I couldn’t just give you the taste of the ex-boyfriend story and leave you hanging.

I’m not going to call him Jim anymore, because I actually DO have a friend named Jim now.  Jim Krieg.  And he wrote a book for kids called “Griff Carver, Hallway Patrol” (buy it here! www.amazon.com/Griff-Carver-Hallway-Patrol-Krieg/dp/1595142762 ).  So from now on, let’s refer to my ex-boyfriend as “Tiger.”  Because he plays golf and is obsessed with golf and it cracks me up on the inside.

So it’s Mother’s Day, and I wake up and check my phone and see that I have a notification: “Tiger has sent you a message.”  I have to admit, I get a little adrenaline shot from this.  Not sexy excitement, mind you, just, “WHAAAAAAAT?” a la “RAAAAANDY” in “Funny People.”  And when I check Facebook, he sent me the message late at night on Saturday, like around midnight.

And I am SO happy.  Why?  I’ll tell you why.  Because the guy for whom I was never good enough, never pretty enough, never girlfriend or wife material enough is so bored that he’s emailing me at midnight on a Saturday.  And call me crazy, but that just makes me feel like I won.

And to make it even more delicious, his message says something like, “When did people get so uptight about sex?  Is it our age or is it just the people I know?”  Clearly baiting me into a discussion that involves sex.  I will have you know that I behaved very appropriately and did not flirt or write anything even vaguely suggestive.  I told him that I didn’t know what he was talking about and maybe too many of his friends were Republicans.

He then asked me if my husband got jealous or if he has access to my Facebook and email accounts.  This is where it got interesting for me.  I almost got up and ran around the house yelling, “I WIN!  I WIN! I WIN!”  He DOES regret not picking me.  SUCK IT, TIGER!!!  I wrote that my husband was not a jealous man, having no reason to be, and that while he did have access to those accounts, he never looked at them (due to the first thing).  I could not resist paving the way for him to write something to ME that he would not want HIS wife to see.  Petty?  Maybe.  Satisfying? Definitely.

He wanted my opinion about his theoretical plans for a Las Vegas 40th birthday celebration.

“I thought it would be fun to hire some local entertainment to play a round of golf. Have them go around the course with us.”

“Just to be clear, we’re talking hookers here, and not Celine Dion or Cirque de Soleil, right?”

“Strippers are NOT hookers because hookers are for sex and strippers are for looking.” The writer/rhetoric and argument teacher in me wanted to argue that his prelude was that his friends are too uptight about sex and if he was only talking about looking then what was there to be uptight about?  But I didn’t want to pick a fight.  Much.

My ex-boyfriend who is married with many kids writes me after midnight on a Saturday (technically Mother’s Day) to ask if I think he’s out of line to pitch playing golf with strippers on his birthday.

If you do not understand why I found this so personally fulfilling, then you’ve never been rejected the way I have, and I congratulate you for not having to live through that.

To give you an idea of how well the idea went over with the wife, I checked his Facebook page about a week after his birthday.

“Thanks for all the birthday wishes! We had a great time in Las Vegas. Saw Dana Carvey!”

Every lingering wistful feeling of “what if?” died with that email from him.  Died laughing.