinker? Or, rather, did you, since the first season’s over? I strongly suggest that you get on that right now.)

So, yeah. That’s where I’m at. How’re you?