Keep Wild Cards in Uno

I've obviously had a lot of fantastic ideas in my day, hence the title of my blog. So when a writer friend recently sent out a request for stories of the terrible things people do to their significant others, I knew I had to have something that fit the bill.

This story is a contrast of maturity. I was 21 and a semester away from graduation. I had been with my boyfriend Brian for 4 and a half years. He was the only guy I had ever been with. This is the part where I applaud my 21 year old maturity. I was thinking in terms of the future and feared that I might meet some regrets in my thirties if I married the only guy I'd ever been with. Actually the lyrics from Mary Chapin Carpenters song, "He Thinks He'll Keep Her" (which I had won a CD of at a 10'th birthday party in which we went to the Wyoming Valley Mall where a KRZ DJ was giving out CDs), stayed with me and haunted me. I decided to be honest with him and talk to him about my fears of being 36 and meeting him at our door. He swore he didn't have the same concerns, that he was sure about me.

About a week or so later, I come home from a grueling 4 hour shift of recieving prank phone calls at the Ithaca College information desk to an instant message (remember those?) saying "Ask your boyfriend what he's really doing." Apparently a girl in Brian's dorm decided to rat him out for kissing a chubby 18 year old. I know she is chubby because she had a link with pictures on her AIM profile. It was before the days of facebook so finding this out was not so easy. She wore overall shorts. Why this is relevant to my story, I don't know. Wait I do, I want you to know she was easily resistible.

I'll paraphrase the many sobbing conversations and negotiations, and cut to the moment of my shining idea: A Wild Card. This is the contrast of maturity where I wonder what I was thinking. The wild card meant that I could make out with someone else and then we would be even. In retrospect, I could have realized this would fail had I observed any playground interactions. When does someone hurt someone else and then when they hurt them back they call it a day?

I picked a friend of a friend to have the honor of being my wild card. It was not as simple as the term "wild card" suggests. There was more than one encounter and I got attached. It became a horrifically long and drawn out break up with a Real World-Esque Vacation thrown in (I will one day write a blog about the legendary Ocean City trip). This wild card ended my relationship, nearly destroyed one of my friendships, and my wild card and I never got together.

Brian is married and my wild card is married with two children. I can hold on to the fact that Mary Chapin Carpenter will never write a song about me.

Oh, and one of my student's math games has these cards simply labeled "Wild Card" in all caps, I have removed them from the deck.