Digital Paranoia

"If he was cheating, I would know within hours," a friend confided in me over Starbucks.

"Really? Because you'd tell by the way he held you or by his eyes?"

A blank expression came over her face. "No. Because I have access to his email, Facebook, and credit card accounts."

Well, then.

The fact is, in relationships, the rules have changed. I know girls who have spent hours trying to guess their boyfriend's email passwords. I know girls who wait until their boyfriends are asleep to go through phones and text messages. I know girls who add their boyfriends' exes on facebook just to 'check up'.

I have not done any of these things... at least, if I had, I wouldn't admit to it on my blog...

I wonder what would have happened if Jackie Kennedy had mentioned to the President one night, "I read on Marilyn Monroe's twitter feed earlier that you two had lunch together. I thought you were in New York, not Hollywood..."

Or if Anne Boleyn had pouted to Henry the 8th about not making their relationship "Facebook official".

Or if Princess Diana had asked Prince Charles why Camilla was in his "top 8 friends" on myspace.

I also think any older friends of mine would be shocked to hear what my peers and I have done in the name of "harmless investigation".

True love is supposed to be about love and honor. I think that twenty or more years ago, it was easier to trust. You couldn't access someone's entire life at your fingertips. You had to trust. It was too easy for your significant other to cheat, so you could either drive yourself crazy wondering or just blindly trust.

In my relationship with John, I am very trusting.

Mostly.

There are moments, where he shields his phone while texting, where I get a little curious. Why is he hiding his phone? Who is he texting? And I'll admit, I accepted his ex girlfriend's facebook friend request because her profile was set to private and it drove me crazy with curiosity (which, I'm sure, is why she added me in the first place as the girl and I have not said five words to each other).

I wish it wasn't so easy.

I wish there was no temptation.

I wish I lived in an age where I could set my mentality to think, "If he wanted to cheat, he could hide it from me so easily, so I might as well trust him instead of constantly searching."

And I try.

Well, I try to set my mentality to think, "He would never cheat! Ever! He loves me!"

And then, I see a comment on his myspace from someone I don't know...

And suddenly I'm checking out this girl's last five years worth of wall comments.

It's a sickness.

The Games People Play

Okay, this is my confessional. It's taken me a long time to realize it, but here goes:

My name is Brandi, and I am Horrible at Games.

Do you remember being a kid, and that first time your mother warned you, "No one likes a sore loser?" Well, I am a sore loser, a gloating winner, and everything in between.

Oh, yes, friends. I have been known to throw dice a little too violently, pout when someone one-ups me, and literally bounce in my seat in delight when I am winning. It has been known that towards the end of the game, my voice gets a little shriller and louder. Friends have been known to roll their eyes and silently mouth, "NEVER!" to each other behind my back when I suggest a round of poker. Some may protest that they have played games with me and never seen this side of me. Rest assured, if I'm in a setting where I need to be polite I can, but I will be going insane inside and will recap the entire game to someone else in excruciating detail later.

And like most things in my life, for this, I blame my mother.

(I do that a lot on here, don't I? I think part of it is because I think she's the only one who really reads this, and she knows it's because I love her.)

If I ran in the house, making the original Nintendo Entertainment System mess up and restart Super Mario Bros 3 just as she was about to reach world 7, I was sure to receive a pop on the bottom. Any attempts at cheating or treating a game of Rummy with anything less than the utmost seriousness would cause my mother to fold her cards, proclaim that I "wasn't playing right" and refuse any games for weeks. And when I tried to talk her into buying me games like Monopoly Jr, she would roll her eyes. "Why? You've been playing real Monopoly since you were five!" She didn't understand that all of my friends' parents would only let them play the junior version, allowing me to feel awkward when finding things to do at sleepovers.

But I digress.

A particular friend of mine, who shall remain nameless, has a penchant for cheating at board games, much to my shock. If it's flipping the mini hourglass in Pictionary, mouthing words to me from across the room during Cranium, or winking at me in Clue, I always reprimand him heavily when we are away from others.

"IT'S NOT RIGHT! I want to win because I'm the best, not because I'm on a team with a cheater!"

"It's just a game, Brandi."

A couple of months ago, I was playing Apples to Apples with a few friends. As it was John's turn to choose a card, he stalled, reading every card carefully and weighing his options thoughtfully.

"Pick a card, already! Jeeze, it's not rocket science!" I growled.

Wide eyed, another friend looked at me.

"Brandi, calm down, it's just a game."

Apparently no one else is as concerned with winners and losers as I am.

Which is fine with me. Maybe I should learn something from this and be a little kinder during these bonding activities.

As long as I'm winning.

'Cause who wants to be kind while they are losing?

She Works Hard For the Money

I don't usually write about work. This blog can be linked to my Facebook, and who knows what corporate big wig is spending tireless hours re-googling the name of the chain, looking for that rogue employee who may be presenting themselves negatively.

But this story is too good to pass up.

So I'll just refrain from mentioning the name of said retail chain.

I was working the other day, when I recieved a phone call from a customer asking if we had a particular product carried by a particular brand.

"No, sir," I said sweetly. "We do carry brands A and B, but not the brands you are looking for."

Angrily, this customer informed me that after hours of internet research, he had determined that brands A and B manufactured their goods overseas. The brand he wanted was manufactured in the USA and he only bought American, thank-you-very-much.

I again apologized for not carrying the brand he wanted.

"Well, I want to talk to your corporate office."

"Yes, sir, I understand your disappointment. The number for that office is 1-800-"

"No," he cut me off. "I don't have a pen and paper."

.......

I had no response for this. Neither the man. Silence lingered in the phone awkwardly. "Well.... I can wait for you to get a pen and paper..." I suggested.

"No!" the man was angry at me again. "Just connect me to your corporate office. Now."

I paused. The phone system did not work that way.

"Sir, I'm sorry but unfortunately I am unable to do that on this phone. You mentioned you had a computer. I know that phone number is available to our web site. Perhaps the next time you have internet access you can find that number and..."

"No," the man angrily said. "That won't work."

What the hell am I supposed to do now? All sweetness left my voice as I flatly informed the customer I would get a manager to talk to him about his desire to speak to corporate. I put the call on hold and angrily walked to my manager's office.

"Please pick up the call on line one."

My manager looked at me as if I was crazy. Usually my job is to help weed the calls away from managers as much as possible, by deflecting anyone the manager doesn't have to talk to.

"Who is it?"

I stared blankly at him. "Please just pick it up. If I could handle it, I would, but this guy is over my head."

I walked off.

Later, that manager informed me, "You were right. That guy was crazy."

"Well, what did you do?" I didn't understand how to be hospitable in that situation.

My manager shrugged. "I finally hung up on him. Customer service only goes so far into Crazy-Land before you have to turn around and come home."

Sound advice, boss-man. Sound advice.

Beginnings and Endings

"New Years is magical," I slurred on a friend's back porch, casually swigging back my vanilla vodka spiked white tea at 11pm on New Years Eve.

"How do you figure?" asked an old friend from high school, smiling in a very condescending way.

"Well, it's kind of like Mardi Gras. You can do whatever you want tonight, and it doesn't matter. Tomorrow is a new beginning."

"I disagree!" he said. "I can get into a car accident tonight and I will still have to wake up to a wrecked car and court date."

Well, no shit, if you're dumb enough to drive when you've been drinking, which you probably will, I thought, but did NOT say out loud. Flustered and unable to properly articulate a good comeback, I grunted and walked back inside.

"How drunk are you?" Corey asked, eyes wide.

"Why does everyone keep asking me that?" I asked. Or rather, I tried to ask, but the question ended in giggles.

In a 21 year old drunken haze, I commented to myself that yes, indeed, New Years was magical, everyone else's opinions be damned. I giggled, talked to myself, hugged people I hadn't seen in years, and told my best friends how much I "really, really, really" loved them, and referred to everyone as "dude" for a bulk of the night. In the morning, I woke up, sobered up, and got back to my life of pretending to be a grown up.

Maybe unlike my old friend, "doing whatever I want" doesn't require the crazy, sick, perverted, or even extreme. And I'm sure that my "wild" New Years Eve was tame by the standards of most of my peers.

And that's fine with me.

At dinner with my friend Daniel last night, I was telling him about my "crazy" night, laughing to myself. He then began to tell me about his which started with "I blacked out from 2am until 7am, but I know from others' stories that I was definitely awake."

Whoa, blacked out? I was asleep by 3am!

Yet again, my life is insanely out of synch with my friends.

And that's fine with me, as well.

So, as we all march to our individual drum beats, I wish everyone a very merry new year. I hope you all grown, live, learn, and experience all you desire. I wish that you have a couple of nights every once in a while filled with your own version of "magic".

And I wish the same for myself.