OK, here is what I did for Valentine's day.
There is a restaurant in the neighborhood where I have had a terrible crush on the bartender. Being a person whose social life is mostly on the Internet, of course, I have never spoken to him or sat at the bar. The spouse and I sit at a table - sometimes, if I am feeling brave and flirtatious, a table very near the bar - and we make sure that the waiter gets this bartender to make our drinks.
This is the total extent of our relationship for like, two years? The spouse occassionally threatens to somehow MAKE me sit at the bar. But it has never happened.
So this evening, we are going out for Chinese food. I have a wicked craving for noodles. But to get there we have to walk past the bartender place. Where we had not been in a heartbreakingly long time, like, more than two weeks. So we peered in the window and he was there and somehow we weren't having noodles anymore.
So later on I am drunker than when I started and I think about how it's Valentine's day. And I think about this really great Waiter Rant blog that I read and how he often tells a story where someone gives him a huge tip and it makes his day. Because, the thing is, it's not just the money, you know?
So I tell the spouse that I think the bartender needs a very large Valentine's tip especially because we really should have given him a Christmas bonus and didn't. And we are sitting like five feet from the bar and any normal person would just walk over and give it to him. But I'm trying to think of how to get the waiter to do it for me instead. And the spouse is saying, just go over there and bat your eyelashes and I say, shush, because if you egg me on it will have the opposite effect.
So then we're getting our check and I think I've gotten up the nerve. But the bartender seems to have disappeared. The spouse is signing the credit card slip. So to buy time I say I have to go to the bathroom.
On the way back from the ladies room, he's back, at the cash registed counting stuff. So like any normal person I go over and hand him a twenty and tell him happy valentine's day. And then, the second best part, I go back to the table and say to spouse, OK I did it we can go. And he's totally shocked, and he missed it. And I disappear into the night with a shit-eating grin on my face, pleased all out of proportion to the actual event.
I'm telling you - where do people of normal social skills get to have this kind of excitement?
Edit: Inspired by this story to change my sig. Dang, I am out of control. This is why I don't usually drink on a work night.