Given that my record with Valentine’s Days is pretty marginal, I can’t exactly be bitter about one going by uneventfully. I mean, last Valentine’s Day… hoo boy. Heck, I even spent part of the evening dancing, though this is because I am taking swing dancing lessons. Though even then, the class seemed alarmingly small, so I guess a lot of people had other things to do. In any case, I am at least finally learning to swing dance this quarter, for two reasons: (a) it’s a lot of fun once you know what you’re doing, and (b) I have an unexplained tendency to fall for dancers, so I may as well be prepared.

In any case, the preceding weekend was jam-packed with entertainment. Friday I witnessed the most depressing musical performance I have ever seen. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone was in fact mostly just painful. The “Casiotone” part is quite literal. It is in fact, one man, of questionable vocal ability, playing a cheap and heavily-processed keyboard – slowly – and adding rather strident and unpleasant sound effects from time to time. Additionally, the acoustics of the Ida Noyes 3rd-floor theatre are a disaster, and vocals invariably die there. So I couldn’t really here the lyrics, although I did catch the phrase “cold, white Christmas in St. Paul.” All in all, he sounded kind of like Craig Finn, without the lyrical brilliance, backed up by the opposite of the Hold Steady. And I really love Craig Finn in the context of the Hold Steady. But this guy, much less.

But the concert was free, and we went ironically, hipster-style. I wore my shiny shirt, and I was very depressed that I had forgotten to take along Hipster Bingo. Some people attempted to dance… it was more of a swaying, I guess. Not a lot more you could do with it. We left after the fifth song, when all hope had been lost and the audience had begun to talk amongst themselves to degree audible over the music.

Additionally, talk of hipsteriness led to the discovery that I know someone who’s been to the Ashbury… but swore off going there once it stopped being ironic. So… yeah…

And I almost forgot that I lost a lot of blood on Friday. And then I got it back. I gave platelets, which involves having a great deal of one’s blood filtered through a large machine full of centrifuges and pumps. And it comes back in colder, which is an incredibly creepy feeling. But I got free snacks, I got to watch a movie, and I gained a little karma, so it’s all good.

And... Saturday was a fencing dinner, fraught with delicious Chinatown cuisine. And afterwards, I continued my crusade to bring Undeclared to the unwashed masses. Which had even more irony this time around. Suffice to say, I know someone who can draw clear parallels between Eric and her ex-boyfriend. But this makes sense, because my first-year was basically Undeclared without the sex, the British guy, and Ted Nugent.