It keeps getting weirder...

I sincerely apologize for the delay in posting. I have been dealing with a migraine for the last three days and can't seem to shake it. That impeded my creativity just a little bit (obvi). I really am working on being more consistent, but it's turning out to be more of a challenge than I could've ever anticipated. Anyway, I am working on few more posts so I can have some waiting in the wings already prepared for you in anticipation of weeks like this one when I can't focus because my head feels like someone is banging my skull with a sledgehammer. Ugh! Calgon, take me awaaaay!

Just when I think that things with Mr. Ex can’t get any more annoying, he went ahead and put the icing on the cake a couple weeks ago.

In the week before Mr. Ex was coming to my town, my friend Allegra, tired of the wack dudes we meet on a pretty regular basis, decided to put a personal ad on Craig’s List. She sat down and drafted a blurb that described her and the type of person she is looking for, included a picture that partially hid her face (but showed enough to peak someone’s interest), posted her ad, and waited to see who would bite. She got a lot of crazy responses from a lot of weird guys and a couple responses from a few that were worth exploring. She had her hands full with communicating with the few seemingly decent guys that had hit her up, so we didn’t speak for a few days.

When we finally got a chance to chat about her success, it was a Friday night. She starts telling me about one of the guys who had responded. She thought he was cool except he had not one kid, but TWO. That was a bit challenging, but she was interested enough not to cut a good brother just because he was a dad. And we agreed that, as long as he was actually taking care of the kids, their mere existence wasn’t necessarily a deal-breaker.

In the midst of our conversation Allegra says: “Oh, and why were you sending me messages with “Mr. Ex’s” picture in them?”

“Excuse me?” I asked, completely dumbfounded, because I hadn’t sent her any message at all, much less a message with a picture of Mr. Ex.

“You know,” she said in an irritated voice, “Those stupid messages you sent me in response to my ad. That really wasn’t funny.”

“Yo, I didn’t send you any messages.”

“Do you have an AOL account?” she asks.

I think on that for a minute. “Yes, I have an AOL account from back in the day that I don’t even use anymore. It’s been years since I’ve logged on!”

“[Brown Girl], are you sure that you didn’t send me any messages?”

“I promise you that I wouldn’t have wasted my time or yours by sending you fake messages with pictures of my ex-boyfriend.”

“Yeah, now that I think about it, that doesn’t really seem like something you would do,” she said.

“So, what did these messages say?” I ask, already knowing that Mr. Ex himself was behind this debacle.

Turns out that the messages Allegra had gotten were being sent from my old AOL account. Mr. Ex had said that he would be coming to town that weekend and was wondering if Allegra (he did not know it was Allegra at the time) would be available to hook up while he was in DC. He also gave a brief description of himself that included his name (an alias that he had apparently acquired since we broke up, because the name he gave was not the one he was born with), height, weight, age, and the fact that he has no kids and NO GIRLFRIEND, which – at this point – we know to be untrue.

Anyway, Allegra thought that Mr. Ex was really me, playing some sort of practical joke on her and her personal ad. So, she responded back to the message thinking she was replying to me.

Her response was something along the lines of “Wow, you must not have enough work to do. I’m going to call your boss and tell her that you’re playing on the computer during company time.”

By the time Allegra tells the story to me, she has already disposed of the messages she got from Mr. Ex, so we feared there would be no evidence of them. But, at her encouragement, I logged into my AOL account just to see what Mr. Ex had been up to. He had cleared my inbox completely, and there were no messages in the sent mail folder. BUT, there were a few messages in the “Old Mail” folder. I opened them up and , lo and behold, there were the messages from Mr. Ex to Allegra and from Allegra back to Mr. Ex (although she thought she was writing to me).

A few hours she tells me all this, my phone starts blowing up with Mr. Ex announcing that he was in town and I begin to wonder how this could possibly get any more ridiculous.

Now, Allegra is convinced that Mr. Ex knows that the personal ad is hers. But given the fact that half her face is concealed in the picture, that is unlikely. I think it’s just a really, really unfortunate coincidence that of all the women that Mr. Ex could contact on Craig’s List, he chose one of my closest homegirls. When I call to tell my other homegirl, Katrina, about the irony of this situation, she accuses me of taking the incident too lightly.

“He’s trying to talk to other girls and still be on some get-back ish with you,” she says angrily.

But the funny thing is, I don’t really care that he was trying to contact other women. Good riddance to him. Let him become someone else’s problem. That’s fine by me. What really bugged me is that I couldn’t understand why he was using MY email address to do it. He has his own. Why would he choose mine to do his dirty work? Maybe he DID know that Allegra was the person behind the Craig’s List ad… Whatever the circumstances, it was just a really weird turn of events.

As I shared the story with other people, I kept hearing the same advice over and over again. Everyone I spoke to said that I HAD to confront him about this situation. It was weird and it was troubling and I needed to put a stop to him using my email address. So, once I was sure that Mr. Ex was on the bus on his was back to New York, I sent him a text telling him that we needed to talk. When he got the text, he called me three times back to back. I ignored his calls because the Grammys were on and I just didn’t have the energy to discuss the situation and nor the patience to deal with the nonsense he was sure to pull out of his ass.

The next afternoon, I called him up and he answered on the first ring – almost as though he were expecting my call. Within seconds of us exchanging pleasantries (I don’t even know how I managed to be pleasant during this call), he asked me what exactly I needed to discuss with him.

“Allegra put an ad on Craig’s List,” I start.

I hear a low moan escape from him, but I continued talking. I explained how she had asked me why I had been sending her messages with his photo embedded. I explained that, of course, I wouldn’t have done any such thing. And I also explained that my email address had been used to send the messages.

“So why did you do it?”

He starts to chuckle, which only infuriates me because there is nothing comical about our conversation.

“DC is just way to small! When she responded and I saw her email address, something told me that she was your homegirl. But I met that chick before and that picture she posted didn’t look like her.”

“Look,” I said. “I am not concerned about who you talk to. Knock yourself out with that. What I am concerned about is the fact that you are using my email address to contact strangers on the internet. Please stop immediately.”

What he didn’t know was that I had already logged into the account and changed the password so that he could no longer access it.

“It’s just weird and I want you to stop,” I said forcefully.

He apologized, but he gave no real explanation for why he was using my address. Then, he tried to make small talk with me, but I wasn’t having it.

“I gotta go,” I said.

“It was good talking to you,” he says.

I hang up the phone and stare at it in disbelief.

Is this dude serious?

BTW (by the way), this is a totally true story. I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.