Hey, lookit!

I met Cardinal Ximinez online, on a BBS run by the public school system in our county, before either of us knew the answer to “what the fuck is the Internet?”.

Brief interruption in the weirdness stream: if you’ve never used a BBS, think of it like forums and chat rooms combined. Back in 1992, the public school system in Miami, Florida not only knew how to run a BBS, they felt it was valuable enough to buy expensive server hardware and pay for several landlines just so students could get acquainted with the technology. Miami, fuck yeah.

So we started talking. We were both about to graduate high school, go to UF, and we were both going to be living in the honors dorms there. It was fantastic to know that I’d have a friend up there the first day, because the only other person I knew of even remotely who would be there was the son of my mom’s colleague (she was, at the time, a counselor in another high school and her colleague was the assistant principal), and that wasn’t much to go on. “So… I hear our parents work in the same place.” “Yeah. Um.” Awkwaaaaard. So yeah, knowing that Cardinal Ximinez would be in the same cluster of dorm buildings was exciting.

When I was moving in, there were two signs taped to my door. One was from the RA and had my name on it.

The other said: Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition! ——->

My mom and I looked at each other in surprise. Cardinal Ximinez was not only in the same building, but he was on my floor! We became friends so quickly that we got mayo-filled condoms rolled onto our doorknobs (because gayyyyyyyy).

I was the best man at his wedding.

He was the best man at my wedding.

And the son-of-my-mom’s-colleague was Cardinal Ximinez.

You’d be forgiven for thinking this happened in Canada, because everyone was just so gosh-darned polite about it.