The Flowers We Buy
Valentine's Day and the gift of attention
I was in line at Costco on Wednesday night, and I watched a man stand in front of the flower cooler for what must have been five minutes. He picked up a bouquet of red roses. Put it back. Picked up pink tulips. Put them back. Tried the mixed arrangement. Back again. Finally, he grabbed the roses, a safe and expected choice, and walked to the back of the line looking like someone who’d just finished a test he wasn’t sure he’d passed.
I thought about that man all the way home.
What I respected about that guy is that he was trying. Actually, trying to choose something that would land right, that would say what he wanted it to say. He was weighing his choices. He was trying to make his significant other happy. He was thinking of her (or him, I have no idea).
Today is Valentine’s Day. The holiday sits there in mid-February like a referendum on whether you’ve been paying attention, whether you know how to translate love into a gesture, and whether you can get it right when the calendar tells you it matters.
For me, I’ve realized Valentine’s Day gives you permission. It’s permission to buy the flowers. To write the card. To say the thing, we should probably say more often, but don’t because life is overwhelming and we’re tired and the bed is cozy and warm.
Without really going out on a limb, I’d say the man at Costco picked a dozen roses because roses mean something on Valentine’s Day. They mean something because we’ve all collectively agreed they do in the same way a diamond ring means something, or a handwritten note means something, or showing up to an event as a parent or a partner means something. The meaning isn’t in the object or the event. It’s in the attention.
I’ve been thinking about attention a lot lately. What I give my attention to, what is worthy of my attention, and how we show people they matter in a world that constantly asks us to pay attention to a million other things. Valentine’s Day, for all its commercial trappings, is a day when we’re culturally permitted to give someone our full attention.
Are you paying attention?
I don’t know if the man in Costco got it right. I don’t know if the roses landed the way he hoped or if they sat on a kitchen counter waiting to be thrown away. I hope they meant something. I hope whoever received them understood they represented genuine deliberation. He was paying attention.
Putting aside the heart-shaped boxes and the overwritten cards, Valentine’s Day says, it’s okay to try. It’s okay to be obvious. It’s okay to buy the flowers everyone knows are flowers, to make the gesture everyone knows is a gesture, and to hope it communicates something that sometimes is hard to say out loud.
Yeah, yeah… Valentine’s Day is all about monetizing love. It’s Hallmark and your local florist’s favorite holiday. I get it. However, I’ll take a world where people stand in front of flower coolers trying to get it right over one where nobody bothers at all.
Be seeing you.
Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl
The Super Bowl halftime show featured Bad Bunny with special guests Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin. It was great. I loved the dancing, the (real) wedding, and the message. I didn’t know the songs or what he was singing, but the storytelling was clear. He’s not my music, but I’m an old fart. I think the last Super Bowl halftime performance I even think about, years later, was Prince in the rain. Right now, Bad Bunny is one of the biggest musical stars on the planet.
There’s always been alternative halftime shows. This year, the one getting all the attention featured Kid Rock, an artist who has not had a meaningful hit since 2008’s “All Summer Long,” which, incidentally, is just a riff on better songs (Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” and Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London”). I don’t mean to call Kid Rock irrelevant, but he is. The Puppy Bowl probably got better or about the same numbers as the show featuring Kid Rock and a bunch of musicians you’ve never heard of before.
Bad Bunny performed to 120 million people in a language that half the country doesn’t speak fluently, and it worked because the performance was excellent and the moment was genuine. That’s it. The NFL didn’t book him to make a political statement. They booked him because he is an international superstar, and the NFL is trying to expand to other non-American markets. Kid Rock and the people putting on this show are yelling at a cultural shift they don’t like and can’t stop. Too bad. So sad.
Related: I love the fact that New England’s O-line was accidentally tipping off play calls the entire game.
The Neil Gaiman Situation
I read a long investigative piece into the allegations against Neil Gaiman, and I read the coverage of his publisher moving forward with his new book anyway. I don’t know what happened in those rooms, and I’m not here to adjudicate guilt or innocence. However, I will say the piece raised serious questions about reporting standards, corroboration, and the speed at which accusations become convictions in public discourse. Just to be clear, no criminal charges have been filed, and all the civil lawsuits have been dismissed.
Is Neil Gaiman a scumbag? I have no idea. Probably? I don’t really know. And neither do you.
“The Only Failure in Life is Not Trying”
Lindsey Vonn crashed during a training run at the 2026 Winter Olympics. She was coming back after retirement, skiing against people half her age, and she crashed hard enough that her Olympic dreams were dashed. Her response was to keep dreaming.
“…we take risks in life. We dream. We love. We jump. And sometimes we fall. Sometimes our hearts are broken. Sometimes we don’t achieve the dreams we know we could have. But that is also the beauty of life; we can try.
“I tried. I dreamt. I jumped.
“I hope if you take away anything from my journey it’s that you all have the courage to dare greatly. Life is too short not to take chances on yourself. Because the only failure in life is not trying.”
Just… wow.
Big Ten Conference Officiating
Brad Underwood is tired of the shitty officiating in the Big Ten Conference. Start at 13:35 if you don’t want to watch the whole thing.
The fix for this is so easy.
The Big Ten hires the highest-rated referees in all of college basketball and gives them a real salary, real accountability, and real opportunity. You set up a real league office, just like the NBA, with a staff of around 50 referees (maybe more, I didn’t do the math to see if that’s off) for the regular season and the B10 Tournament. The office then manages their training, evaluation, and performance reviews. The league covers travel and hotels and pays a real living wage for a high-stress job. NBA refs on the low end make $150K. I’d probably start at $50-60K, with the opportunity to earn more based on performance.
This should be Tony Petitti's top priority. It isn’t, but it should be.
