Who Do You Love?

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I have a complaint. Who in heck set Valentine’s Day on Ash Wednesday? It’s a fishy affair if you ask me!

However, it prompts me to say remember you are dust and to dust you shall retur– Er…. Okay, but what I mean is: let’s talk about love.

In present day when we mention love, it’s always one sort of love: eros. Or at best, romantic love, the sort of love between married people.

But love has many forms. And to the credit of valentine’s day in schools and childhood, people do have “love” in the sense of friendship. Although in schools you have to love everyone, which of course means you love no one.

STILL to our point…

I’ve been — rather surprisingly, considering it was not something I expected, and I’m neither good with feelings nor with people — blessed with a grand love affair. I married the love of my life, and 38 years on, we’re still very much in love.

However, despite that, and taking nothing from it, my life is beset with other loves as well. I love my kids. I love my extended family. I love my friends. I love my country. I even love my commenters, and worry about you guys when you’re missing. (Or take a powder and wander off, usually over something silly.) Oh, and I love my cats. Though apparently not as much as Muse loves me, because today she won’t leave me alone. At all.

Anyway, the juxtaposition of Ash Wednesday and St. Valentine’s and the fact that recently a lot of friends and acquaintances, some younger than I, are dropping off — stop that. Seriously. I mean it — make me think that this love stuff, not just eros, but agape, and the friendly, companionable love we have for pets, and and and… are important. Else, what is life for?

I’ve reached the weird part of my life where I get more fun doing something nice for someone that they aren’t expecting, or perhaps secretly helping someone than you know going out and getting a big dinner. Which is good, since there will be no big dinner today.

It’s sometimes hard to explain this to people. “Oh, no. But you should take that money and do something good for yourself.” (Seriously, people.) When in fact I am doing something good for myself. This is not the bad kind of altruism, where I hurt myself to make others happy, but the happy kind of altruism where I do things because I can and they make people happy. (Yes, I know. I should put up free short stories more often!)

On this very fishy Valentine’s Day, yell back at death and desolation by loving someone. And I don’t mean that kind of love. I mean… Do something nice for someone you love. Even if the someone is a cat who has no idea it’s a special day. Get out of your own head, and give the cat a treat. Call an old friend who might be feeling lonely. Go for a walk with your spouse. Water your house plant. Something. Do something for someone else.

And do it with love. It will make you feel better, I promise.

122 thoughts on “Who Do You Love?”

  1. Love you too dear cyber niece o’ mine.
    Waiting patiently and with great anticipation to see that avalanche of new works for me to pick apart.

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  2. I am grateful every Valentine’s Day that I no longer have to line up four kids, make them sign their names on 30 cards each, stuff the envelopes and write the student’s name on each card, making sure I don’t get the classes mixed up, and put the packet in each child’s backpack. Roughly 120 cards, each year. I’m glad you reminded me that this was a valuable lesson in friendship for my children. It was, and they loved it.

    I’ll cherish the love of my friends and family today. Thank you. I hope y’all have a wonderful day too.

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    1. Thankfully, while my kids’ school enforces the rule of “bring one for everybody if you’re bringing any” (which I don’t object to), they prefer randomly passed out valentines. So only “from”, not “to.”

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  4. Dearly beloved, let us love one another: for charity is of God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God: for God is charity. By this hath the charity of God appeared towards us, because God hath sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we may live by him. In this is charity: not as though we had loved God, but because he hath first loved us, and sent his Son to be a propitiation for our sins. My dearest, if God hath so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abideth in us: and his charity is perfected in us. In this we know that we abide in him, and he in us: because he hath given us of his spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father hath sent his Son to be the Saviour of the world.

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          1. Hmmm… Just re-read this; apparently your “That’s” referred to your post rather than to my reply, as I should have realized. Confusion reigns supreme, at least at my end. :oops:

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  5. “Who in the heck set Valentine’s Day on Ash Wednesday”

    Since Ash Wednesday is the movable observance — it varies year by year based on when Easter is — while Valentine’s Day is fixed on February 14, the pertinent question would be “who set Ash Wednesday on Valentine’s Day”. The answer would be “the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.” If one is Eastern Orthodox, however, Easter isn’t until May 5 this year and Great Lent doesn’t start until “Clean Monday” on March 19, so no problem there.

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          1. I thought I’d seen a lot of Christian theology variants, but a Dispensationalist Catholic is a new one.

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            1. I’m not sure of the technical difference between a dispensation and an indulgence (wholesale vs. retail, maybe?), but the latter has been (was? I dunno if it’s still granted) a Catholic “thing” for probably a millennium, definitely several centuries.

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              1. A dispensation allows one to do something that would otherwise not be allowed, like no abstinence on a Friday during lent. An indulgence is a remission of time in Purgatory. A dispensation is given by a bishop within his diocese, an indulgence by the pope.

                Selling indulgences was the proximate cause of that unpleasantness in 1517.

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                1. A common use of dispensations in the Catholic Church today is to grant permission for a Catholic to get married in a non-Catholic wedding ceremony — often in deference to a non-Catholic bride who wants to have the wedding in her church.

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                  1. So they are still in use? I guess that as nominally a Catholic I should have gotten one before I was married in a Lutheran church back in ’65. I suspect that won’t affect my ultimate destination, however. ;-)

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    2. I KNOW. :) They tell me 2018 had the same confluence. I don’t believe it because I don’t remember it. Then again that was a BAD year.
      OTOH before that the last time was 1945, so….

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    5. Somebody noted that most of the time Ash Wednesday is on Valentine’s day, then Easter is on April Fool’s Day. (Not this year because Leap Year and Feb 29th.) If there’s a deeper meaning to that, it escapes me. :)

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    6. Actually, because the calendar got revised they also revised the setting of the date of Easter. thus the regularization of the selection of the date of Easter we (We being the western churches including most of the protestant world, As noted the Eastern churches still run on the Julian Calendar for their feasts) use now comes out of the Gregorian Calendar. This was promoted by Pope Gregory XIII in the bull Inter Gravissimas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter_gravissimas) and has been in use for over 450 years. So it is (indirectly) the fault of Pope Gregory XIII.

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  6. The Council of Nicaea, by the way, established the “first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox” rule for setting the date of Easter that Western (Roman Catholic and Protestant) Christians follow. Easter, in turn, determines when Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, Pentecost and several other observances occur.

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        1. When the Church began having their local clergy calculate the date (with the breakdown of communications, they couldn’t just have the Pope declare it and send it out), they fixed the date of the Vernal Equinox at March 21st (Gregorian). Which is later than reality this year by two days, but doesn’t affect the Easter date – the following full moon is on March 25th, no matter which date you use.

          What does frequently make a mess of the whole thing is that the Hebrew calendar is a modified lunar-solar calendar (IIRC from the Babylonian Captivity). Every so often, their calendar throws in an entire leap month, which completely disconnects the Roman Easter from the Jewish Passover. (Dug a bit – last time was apparently in 2016, when Easter was on March 27, while Passover was April 22-30.)

          Now that is for the Gregorian (Roman) date – Orthodox Easter was on May 1st in 2016 – which jibed with neither Roman Easter nor Jewish Passover.

          I used to have a little program that would calculate the date of Easter, and the other movable Catholic feasts (Roman, not Orthodox). The code is long gone, though. I tried once to have the problem be a programmer hiring test, but that was shot down…

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            1. Borrowing from Tom Lehrer’s “New Math” song, “It’s so simple, so very simple, that only a child can do it.” :)

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          2. Ah, thank you for that explanation. After my mother passed last year (fallout from that has been why I’ve been a silent lurker) my then fiance and I did a courthouse wedding, so as to ensure financial and locational stabilty.

            I had suggested having a larger celebration this spring, and mentioned the vernal equinox as a possible day, but she mentioned it was the 19th this year, when I was thinking the 21st. The 19th is the anniversary of my birth, so I didn’t want to “cheat” by having it that day.

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          3. Actually I wrote that for a sophmore level programming class. The fun thing is it was written in Lisp (MACLisp, having nothing to do with Apple Macs as those were about 5 years into the future). There was a function to get the phase of the moon for a particular date needed for that calculation.

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                1. I am afraid I must object to your object oriented carp. Pascal is a structured language in line of descent from Algol 60 Thanks to Mr. Dykstra. Lisp started as sort of an ersatz assembly language (the car and cdr were actually address and data registers (no idea what the C stood for) in an early IBM or Burroughs machine (never was clear which). Neither was particularly object oriented although LISP with its interpreted nature and functions as first class items had some of that feel. There was Modula-3 which Dykstra created that had some of the Object orientation ideas.

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                  1. C is the follow on to A and B. Seriously.

                    Still have my K & R C book in a box somewhere around here.

                    Obligatory object orientated language jokes –
                    You know the name of OO – COBOL?
                    ADD ONE TO COBOL GIVING COBOL.

                    Then there is OO RPG ( really need a non-proportional font here…)
                    ADD 1 RPG

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                  2. Modula-3
                    ………………..

                    One I am perfectly willing to forget I had to use. Or rather it was “Class topic is OOP … Modula-3 is the tool you will use.” Blink. I at least had a whole lot of training on moving between multiple programming language tools (where I *started they had whole terms on different programming languages), with followup professional experience. A lot of my classmates only had whatever they had had in HS, and the underclass tool usage (Schema, I think, I got to skip that). OTOH I was hampered by working 40 hours/week, programming RPG (old style), later 20/hours 2 days/week programming VAC Basic (again, old style). They pulled that with “this new fancy tool from AT&T Labs called C++” :-) too, winter ’89, an optional class “Advanced OOP” (graduated spring ’89).

                    ((*)) Difference between 2 year programming associate, and 4 year computer sciences bachelor. degrees. I had no intention of getting the latter. But when an employer says they’ll pay for it … Um. Okay. Sure. They did too, until they moved the firm out of town, and let most of us go. About 55% of the classes, about 66% of the cost (given 4 hours a term is about 2/3 cost of 12 hours class, full time, a term. More per hour, same fees.)

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              2. There was a standard idea in that class that LISP stood for Lots of Insipid Silly Parenthesis . It was an intriguing language that I ran into a couple times later in my career, but to my taste doing ANYTHING was inordinately hard and often better done with other later languages that weren’t so inscrutable.

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                1. LISP inscrutable? How about APL?
                  If there was ever a write only language…

                  And wasn’t Nicolas Wirth Pascal’s and Modula-2’s creator?

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                  2. APL was almost as bad a Brainfuck or similar intentionally bad languages. Even the DEC compiler on VAX/VMS (where all the languages usually played well together) it was a nightmare to use other language libraries. I got DEC GKS (a graphics library) working with Cobol, Ada and Lisp (common Lisp), but could not make APL work. Even the APL compiler team threw their hands up in surrender.

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  7. Hi Sarah. I hardly comment here anymore, due to work load for the Interstellar Research Group and various other time-wasting responsibilities and opportunities. :) But never doubt that I read your posts every day, and think about you, Dan, and the kids regularly. Ruby and I will see you at LC36 in June! And I’ll catch you up on the Luxembourg symposium too, as soon as I have new info on it…

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      2. We have enough engineers, odds and mad scientists here, it shouldn’t take long to throw together the plans.

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      3. Open a can of tuna and my Miz Kitty teleports. Seems to be only very short range, so not useful for interstellar.

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        1. Not sure if it is teleportation or precognition and the cats KNOW you’re going to open the can and are just very stealthy movers. Or perhaps they really are just a waveform like Schrodingers cat and the sound of a can opener collapses the wave form. I recommend when we get a Mars base someone open a can of tuna and see if any cats show up. That will at least tell us it might be useful for interplanetary travel. Or perhaps instantaneous interplanetary messaging? Tie a message to a cat and then open the tuna on Mars? Perhaps IP over a Cat/Tuna link…People have speculated on pigeon based IP.

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          2. Which raises the question…if cats truly can teleport in this fashion, would it be sufficient to duct-tape only one cat to yourself to be similarly transported, or would you need multiple cats? And if so, how do you get them to all teleport to the same location at the same time? If only a portion of your feline delivery system transported simultaneously in time and space, it could get somewhat messy for the erstwhile passenger…

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            1. And worse if several people open tuna cans simultaneously when yo have multiple cats in place does it result in a Harry Potter like Splinch? Its kind of like the old issue of using a cat as a levitation tool. Take one cat and attach one piece of toast (jam/butter side UP) to its back. Pick up said cat and drop. As the toast must land butter side down and the cat must land feet side down what you end up with is a suspended feline/toast amalgam. Allegedly this is the power source for many UFO’s which explains the buzzing sounds often heard from said objects.

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            2. Using multiple cats in conjunction with duct tape sounds like a recipe for catastrophe.

              Kat-the-dog always appears in the laundry room when her bedtime treat jar is opened, no matter how soundly she was sleeping, and how quietly said jar is opened.

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            3. I’m fairly certain that using multiple cats will not work for teleportation purposes unless they are all coherent cats. Otherwise the energy disperses too rapidly and you don’t have enough to make it all the way to your destination. At which point the cats look at you as if you’re stupid, and then go their merry way without you.

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              1. Sounds like you’d need quantum entanglement of your teleportation cats of some sort. Sounds like this is a place for a nice ball of yarn…

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  10. Searching for Mrs. Right is usually a better long-term strategy than Miz Right Now. (grin) Ow. That hurt. (grin)

    Someday, I will find the woman who a) will put up with me, and b) will not give cray-cray lessons to the Joker. (and “c) will not already married” is essential.)

    (grin) ow….

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    1. Unless your surname is Wright, you’ll not find what you want by looking for Mrs. Wright.
      And if it is, you probably want to look for Has-potential-to-be-Mrs. Wright

      Exits, pursued by a flock of carp.

      “I’ve gotten to where the first thing I notice about a woman is the status of her ring finger.”
      “…”
      “Gettin’ too old to outrun jealous husbands anymore.”

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      1. LOL. Good carp!

        Must. Not. Already. Be. Married.

        An example of what washes up on my beach. I was a fairly newly minted PFC in the Army, and at the main enlisted club on Fort Stewart. A decent looking lady persuaded me that we should go out to her car and get to know each other better. I was looking forward to this, until out of the corner of my eye I noticed the parking authorization sticker on the windshield.

        It had an eagle on it, the indication of a Colonel/O-6.

        “….Are you ….. married?”
        “He doesn’t mind!” purrrrr
        (record scratch noise)

        ABORT!ABORT!ABORT! EJECT!EJECT!EJECT!
        DANGER WILL ROBINSON! DANGER!

        Yup. A man-eating cougar almost got me. (grin)
        -Now- I understood why the bartender was chuckling every time he refilled our glasses.

        So, yeah. I have reformed myself, and definitely changed my criteria.

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        1. Yes, there’s no quicker way to stop a relationship that hearing long term lover say “I really should get around to divorcing my husband.”

          That happened as mentioned once. Some years before, a budding relationship ended when I met her husband. Liked the guy, too.

          Mrs RCP has been so for 22.5 years right now. I think we’ll make it a while longer, with cooperation from the Grim Reaper.

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            1. Co-worker at Assimilated Semiconductor Company. We’d been dating for a year and a half before she dropped this little tidbit. Didn’t know a thing about the dude, and had zero interest in finding out.

              The second case occurred within a few weeks of seeing her. It seems it was the case that the lady was trying to determine if the marriage was worth saving. I hate being the alternate hypothesis. (Or was that hypotenuse?)

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        1. Yes, but that’s rather limiting your chances, isn’t it?

          I used to joke that I’d marry a girl who was born on Valentines Day, on her birthday, so that I’d only have one date to remember, and the whole world would help.

          Did not end up doing that.

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          1. And of course the wedding has to be on 2/14/?? , There’d still be Mother’s day but that issue could be avoided…

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            1. Ah and indeed I misread you already dealt with marrying on the birthday solving that particular issue.

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          2. Mom remarried a few years after Dad died, and for various reasons, it ended up being on my 21st birthday. That was fun.

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    2. Pretty sure there at least two women on this board that meet the second two of your three criteria.

      The question then becomes “can you meet their conditions for age-range and religion?” which can go a long way toward them meeting your first condition.

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  13. If you miss Fat Tuesday, you are doing it wrong.

    If you cannot -remember- Fat Tuesday, you are probably doing it right.

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  14. Good post. As usual.

    We are putting off today until Saturday. Because hubby is on his winter golf trip. Saturday I fly down to join him (so if no comments Saturday – ???, it is because haven’t been online, and WP commenting on my phone are a PIA). So, just me, son, and the 4 legged, today. One of whom is going to very unhappy when she realizes neither dad or I are there come Saturday night. (And son thinks the new feral cat has become clingy because dad is gone. Pepper, dog, is going to be worse. We chose to not go through the process to have her fly with me.)

    We’ve rarely do dinner out on Feb 14, now for decades. We just don’t want to fight the crowds. Generally create a special dinner at home (or try, there have been some spectacular failures).

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    1. We did ours last Friday – between getting out of work and doing Mass (and back to work the next morning), it would have just been too late for $SPOUSE$.

      Which, since I had planned a steak dinner at home for Saturday, meant two of those in a row. Got a bit of an ego-boost when she told me that mine was better than the steak house. (That despite it being a Manager’s Special and frozen for a week.) There is apparently hope for my cooking skills…

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  15. I will admit, I’m cynical about relationships. My experience of them is that they are a matter of give-and-take. As in “I give, she takes.” That said, I’ve been chasing the same woman since 1987 or thenabouts, and while I still don’t think our relationship is better than “marginally acceptable—better than nothing, but not by much,” a lot of it’s not her fault. We just live far from each other, and neither of us can relocate.

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  17. Valentines Day, or Singles Awareness Day as it almost always is for me, has been very rough for me this year Great Aunt.
    First Valentines Day after Mom’s passing.
    I think we’d have better odds of Ronald Regan winning the 2024 election via necromancy versus being in any kind of romantic relationship at this point. Especially since I have such a good example in the form of Mom and Dad’s relationship, which worked for nearly fifty years to “until death do you part”. It’s hard to find love when you come in half-way to the story and don’t know how to start.
    My round of “Happy Valentines Day” messages has an even lower number of replies than last year.
    Lots of stress points, from Dad’s insistence that we do a massive decluttering of the house, issues with my current job, having problems finding anything that isn’t a pure sales job because Dad insists that I have a backup plan for my current job, all of the stupid that makes you despair when people excuse the dumpster fire that has become mass market media…(1)
    But I keep my eyes open and keep trying every day to make the world a better place. I’ve got something that looks like a deal with my muse (I write the YA novel and erotic novel she wants, she helps with the other stories, including A Solist In Rome), the house is coming together, and as long as I don’t put an axe through the TV because my computer is back in the old location where I can’t help but be exposed to daytime TV at a volume that even overwhelms my headphones…we’re not doing too bad.
    (1-Seriously. You read stories of people outright changing the script on localizations and upper management clearly approving of it. You watch as Bob Iger BSes everyone for the last five to six years and has probably destroyed or critically injured the Disney IP. Amazon Prime is quadrupling down on DEI initiatives to cause their industry to DIE. “Popular” music is a disaster. And let’s not even talk about the destruction of the mid-market book series and how GRRM has pretty much murdered the epic fantasy novel series for at least a decade if not more.
    (If you wonder how anybody could have been a “Good German” in the 1940’s, living next door to a screaming pork factory in Poland where trains of people go in but don’t come out…you can see examples and be massively depressed.)

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      1. I can look at it from the outside and know that it isn’t that bad. I have a home, I have food, I have my health, I have my family. There has to be a job out there for me, something that will hire me and give me a salary.
        Yet all progress is illusionary, from the inside.

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        1. Oh, I know that feeling. Looking out the window and seeing nothing but black clouds sending down rain and sleet. Not at the dry, warm room that’s inside.

          A while ago, I set up a file for every day, and try to write in it. Even if I only accomplished the essential life tasks of the day, it seems to help to keep the leash on the black dog.

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          1. I’m a big fan of lists to beat the black dog to death.

            I do something like:

            I’m panicking about how I’m useless. Well, check it, that’s objective, I know my judgement can be bad. Make a list of stuff to do. Making the list counts as doing something. K, what’s on the list? Clean The House is too vague. Make it more precise. No more than one room or item per checklist, things can only have more than one step involved if it’s a literally five minute job make coffee for tomorrow or switch teh loads of laundry. Be PRECISE, even if goal is whole house is clean. K, so “clean bathroom floor,” that’s one item. “refold towels” that’s item two.

            You can also have the big, broad list of “things to do” but those are 1) stretch goals, and 2) a list of things that you can write a list that breaks them down into useful steps, like ‘fix library’ becomes ‘pack books into boxes. assemble shelves. Wash carpet in library area. Repair outlet in library. Replace lightbulbs in corner. Secure shelves to wall. Label shelves with sticky notes so you can sort. MAKE labels that are more permanent, don’t put on shelves until last step. Unpack and sort books, with numbered list for how many boxes of books you have because that’s more than a five minute job……

            And remember, making the list COUNTS as doing a thing! Figuring out objective steps is an important skill and a lot of work ,which is why few schools teach it. :D

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            1. Yep. Actually that reminds me, I need to put on the daily list to get the big lists updated.

              I basically have three of those – Office Maintenance, Household Maintenance, and Yard Maintenance. I bought some cork board strips (about 1 1/2″ by 10″) and stuck them up around the sides of the bookshelf that sits on my desk. They’re all tacked up there, but a lot of things are done now (YES!).

              Oh, also good for tacking up the calendars, and printouts of the “Daily Log” where I’ve added writing thoughts, until I get into that part of that story (or stories).

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  18. Thank-you Sarah A. Hoyt! The posts you write are a gift to me (when I can grab the time to read them)! Please know, that your posts resonate with my soul. (How so puzzles me: your life experiences are so different from mine?) Happy Valentines Day to you, your family and the cats.

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  19. Mike cheated: He bought me a rose-per-year for my birthday, last week. They’re still gorgeous, so they need to count for Valentine’s day, too. Picture is one post back if you click on my name – good luck counting.

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  21. As Valentine’s Day is squeezed between the Reader’s better half’s birthday and our anniversary, it is tended to be ignored here at the Reader’s library. This year is especially not a Valentine’s Day for the books as better half scheduled her colonoscopy for 730 AM this morning. The good news is all is well.

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  22. How about how Passover and Good Friday overlap so often; if you observe both, then you really have a limited menu, given the no meat and the no leavened bread rules.

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    1. We tried it once in college, though the fish largely ended up falling through the grill, which is how I discovered that white zinfandel goes pretty well with NYC-style cheese pizza.

      (There are a lot of reasons that particular dinner ended up as Lore, mostly because of a couple of twerps who couldn’t keep their drama on the stage. But that’s another story and it is full of rage.)

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      1. Swordfish, Tuna or Salmon steaks have been the go to dinner for Christmas Eve and Good Friday, although having any of those three with Matzoh is a definite “experience”.

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    2. All you need is to serve a meal to a group including both Jews and Catholics on that day.

      I once was one of the group. It was fun. That was the same day where a Jew explained to me about keeping kosher for Passover while eating bacon because he wasn’t keeping kosher, just kosher for Passover. Told that to an Orthodox Jew once and was told that was the proper order if you were going to do only one.

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  24. I would have a very hard time not naming a child born on Valentine’s Day something Valentine-related.

    So it’s probably just as well that my brother and sister in law picked out my new nephew’s name well in advance.

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  25. Of course, every time I see the title of this column, I get Jefferson Airplane singing “Somebody to Love” as an earworm.

    (Ceti Alpha V earworms, LLC)

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