I’ve been meaning to write this (and this new category) for a while now, and now, with a day off and schoolwork to be procrastinating away from, I’m finally making the time.

The first girlfriend I ever had (in college – yeah, I was a late bloomer. So what?) had a weird pathological hatred of mustard. When we’d be doing deep-mouth drilling with our tongues in each others mouths during our somewhat fevered make-sessions, if I’d had even a small dab of mustard on a lunch sandwich three days before, she’d taste it in my kiss and damned near bite my tongue off.

Obviously, this was a mood-killer.

And these rages were nothing to be trifled with from a girl who had once poured a full glass of chocolate milk over my head in the middle of a crowded cafeteria or who once angrily challenged an entire drunken fraternity to fight me (well her, really, but since I was the only person with her, it was obvious that I was on her side, for better or worse) in a frozen parking lot one night.

I don’t even remember what it was I had said that set her off in that chocolate milk episode, but it still sticks in my mind, twenty years later, that it was thoroughly unintentional on my part.

And this something I must say say here – we dated, such as it was, for about nine months back in 1986. So I’ve now spent substantially time being broken up with her then we spent dating – something like 27 times as much – and still she, or at least some weird mythical vision of her, still occupies a sizable portion of my psychological makeup.

Why? I dunno. She was my first ever serious girlfriend, and because we mostly ceased speaking after we split up, I guess I’ve never been able to prove to myself that she – and therefore, we – ever existed.

But, back to the mustard.

I think that when I purposely started getting my sandwiches, burgers and sausages with mustard, that maybe it was time to end the relationship. Maybe she thought the same thing.

If, in fact, she ever actually existed.