Went out to eat for a nice Valentine's Day dinner Wednesday night at an Italian place in River West called La Scarola. It was fantastic. One of those tiny joints you see in the movies. One of the few restaurants I’ve been to lately where the ambiance and the food was exactly what I was hoping it would be.

Why is it, though, that every good Italian restaurant I've been to is about the size of my parent's living room? The Italians are big people. Why don't they make their restaurants larger? Mexicans, I get why they have small restaurants. They’re small people. But Italians? James Gandolfini would need his own room at this place.

The ambiance was great, although a bit overwhelming. It was as if you were listening to about a dozen conversations at once. And every minute or so somebody was bumping into the back of your chair or dragging their coat across the corner of you table.

There was also the celebrity factor, which made it even more interesting. Emily and I were standing at the tiny bar (which is inconveniently located smack dab in the middle of the place) when we looked over and saw this even tinier man who looked very familiar standing in line for the pisser.

"That guy is totally an actor … who is he?" I leaned in and asked Emily quietly.

She sat there for a moment thinking, then leaned in to whisper in my ear "That's Stephen Dorff."

Ah, ha! Then we spent the rest of the meal trying to remember what the hell movies Stephen Dorff was even in (it wasn't until I got on imdb.com the next day that I could actually figured out what: Blade was his biggest hit).

Moments later we get sat and I notice another very familiar short white guy a couple tables in front of me.

"Nah, that's not really him," I said to myself as I gnawed on some bruschetta. "He'd at least be wearing a collared shirt."

But when I saw the gawdy diamond earring he had in his right ear, I realized it had to be him.

"That guy nine o'clock from you is a pro basketball player," I whispered to Emily.

It was Jason Williams. White Chocolate. The dude that did that Nike commercial with Randy Moss and the Dukes of Hazard song in the background.

At first I was taken aback by how small he was (6-1) even for a point guard. He's rail thin, too. And dressed like a schmuck — he was wearing a long sleeve Heat T-shirt with his left arm out of the sleeve because he'd recently got a tattoo on it (I could see him showing it off at the table).

The attire at La Scarola is casual (come to think of it, Dorff was dressed poorly as well), but shit, if you were making $9 million a year like Williams is, why wouldn't you at least attempt to look half decent in public? If I made that kind of coin I'd be pulling some Tom Brady shit. (I'm sure there's a causal relationship, too, between how good an athlete dresses and the people that hang out with him: The dudes sitting with Williams reminded me of the types of average douchebags that hang out at sports bars back in Council Bluffs. Tom Brady hangs out with super models. Dorff, coincidentally, does hang out with super models.)

Of course, then came Valentine's Day. I'm not one of those anti-Valentine's Day guys. It is what is. If you're in a relationship with somebody it's just an excuse to have a sweet dinner and some good sex. (Or in my case this year, break up with each other). If you're single, then it's just another day you get to do whatever the fuck you want (such as go to the bar by yourself to pick up on desperate chicks). What's really the negative?

This Valentine's Day will go down as one of the two worst of my life so far, though. A close second to the Valentine's Day of 1998, when, at the age of 18, I hitched a ride from Iowa City to Peoria, Ill., to spend the weekend with a girl I was kind of seeing at the time. She wound up blowing me off pretty much the whole trip. She got super wasted at a party that Saturday night and ditched me for some dude who I think she slept with. Which meant I had to spend all of that night cooped up in her tiny dorm room (without a key, no less, so I couldn't leave the place and get back in). I didn't hear from her again until late that Sunday evening, after I'd already broken down and asked the girls from Peoria that gave me the ride if I could spend Sunday with them since I was so lonely. It's bad enough to have a girl you think you're in love demonstrate with absolute clarity that she could not give a tiny fuck about you. It's even worse when that forces you to call up a stranger and invite yourself to her Sunday family dinner because you're an emotional train wreck.