gambling with valentine
Tuesday, 3 March 2009
For many people valentine’s day is a special time to express one’s love for that special other in one’s life. Although sadly it has be co-opted by those who wish to exploit the holiday of love into an opportunity for profit.
I am lucky to have a wife who doesn’t expect me to follow the traditions of over priced chocolate and roses followed by diner & movie.
Let me tell you the dangers of gambling with valentine, through my first hand experience a few weeks ago.
Late in the afternoon of Valentine’s Day we {my wife and I} decide we should start thinking about dinner for the evening. Our oldest daughter is with her grandmother, so It is just us & the baby. Instead of going to a restuarant, we go to grocery store to buy things for tacos, as well general food shopping since it hadn’t been done this month yet. We get home, make dinner and eat. It was all very nice, I even helped in the kitchen.
After eating our nice meal together, we decide that it would be nice to watch a movie together. Thi is where the danger lies, movie picks are a tricky matter. There is a delicate balance to the choice of movies, especially for such a special occasion. The usual choices of medium involve:
- theatre
- rental
- cable/ondemand
- personal collection
Well Amber & I haven’t been to the theatre together, ever, and with baby in hand it wasn’t happening on this night. 2-4 are pretty well canceled out because we took our tv out a few months ago, and dragging it out from the shed wasn’t worth it. The only possible source left was streaming video from the intrawebs onto my 8.9″ Asus screen. Not being very familar with the technology, the only site I knew of was hulu.com .
The problem isn’t that we had to watch a movie on a tiny screen, but that we don’t ever watch movies enough to know a good movie. I browse in drama, thinking that is a good choice, no matter that there were featured choiced specifically for Valentine’s Day. They all looked too bubblegum pop, I wanted something ‘indie’ ‘artsy’.
I found something called In Search Of. It had some vague description about it being about the ramification’s of people’s sexual lives. I thought it would be about some complicated love triangle—definitely not what it is about. It is better described as being in line with films like Kids or Requiem for a Dream.
My wife and I were both so horrified after watching the film that we had to watch one of those bubblegum pop stories just to ease us down a bit before we could go to bed.