I’ve been meaning to write much more, but we’ve been driving about 10 hours a day and most of my time has been going into fixing up the other parts of the site. Eventually all the parts will have the same style/template and when they do I’ll send an email out to friends, acquaintances and enemies so that there will be a little more involvement than Kevin, Hari, Revaz and I. One of the main things I’ve been trying to make work is a translator so friends from Mexico and South America can read and post. There are a lot of sweet little toys for this thing - like little maps that pop up if you enter the name of the city where you are or are describing. But I always fuck up, I always try to put them on the site before understanding how the hell they really work.

Laura and I are in Tucson right now. It’s strange to be back in America - far stranger for her I’m sure. My English is an awkward direct translation of Spanish phrases and modismos - kinda like how Hemmingway writes in For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea. I’ll forget how to say something as a normal person would and I scrunch up my face in confusion and struggle while some Western Cowboy in a Stetson looks at me like what the hell is wrong with this kid.
Tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day. I just overheard somebody saying this. Fuck. All day I’ve been nauseatingly romantic with Laura, giving her little butterfly kisses on the forehead and telling her how much I love her. And now I’ve got to do it tomorrow to? Surely the karma police are after me.

Not that I’m not a romantic - but romance is spontaneous is it not? It is the heat of the fire sparked by passion, not the calendar. Please someone else out there agree with me - leave a comment in protest of valentine’s day.

If we must celebrate Valentines day we should do it correctly. As says the historychannel.com,

Lupercalia, which began at the ides of February, February 15, was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus. To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at the sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would then sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification. The boys then sliced the goat’s hide into strips, dipped them in the sacrificial blood and took to the streets, gently slapping both women and fields of crops with the goathide strips. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city’s bachelors would then each choose a name out of the urn and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage.

Let the “gently slapping of hides with hides begin.”