After I was able to connect to the Internet toward the end of 2000, I decided to use it for its intended purpose: Meeting women.
Or, that was the plan anyway. As it turned out, I didn't get to meet many women over the Internet. My batting average was far worse than when I was doing personal ads. Up to this point, I'd heard all kinds of stories about people meeting each other on the Internet. And sometimes, they left their spouses for what were supposed to be temporary flings. I didn't want to break up a marriage, but it sounded a lot easier than it turned out to be.
The biggest problem was locating women who lived nearby me. I was up to meeting women who lived in Southern California and willing to drive up about three hours, but even those opportunities were few and far between. I couldn't catch a break.
I had no intention of getting on a plane to meet someone halfway across the country because I certainly didn't have enough money for that. I barely had enough money to afford a trip in which I could fly out to Missouri to see my Mom and Loyd earlier in 2001. I couldn't imagine a situation in which I was willing to shell out money for an uncertain meeting with someone I barely knew in a place I wasn't familiar with.
Jarz was one of the first women I IM'd on AOL. We were in some chat room together and I looked at her profile. She was 28 years old and was a single mother. She lived in Michigan. What I really remember is that she had an amazing profile photo. (I wasn't brave enough to put my photo on my profile.) She was one of the few people I would describe as "sassy." She was very attractive, but I didn't feel like she was out of my league. We started chatting with each other.
One thing I should point out about my AOL experience is my chat method. I was very hard-wired to type correct grammar, punctuation and capitalization. I knew I was a pretty fast typist and didn't view having full sentences as an obstruction to trying to get a message across. About 30 minutes into our chat, she mentioned that she was trying hard to correctly type everything. I looked back at the beginning of our chat and saw that she started out with all lowercase letters and no punctuation, but that had changed midway through. I wrote, "Oh, you're trying to impress me!"
After that, we would occasionally find each other online and chat. After awhile, I got brave and asked if we could talk on the phone. She said we could, but she wouldn't give me her home number. I would have to call her at her job at a particular time of day. She worked at a Big Lots! I'd never heard of it before. But I did call her up. We talked for a few minutes before she had to start work.
She told me about how she had met someone else on AOL a year earlier and they arranged to fly do a destination in the middle to meet. But she didn't go into detail about what happened after that. I imagine it just didn't work out. I already knew I wasn't going to go that far to meet her, but it was nice to connect over the phone.
Once I went to a street fair in North Park and hung out with Tez and a couple of other guys. She needed to buy something, so we went inside a Pic 'n' Save store. (I always thought it sounded like something you weren't supposed to do with your nose.) Inside, I noticed that their bags said "Pic 'n' Save/Big Lots!" NOW I GET IT! They were both part of the same chain.
I talked to her at work a couple more times. Then, she told me she'd met someone and I didn't need to call her any more, so I never did. I never knew Jarz' last name, so I have no way of finding out what happened to her.
But I was fine with not talking to her anymore. As you'll find out, I had a couple of other women online I was making efforts to meet.
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