Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day. You may ask yourself, just who the hell was Saint Valentine? Why do we give chocolate to our loved ones? Why do we think today is the ultimate time to score, as it were? Well let's talk about scoring since I have no clue as to the other stuff.
As I write this, the United States of America has scored five Olympic medals in the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. We are number one, so far, in the medal category, which means we are better than the rest of the world when it comes to sliding on blades across slippery ice, or wearing boards on our feet and allowing gravity to inexorably pull us down hills, fly through the air, ass-over-teakettle, land on these wooden boards and continue sliding down hills, or lie on our back on a luge, and go as fast as possible, limited only by our form, gravity, and our unanticipated screwups like trying to see where the hell we're going at 90 freaking miles an hour, which causes the air to slow us down. That said, "WE'RE NUMBER ONE!!! WE'RE NUMBER ONE!!!" But is it really about American pride that makes us cheer, or is it really about our human need for competition as a way of measuring our intrinsic worth? When we pull for the home team, it isn't "US" who won--it's a group of people who practices endlessly day-after-day, year-after-year, to be faster at, stronger in events that we have invented as a way of measuring this intrinsic stuff.
I believe we are all Number One. We are all worthy simply as humans. We don't need to slide, fly, or glide faster to prove anything.
But I enjoy the games.