I'm a hopeless romantic.I'm also hopeless as a gymnast and harpsichord player, if you must know.
I met my future wife at a college basketball game in January of 1992. I was playing center, and she was the captain of the cheerleading team. That's a ridiculous lie. I'm also hopeless as a basketball player. And while my future wife certainly
We were both ushers. We worked the front door together. We bonded by reciting dialog from the Saturday Night Live 15th anniversary special, which we'd both seen far too many times. As things wrapped up, I asked her what she was doing after the game.* "Going home," she replied tersely. Ah, young love.
Fortunately (for me, at least), I persisted, stopping by her dorm room repeatedly over the next few days. She was friendly but a little cold. Her story is that I made her "nervous." Nerves don't explain the pepper spray though, do they? No, they do not.
Our first date was the week before Valentine's Day. This put me in an awkward position. I had been trying to ingratiate myself with this girl for a couple weeks now, and I wasn't entirely sure that she wasn't just humoring me. I wanted to do something for Valentine's Day that indicated I liked her without scaring her off.
I honestly don't remember what I ended up doing. I may have just called her, or gotten her some lame-ass card. But I remember feeling cheated by circumstances. I was in love with this girl, and I felt constrained not to demonstrate it on the one day that I should have been able to go crazy. Not that I'm a big fan of Valentine's Day; as a rule I don't like having my behavior dictated by the Hallmark corporation. But I would have made an exception for her, if I didn't think that I'd have scared the bejesus out of her.
My solution was to say, essentially, "Screw Valentine's Day. Screw Hallmark. And screw American Greetings too, while we're at it." I made up my own holiday.
On February 26, I slipped a card under my future wife's door. It was a "Happy Birthday Grandson" card. I wrote "Happy Inappropriate Card Day!" on the inside. And a new tradition was born.
Every year, my wife and I exchange inappropriate cards. One year she got me a sympathy card. One year it was a little kid's birthday card, with Bambi on the front. The caption was, "Kinda wobbly, aren't you?" I think last year I got her a card that said "Happy Father's Day from both of us." My best effort was the time I stopped at a gas station on the way home from work and got her a postcard with the windmills from Altamont Pass on it. "Wish you were here," I wrote.You can give an inappropriate card to anyone. There are no rules. Well, except for the fact that the card has to be completely inappropriate -- and not risque inappropriate; that's too easy. It has to be a card that would be perfectly appropriate for someone other than the recipient, preferably on a completely different day.
Last year I told some people at work about my holiday, and they thought it was fantastic. So I decided that this year I would release it into the wild, and see if it takes to its new habitat. This year, celebrate Inappropriate Card Day with someone you love.
Inappropriate Card Day is February 26. Start rummaging through your reject card pile today!
*We won, as a recall. Calvin went on to win the Division 3 championship that year. I like to think I had something to do with that.
Shamelessly whored out to humor-blogs.com.
Mattress Tags: Inappropriate Card Day]]>