Here is an editorial I wrote in the FSView and Florida Flambeau in May 2003, just before I graduated from college. My editor loved it and thought it was one of the most original pieces he had ever read. Responses varied from people that "got it" and thought it was hilarious, to people who said I was pathetic.
Four years ago, like many incoming Florida State students, I stood in line outside the FSU bookstore, waiting patiently to get my FSU ID card. After what seemed like hours, I finally got my picture taken and was handed my brand new, hi-tech ID card.
As I proudly left the ID Card Center, I slipped my new card into my wallet. There it joined the other inhabitants of my small, black leather billfold – my driver’s license, military ID card, ATM card, a couple of dollars, and a recently placed Trojan condom, which I thought wouldn’t be a bad idea to have on me. After all, Florida State University was just named the number one party school in the nation and its student body was, and still is, over 50-something percent female. It couldn’t hurt to be prepared.
In the days and weeks that followed, the condom made a home in my wallet. It befriended already established residents such as the ATM card, who every time it left brought back with it money – those transient presidential portraits who never seemed to stay more than a day or two. Money surely could never be called a “wallet fixture,” a title the condom hoped it too would never have.
When was its day in the sun, the condom quickly came to ask. There were nights, Fridays and Saturdays in particular, when it would get its hopes up. It would watch as the ATM card would get money before going to the club, the driver’s license was used to get in the establishment and the money would leave and never return once inside the club. The condom knew its role was in the closing act of a fortunate night that never seemed to arrive, the final runner in a relay race that never seemed to reach its last lap. Patiently, it awaited its baton, its imaginary arms outstretched.
Bad luck seemed to plague the provalactic. Its mere existence was cursed. Months turned to years as the condom recalled legends of unfortunate “rubbers,” as they were called in the early days, which had “dried up” and had to be discarded before ever being used. Its lack of use was not from lack of trying, the condom was told. But after the first dozen or so wrong phone numbers and several mismanaged dates, the condom started to count down the days to its expiration, like an inmate on death row awaiting execution.
Why was it here and not in the wallet of a more socially fortunate soul, the condom wondered. Others formed in Trojan factory, those with whom the condom had an almost brother-like bond, had long served their purpose, protecting their masters and dying on the frontline with honor and dignity. The condom tried hard not shed a tear of despair.
The only source of pride the condom had was in an unmistakable ring it was leaving on the outside of the wallet. A ring that if the condom was used quickly it would have never had the opportunity to make. A consolation prize in the losing game that was the condom’s depressing existence.
On May 2nd, 2003, the condom joined me as I walked across the graduation stage. With one flip of a tassel, I became an alumnus and the condom, with its four-year birthday quickly approaching, was now an institution in my wallet. It had seen many changes sweep the wallet landscape and survived them all. My driver’s license had been replaced twice, ATM cards had changed banks, military ID card expired and even my shiny new FSU ID card had fallen apart, only to be replaced with a newer, more hi-tech card.
Thank goodness the condom has two more years left until its expiration. Two more years of keeping hope alive.
Picture from this Sexual Health site.
