Tag Archives: valentine’s day

pillow fight club

{15 February 2010}


photo credit: M.Reyes

nothing says “i love you” like a flash mob valentine’s day pillow fight. as my friend adam put it, i live in a very special place. as mob scenes go, it was the most congenial crush of people i’ve ever been in — in spite of the fact that everyone was smacking the holy heck out of one another with feather pillows. in true san francisco hippy style, the organizers requested that only natural fiber-pillow be used, so that no nasty synthetic materials would get washed into the bay.

the lessons i learned about flash mob pillow fights were as follows:

1) it’s a pretty adorable valentine’s day date option.
2) the handkerchiefs and face masks people were wearing weren’t out of fear of swine flu — they were to keep from inhaling feathers. which i did. and coughed for the next 20 minutes.
3) dressing up in costume pretty much guarantees that people will team up and whale on you. dressing up in a giant pillow costume means that you won’t have free arms to defend yourself.
4) telling a total stranger – “look! over there!” and then smacking him with a pillow when he looks away isn’t poor sportsmanship, it’s brilliant strategy.


pillow fight 2010

i am valentine

{09 March 2009}

i’m only a month behind on photo blogging the ski trip gene and i took last month, but, well, it took that long for me to get around to downloading the photos. anyway, we spent valentine’s weekend* at my parent’s cabin in idaho, skied till the lifts closed every day, ate good food every night and then passed out cold about 10pm. ah, vacation.

i gave gene shit repeatedly about whether he was going to buy me this trashy pink plush unicorn that we kept seeing at the general store all weekend as my valentine’s day gift, but alas, he did not. we did, however, spend the most hated of all holidays skiing, then checking out the ice sculptures in town left over from the previous week’s winter carnival, then hiked out into the middle of the frozen-over lake at sunset, followed by dinner at a cozy wine bar. i gotta say, it ranked pretty high as valentine’s days go: skiing, hiking, ice skating, wine-tasting. and wearing sweatpants all the while!

* with my parents! isn’t that every young man’s dream? to spend valentine’s day with your new girlfriend and her parents? ha ha. gene was a good sport, my parents are pretty cool, and it was technically coincidence that we planned our trip around valentine’s day. oh, and president’s day.**

** this latter scheduling oversight presented a problem in that we were flying standby. standby on a holiday weekend doesn’t work quite so well. we did make it to idaho and back, but not without mishap: i managed to misplace gene (well, technically, united airlines misplaced gene) in denver for three days. standby fliers, beware the monday holidays.