Valentine's Day.

An annual non-public holiday festivity that denotes hearts and flowers for the romantic, monetary increment for the mercenary and a mixed bag of shock/horror/amusement for me.

Why?

For many years, I was content to spend Valentine's just like any other day of my existence. By pretending that it was just another day; work, go home or spend it with good friends. If you've been a regular reader of this blog you'd know what I thought about Valentine's already, so I shall not repeat myself. However, things took on a whole new meaning eversince I went to one that was thrown by a close friend last year.

The party was memorable for a few things: It was filled with lots of decadent goodies (only desserts and nothing else!), packed with a bevy of beautiful people and familiar faces ...and it had the one thing that did us all in, champagne. Essentially, there were about 100 people crammed into her tiny, little two bedroom apartment and being packed in like sardines just meant one thing: That we should drink ourselves silly and be as wacky as possible. By the way, the personalized champagne flute on the left is what each one of us received at the party...how cool is that?

How this party didn't turn into a massive orgy that had the police coming by to drag us off to jail, mystifies us still.

How a majority of us managed to stumble to work the next day is even more baffling.

Anyways, this was also the very first party that I've been to where I got so blindingly drunk on bubbly that I broke my glasses, couldn't walk straight and well, turned into a frigging merlion. None of which I am very proud of. Meanwhile, my mother laughed her ass off and has never let me forget it. Bugger. It's safe to say that since that fateful day, I've laid off the bubbly.

One can only hope that things will not repeat themselves this year...although, from what I hear on the grapevine, there seems to be a revenge vendetta that will probably come back to bite someone on the ass on that fateful day. Thankfully, this vendetta is not directed at me =o)

A final word of advice: Be kind to your Valentine! And please try not to turn this into a bloody valentine of Tarantino-like proportions for we would still have to work the next day.