I didn’t really play EQ much last night -- i was working on a fiction story, believe it or not -- but I’m on again tonight , and keeping fairly occupied with it. At the moment I’m back at the Mistmoore zone, but now at a spot that is for higher levels, instead of the mid 20’s, like i was before. My little dwarven cleric officially turned 35 last night, 36 about an hour ago, and now, hopefully, if this group lasts, she will turn 37. 

One guy I have been  playing with, and who talked to me quite a bit,  whose playing a human monk, started telling me he was thinking of quitting already. “Why?” i asked

. “Because this game is so horrifically designed and harder than i ever remembered it being. Guk is literally, like, the worst designed dungeon I've ever seen, and now I'm here in Soluseks Eye, and like, I can't fuckinf telll my way around anything. I got killed three times. Seriously crazy corpse runs. I can't do shit.”

“I knew you were in for a bad night, Xerez” I said, “when I saw you writing in guild chat , that you were looking for a place to solo. You can't solo in this game. Lol.” 

 I then told him the story of why i was playing -- my broken heart over Becky and all that -- and told him he had to keep playing himself. I convinced someone to keep giving more of their life to Norrath. Tell me thats not...awesome? 

Of course, when i told Xeraz the story of why I was playing, i didn’t tell him about Becky, because Xeraz, like everyone else in Norrath, thinks I’m an Italian woman. So i made up a big tale that was a bit simlar to Becky’s life, but where she was instead a he, named Giovanni, and Giovanni had a child that i was like a mother to, but he kept cheating on me & abusing me -- “for a thousand years”, i said -- until 4 weeks ago, when I made the split second decision to leave him, for good. 

“When I decided to leave Giovanni, I basically had two options,” i explained. “One, was that i could endlessly bitch to my girlfriends about how much of a prick he was, which im tired of doing, and two was that i would eventually crumble and call him again. I dont wanna do that either. EverQuest, and tripping thru the portal into Norrath, offered a way out that the real world did not. So… i leapt the portal, and haven’t much felt tempted to call Giovanni since. So Norrath saved my life, Xeraz… you see what i mean? Thats why you can’t log off …” 

The one thing I find so funny about pretending to be a woman in Norrath is that, you can see so many of the people are definitely suspicious that you’re lying, but if you know a few certain keywords and phrases, you can sort of lift them up over a fence, and totally suspend their doubts, and make them believe you completely, that you are indeed a woman. It is admittedly a bit hard, because saying certain things will give you away, immediately, as a man (like maybe if I wrote stuff too intelligently) but I’ve found one good approach is to just randomly mention details about make-up, or mothering, or even female music artists. It’s as though the players have only ever been accustomed to someone who only knows how to “slightly” roleplay a real world woman, usually probably in a sexualized way, I might add, and so they don’t expect you to be able to carry it that far. They don't think a man will go that far, to even sit there roleplaying and acting as though he's a mother outside the game, or sad over babies, or even like I am, sad over men.

This is especially the case since most of the player base here is older. So once I do something like, say, drop the name of a young urban female rapper in the group chat , they’re instantly persuaded “yes...that cleric is an actual woman...not just some weird male lying!” Funny how it works, no? You also have to know how to respond when they hit on you, which they will. You have to ignore them. Lol. 

Don’t forget of course that I have considerable experience roleplaying a woman not just on virtual games but also even on the platforms like Tinder, Twitter,  Cupid, and Plenty of Fish. I’ve spent full, long nights talking and conversing with men on those platforms--good looking, hot men, too --- who have no idea I’m really just a boy. I'm a woman all over the Internet. 

At any rate, I’m sort of already at the point in my Norrath experience here, where I log on at any given hour, and within 30-45 mins, I got a small number of people interested in playing with me. I wrote of this before, you’ll remember, about how the game eventually starts to suck you in, even when you might want to leave, because the players in it start depending on you, and leaping at you once you log in..

 If you’ve never played before, and you’re just logging on yoru first toon, you don’t know anyone. It’s easy to leave. No one gives a hell abotut you. After awhile, though, people start taking an interest in you, and they might need you for a thing. They’ll also, of course, improve your gaming experience, perhaps in an effort to keep you hooked. So you might be just about to log off, after only being logged in for 20 mins, when you get a message from your pal who tells you he’s got a new shield for ya...and “don’t you want it?” The shield keeps you in the game...and then another sword an hour later… 

I don’t know. Time for a new topic. Which? How about the fact that ...Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and its also---oddly enough--going to be the three week “anniversary” of when the block with Becky happened, on January 24th, the day of Evil. Isn’t it kind of weird? For years now I’ve paid zero attention to Valentine’s Day, and yet this year, there it is, falling right on the 3 week anniversary of avoiding the evil one. One wonders if it will make her even sadder, or sad at all. I doubt it. Maybe she even has a date! I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.  22 days though, tomorrow will be .22 long and strange and lonely, but also somewhat victorious, days. 

Thinking already back to the tale I was telling that Xarez guy though, about who I am in reality. Excuse me but a mamma gets stuck on it. A new biographical detail was handed out, that I suppose I might maybe have to remember for a very long time. The detail was my real life name. Apparently he thought my characters name seemed pretty italian, and told me he thought it was also my real name. This was hilarious since the name I got for the dwarf character literally came from a site that generates random Dungeons and Dragons type names. The reason he thought it was so “italian” was because it ended in a vowel. 

So then I told him my real name though, and i named myself after who my first best friend from Rome was,and who I met when I actually flew to Rome,  Ilaria. “My name in reality,” i said, “if you’re curious, Xeraz, is Ilaria, because my father is named Ilario, and in italian that’s the way it works.”

My fictional father has actually been one of the most intriguing characters in my fake biography yet. I'm superstitious about mommas so I've never mentioned one, but I keep mentioning a daddy. I explain what's hes doing and where he's living. I say my sisters are all with him back in Italia, and I was even saying he used to make wine in the cellar of the house I grew up in,on Long Island. I have written of my father to these people, as someone a bit like who I really am. I tell them he got tired of America and didn't like it,  after trying to make a life here for something like 26 years, and then went back to Italy as a 50 something man. My sisters went with him, but I stayed behind in America. I never say why I stayed, just that I stayed. I also type in a way that makes it seem like I might not know English too well to them. This is actually easy to do, after all the conversations I've had with Italians who hardly know English. I type sentences like, for instance, the real Ilaria, used to type…. 

“That's crazy.” Xeraz said though , in response to the fact that my fathers name is only one letter different from my own, a female name...

“Ya. It's how the Italians do it. Like Mario and Maria you know?”

“Oh my god…! I never realized those two names were the same like that.”

“Hehe.”

After that he came running, halfway across Norrath, to find me in the zone that I was in, but I...didn't group with him, and stayed with who I was with, like a bit of a bitch I suppose. The group I was with, to be fair though, was in the middle of what is known in MMO parlance as a “power level”. This doesn't always happen and you'd be wise to take advantage of it when it does. One of the ladies in it, a half elf bard, was being a bit of a cunt to me, cus I kept going “AFK” to switch songs, but she didn't kick me out, so I stayed…. 

Anyways I find myself facing down a random bout of sadnes right now. It came over me rather suddenly. I've just realized I'm starving and of course like always all I have to eat is Something no good. So like always I'll drink endless gross cups of hot coffee in the distinct hopes that the acid will burn my stomach lining right out and kill me. In the meantime before my death, I'll make angry posts on Twitter like I always do when I get in my “USA is such a dirty country and is the reason I'm starving” moods. Right now I've just posted on the Twitter that trump is going to inevitably make America just like Russia was after the Soviet Union collapsed. “All the Americans will be driving 25 year old cars and using 30 year old tech and thinking its new. That's what Trump will bring to the states. The highways will all rot, public transportation will be broken and useless….” 

I was reading a bit about what Trump is going to do with the welfare and food stamps earlier, and I think it put me in a bad mood for the entire day and night now. I remember when Trump first got elected I tried writing a fantasy story where he actually existed in between two worlds, this one and another one, something like Norrath I guess. He was using his power as an evil wizard in the other world (where he also had a tower erected in his name) to get himself more powerful in tis one too. The good guys in the fantasy world were on his tail, however. They were elves who were chasing down the dark wizard “Drumpf” and looki to replace him. Once the elves dethroned him in the fantasy, he would  also be dethroned here… 

A cool story. Now I gotta go.