I dated a girl who was obsessed with the television show Xena. That should have been my first warning. She hated all contemporary music, and played a lot of World of Warcraft. (Second and third warnings.) She made me play WoW with her, and I named my night-elf hunter Xenakis, thinking she’d never know. I named Xenakis’s pet turtle Crumb, and I told her it was for R. Crumb and not George. When other players asked about my name, I told them I was a Warrior Prince.
Then in one fateful road-trip, Xenakis’s Kassandra showed up on my iPod shuffle. Suddenly things in the car were very operatic. The countertenor was making those yodeling sounds, and my girlfriend was shrieking “Turn that off before it makes me crash the f#$%ing car! Why do you play that ICE s$%^? It’s not even music!”
Not long afterwards, she moved to Wisconsin to marry a different night-elf hunter, and I canceled my WoW subscription. A year later, I had the best seat in the house for Kassandra.
