My hands are killing me.

This weekend I was coerced into performing labor. Intensive, sweat-inducing, physical labor of the most degrading nature that my poor, weak, Geek body was completely unprepared for.

I mowed a lawn.

Having been born and raised in a big city where a 10’x10’ patch of weed infested dirt in front of a single-family, waste-of-good-condo-space, home is considered a luxurious ‘lawn’, I had no idea that mowing the lawn could cause someone so much agony. The seemingly simple act of walking in a shrinking square pattern under the burning eye of a blazing sun while being dragged along behind a self-propelled, gas-powered, ear-shatteringly loud grass muncher has reduced me to a simpering, blister laden, body aching crybaby.

Simply holding a fork can reduce me to tears.

Oh, this all started innocently enough. HoBiscuit asked if we could visit her father for Fathers Day and of course I said yes. We spent a pleasant Sunday morning looking around various neighborhoods in the hopes of finding a new apartment (no such luck) and then headed out to her parents place at around 4pm. She told me all about her fathers recent eye surgery, her sisters upcoming visit, and how nice it will be to spend the evening helping her mother cook.

Not once did she mention anything about me doing physical labor.

When we arrived, HoBiscuits father was in the driveway proudly standing behind a beaten up lawnmower. I would have kept driving, but HoBiscuit’s never fully grasped the proper method of ‘Tuck and Roll’ necessary to ensure a safe landing when thrown from a speeding automobile. That, and her father might interpret her violent expulsion from my car as some form of personal attack or insult and then hunt me down and remove my manhood with white hot pincers and serrated chopsticks.

I hate when that happens.

For those out there like myself who have never actually mowed a lawn before, allow me to list the necessary steps so that you’ll know what to do should you ever find yourself standing on a lawn in suburbia with waist-high grass and holding on to a bright yellow and green JD machine.

1. Carefully unscrew gas cap from lawnmower and pour exactly ½ gallon of gas into lawnmower gas tank.
2. Swear gently as tank overflows and covers lawnmower and driveway with 1/8 gallon of gasoline.
3. Smile ruefully as girlfriend’s parents and girlfriend laugh at you and call you ‘CityBoy’.
4. Ask for help cleaning up gasoline. As they all bend down to help, pretend to light match and watch them run. Ha ha. Bad CityBoy. Bad.
5. Attempt to start lawnmower by pulling ripcord 100 times in under three minutes.
6. Clutch chest, fall to the ground and foam at mouth. Serves you right, CityBoy.
7. Start lawnmower by pulling ripcord and holding clutch.
8. Curse smart-alecky girlfriend.
9. Manhandle obnoxiously loud, heavy and vibrating lawnmower seven feet from driveway to front lawn.
10. Wonder out loud why the stupid lawnmower isn’t moving no matter how hard you push.
11. Thank the cute little 7 year old girl from next door who takes pity on you long enough to point out that you need to release the brake in order for the lawnmower to move.
12. Say a silent prayer that you’ll lose control of lawnmower and it will run over the smart-alecky cute 7 year old girl next door. Ha ha. Bad CityBoy. Bad.
13. Watch in awe as lawnmower dutifully cuts a six foot long patch of grass and then stops dead.
14. Attempt to re-start lawnmower by pulling ripcord 100 times in under three minutes.
15. Throw out back, fall to ground, bleed from anus.
16. Remember that to start lawnmower you need to pull ripcord while holding clutch.
17. Mow entire 7 square acres of front lawn. Good CityBoy. Have a cookie.
18. Go to back of house and mow entire 20 acres of lawn.
19. Do not mow the garden!
20. Curse and swear, just to stay in practice.
21. Notice that your good, clean light brown pants are now completely covered in grass stains and smell of gasoline.
22. Swear vengeance on your snickering girlfriend.
23. Finish mowing the backyard and let go of lawnmower for the first time in three hours.
24. Scream in agony as two humongous blisters on your hands burst from the shock of encountering fresh air.
25. Vow to use a sharp, hook-pointed stick up the wazoo to remove the entails of the next person who should ever ask you to mow the lawn.
26. Listen in silence at dinner as girlfriend and her family poke fun at CityBoy and his inability to hold eating utensils without sobbing in pain.
27. Consider coming back at night and salting the entire lawn. Bad CityBoy. Baaaad.

We all think we know love.

We love things, like cars, motorcycles, boats and planes. We love hats, shoes, shirts and comforters. We love roller coasters, video games, two-ply toilet tissue and ballpoint pens that can write in zero gravity. We love toys that light up, make noise, need batteries or require some assembly.

We love technology.

We love electricity, indoor plumbing, central air-conditioning and double-sided, high-density DVDs. We love computers, cell phones, the internet and paper clips. We love dishwashers, remote controls, robotic dogs and 5 mega pixel, auto focus, 3x-zoom digital cameras.

We love the arts.

We love music, movies, books and television. We love creating, discovering, inventing and becoming inspired. We love color, typography, design, and concepts. We love to sing badly in the shower, write wretched poetry on public bathroom stalls and tell horrible jokes in polite company.

We love activity.

We love going out, staying home, being with friends and spending time alone. We love fitting in, being different, starting a trend and standing on our own. We love engaging our senses, disconnecting from the world, becoming immersed in the moment and stepping back to observe.

We love time.

We love being young at heart as we grow wise with age. We love holidays, vacations, weekends and birthdays. We love then, and now, and our memories and dreams. We love what was, what is and what we hope will be.

But do we really know what it means to love someone?

We all use the word love so many times during the day that we might forget at times the true meaning of love. Is it fair to tell the one you profess to love that they are only as important to you as the latest hit song on the radio? Or that you love them as much as your favorite food or childhood toy?

Do you want to be loved that way?

This day, Valentines Day, should not be about cards, or gifts or candy. It should not be about getting the biggest stuffed animal or sending the most roses to your significant others office to make their officemates jealous. Do you think buying a Hallmark card and a dozen roses will really win someone’s everlasting affection? Do you truly believe that those things, those silly, quickly discarded physical things really matter? Is that all love is to you?

That is not love to me.

Love to me is a smile that makes you want to break out in song and dance. Love is waking up next to someone and lying there, trying not to disturb their sleep, just so you can listen to their breathing for a little while longer. Love is feeling safe and warm just by hearing a voice on the phone. Love is doing what’s best for someone else, even when it’s not best for you. Love is sacrifice. Love is bliss. Love is power. Love is pain. Love is heaven. Love is hell.

Love is everything.

My girlfriend means more to me than I can ever fully express to anyone, either in words or actions. I try day and night to show her how much she means to me, but if I lived a thousand lifetimes I would remain unable to fully express my devotion to her. After days of searching for some other way to show her my feelings, I have come back to the only way I know of that might come close to expressing how I feel. What I am going to say is an overused, commercialized, and pathetically unoriginal phrase, but I can only hope and pray she will somehow grasp a small, tiny fraction of the sentiment behind the words. I say it here on my website for the whole world to see only because I say it so often when I’m with her that hearing the words from my lips might not be taken seriously anymore. When she reads this, I want her to understand that I know the meaning of the words and the weight they carry. I want her to understand that it is not this silly holiday or peer pressure forcing words from reluctant lips. I know exactly what I’m saying, and it comes from my very soul and with all my heart when I say;

Honey, I love you.

I really hate being sick.

Whatever illness HoBiscuit had she managed to give it to me and now I am completely and totally unable to speak. Really, it’s true. When I open my mouth I can only manage to create this pathetic, high-pitched, squeaking noise not unlike a small rodent being violently folded in half. Backwards. And the amount of mucus congregating in my lungs and around my vocal cords would choke a starving, tapeworm-infested miniature goat.

And everyone knows how much they can eat.

HoBiscuit, bless her evil, cold-as-a-stone heart, has been doing her best to nurture me back to health while simultaneously exacting revenge for all the evil jokes and no-longer-quite-so-funny pranks that I subjected her to all last week. She loves to ask me if there’s anything I want or need and then, when I try to talk, she cups her ear and says, “What? I can’t hear you. Could you speak up please?”

Asking for a glass of water is completely out of the question.

On Thursday evening I did something I’ve never done before. I met Luke, who’s a Web Log Writer just like me, in the flesh for the very first time. I never knew of him before and he never knew me, but we had a common bond that drew us together, even across a crowded bar. Actually, he knew HoBiscuit and since we were all hanging out at a bar we got to talking about our web sites. The reason we were at a bar was because a mutual friend of his and HoBiscuit’s needed ‘Emergency Relationship Breakup Support’, but that’s not something I’m allowed to write about.

And that’s a shame because it’s a real good story. Damn.

Anywaste, it came out that we both maintained Web Logs and we started to talk about web sites and other technical stuff. We were quickly cut off from discussing such important matters as click-through rates and visitor counts when the ladies began rolling their eyes in apparent boredom. It didn’t help that we were the only males in a group of six (that later became a group of 12) and all the females were doing the ‘support the girl, guy-bashing’ type of stuff. I was surrounded and felt threatened and scared all evening.

I consoled myself by watching Charlie’s Angels on the bar TV screen.

Right now I’m trying to recover my health and I hope to be better in a couple of days. My diet consists of soup, Earl Grey Tea (hot), salty crackers and a healthy helping of Humble Pie served daily by my loving girlfriend. But don’t worry, I still get to watch TV all day on the Comfy-Couch of Super Sleep while the rest of the world goes to work.

Hey, just because I’m sick doesn’t mean I have to change my lifestyle, right?

Yesterday, HoBiscuit was a little sick. Not very sick mind you, just a little sick. Since she was in my apartment her sickness became my responsibility and I did everything I could to help her feel better. As we were lying on the couch watching TV she asked me if I could please go get her some water because she was thirsty.

Of course I screwed it up. I’m a guy.

It sounds like a simple request, doesn’t it? When necessary, Wild monkeys in the jungles of East Africa have the necessary social skills to stop flinging their own poo at each other and bring food and water to their sick monkey friends, so it should have been a simple matter for me to get up off my perfectly healthy ass and pour my girlfriend a glass of water. I mean, the fridge was only a couple of feet away and it wasn’t like she was asking me to paint her toe nails or, god forbid, snuggle. Don’t get me wrong, snuggling is great when we’re both healthy, but if one of us is sick and sweaty and having respiratory problems it’s just not the same.

Frankly, it’s just yucky.

So, as I got up to get her water I realized that I still had a full glass of water sitting right there on the coffee table. For a moment, I just looked at it. A nearly full glass of cool refreshing water perched there, virtually untouched, just waiting to quench someone’s thirst. Suddenly, too little geeks appeared in my mind and had a little conversation that went something like this:

“Well, will you look at that. There’s a full glass of water right here.”

“I think she wants water from the fridge.”

“She didn’t say water from the fridge, did she?”

“Well, no. Technically she only asked for some water, but I’m sure she meant fresh water.”

“But this water is right here.”

“You’re going to get us in trouble.”

“Shut up and be a man. It’ll be fun.”

Let me tell you, the look HoBiscuit gave me as I artfully poured my room temperature, slightly used water into her glass was priceless. The look of incredulous astonishment will forevermore be etched in my mind as one of the times that I really ‘got’ her. Of course, she doesn’t see it that way. She thinks I was just being mean and lazy and was angry with me for a couple of hours. It wasn’t until much later on that she realized that I had done it as a joke and wasn’t trying to be deliberately mean. Of course, she thinks it’s funny now, but she’ll never let me live down the fact that I was mean and heartless in her time of need.

And I still think putting the ice cube in the glass afterwards was a stroke of genius.

Snippet of a slightly embellished conversation with my girlfriend:

MightyGeek “Y’know, I need a name for you on my site. Calling you ‘girlfriend’ all the time is getting tedious.”

Girlfriend “OK. How about SlutPuppy?”

MG “Pardon?”

GF “Slut. Puppy.”

MG “You want me to call you SlutPuppy? On my website? For the whole world to see?”

GF (Laughing) “OK. OK. How about HoBiscuit?”

MG “Ho. Biscuit.”

GF *Uncontrolled giggling*

MG “Sigh. Well, at least it sounds a little classier than Slutpuppy. HoBiscuit could almost be a new cracker from Nabisco.”

GF (Laughing) “Don’t you write about this, ok? I don’t want people to think I’m crazy or anything.”

MG “Oh, this is soooo getting blogged.”

I have the coolest girlfriend. Ever.