(Written by Jer)
Circa August 2001
There’s a little place on the internet known as Nilgiri. It’s a MUD. Think MMORPG but all in text. For those who still don’t follow, imagine a combination of a chat room with Dungeons and Dragons and you’re kind of there.
One day there was a rather respected member of the community absolutely trashing women and love. He had surmised that it was all a big elaborate game women played and that they were all alike. Lady Jazmin (the most lovable, respected, and charismatic member of the Nilgiri world, aka the Life of Nilgiri, a title she has never, and will never, accept and frankly I might be a bit biased), begged to differ. She claimed that all women are different and that just because one screwed him over did not mean all women were bad. This ensued in a battle of epic proportions (a heated debate) between a love-scorned man and the most stubborn woman the earth has ever seen (funny she’s never denied that title).
This caught my attention. I’d played Nilgiri a year previously but gradually lost interest. After things didn’t work out between me and my ex-girlfriend, I decided to check out this old MUD again. So I piped up and offered (at length) an exquisite interpretation and perspective (read: verbal diarrhea) on women. At any rate, my opinions caught Jazmin’s eye – and she spoke those immortal words that amount to the most unattainable feat a man could never perform. ”There’s a guy who really understands women,” she said. Well at the time I suppose I thought I did, but I forgot half of it and lemme tell you, it takes a tremendous amount of concentration, consideration and patience to even skim the edges of that. But I wasn’t doing much else at the time, so I had figured what the hell. It broke the ice.
In the weeks that followed we talked a bit more. She liked to wiggle her bum and talk about her boobs. I’m a guy, so how could I resist being baited into such an interesting topic? Jokes aside, we also found we had some common interests. We both loved Final Fantasy for example. We both loved stupid jokes (I loved telling them, she loved hearing them… until she discovered that I actually thought they were funny and then decided I was a bit pathetic… But that didn’t happen until years later), our birthdays were 10 days apart (or 355 days apart, as the case may be), and we were both absolutely insane. Not just a little nuts, but stupidly insane. Like we’re both obsessive, stubborn, and think we know everything, and yet because we know that no one knows everything, we both insist that we don’t know everything, we’re just never wrong. Either of us.
Well Jazmin was always happy and laughing, but as time grew on we began to get more comfortable with each other and talk about serious things…