SPOTLIGHT: Secret Girl Struggles - Why I am Allowed to Snoop Through All of Your Electronics

I feel it’s necessary to start this out with a bit of commentary on our society today, just to provide some context for those who think they disagree (i.e. those who are wrong).  But even before that, let me just say this: This is Honest Time.  The doors are open, friends.  We are airing out the shit.  This creeping through electronics shouldn’t come as a surprise to you, and if it does, then you need to spend some Honest Time of your own staring yourself down in the mirror and thinking long and hard about your life, because the truth of the matter is, we have all snooped.

 

Maybe it started when you were young.  Maybe you knew you were going to get something awesome for Christmas, like a Tamagotchi, and you just couldn’t wait to see what color it was going to be, so you snuck into mom’s room as soon as she left for the grocery store and you dug through her closet in search of that present.  Or hey, maybe your sister had a diary, and you were just casually browsing through her room one day when you happened to stumble upon it’s locked pages of teenage glory, and woops! It fell on the floor and the latch happened to just “pop open” and the page titled “Vick’s such a bitch” JUST HAPPENED to be placed directly in front of your face.  What are you going to do?  Not read it?  You're already in too deep, man.  Come on.  Come the fuck on.

Your sister should have known better and gotten this high-tech shit.

  It’s human nature.  We are all sneaky people, and we love to know what our fellow sneaky people are doing.  We want to know their secrets, what they really think of us and of everyone else, and we want to take those secrets and put them all over the internet, or at least spread them out to our friends so that we have something to talk shit about.  Yes, it’s rooted in insecurity.  OF COURSE it’s rooted in insecurity – what if someone doesn’t like you?  You need to know why, or else you will stay up late at night wondering if maybe it’s because you have a mole on your face that your mom calls a “beauty mark” but really everyone knows it’s just a mole and maybe everyone thinks that it makes you ugly and grotesque and that’s why they all hate you (it’s certainly not because you tweet things every thirty seconds and push your shitty blog down everyone’s throat.  It’s the mole, dude.  It’s definitely the mole). Snooping is insecurity at its finest level, and always has been, and here’s a newsflash, people: it’s gotten 30 billion* times worse now that we have the mystical playground that is the Internet at our every beck and call.

 

The Internet has created shortcuts for everything – we no longer need to know what the capital of Missouri is off the top of our heads, we can just Google it.  We don’t need to wonder what year Sarah Jessica Horse was born because look, it’s right there on Wikipedia.  

She was born on March 25th, 1965, for the record.

 Facebook itself has made the process of regular dating entirely obsolete – instead of spending 10 to 15 minutes in-person with someone to see if you like them, you can now just scroll through their profile and avoid all of the awkward tension involved in deciding whether or not you’d even want to speak to them, let alone fuck them on a regular basis.  Thanks to technology, we now live in a society where individual people know how to stalk better than the CIA’s finest - Facebook started it, but now with Twitter, Foursquare, etc. it’s become fully possible to meet a stranger on the street, find out his or her full name, address, closest friends’ names and addresses, plans for dinner, and whatever else we so please.  We are all fucking stalkers, and we are all constantly inside of each other’s assholes, so much so that we now have to physically hold ourselves back in social situations to keep from slipping out some tidbit of information about an acquaintance that we wouldn’t know unless we had been stalking the fuck out of their profile.  How many times has your friend asked you who someone is and you knowingly rattled off a few (thousands) of facts about her, even though you’ve only actually interacted in-person once or twice (if at all)?  Ever made the awkward mistake of calling someone their first and middle name when being “introduced” at the bar, because that’s what their name is on Facebook?  Yeah.  Point proven.

Now when I say it’s okay for me to sneak through all of your electronics, I obviously don’t mean with friends.  First of all, who has that kind of time?  And secondly, if you need to snoop through your girl friend’s Facebooks and emails, you’re probably in high school and therefore can go fuck yourself.  We all know that I’m implying boyfriends here, and yeah, I’m also implying that it’s okay to literally violate his privacy from time to time with a Holocaust of snooping.  To argue this point, I’m going to show you a fine display of rambling girl logic in a List of Things To Realize About Snooping.
   

A List of Things To Realize About Snooping:  

 
1.  Snooping in a relationship is inevitable.  It’s going to happen.  No one in this world trusts anyone, and snooping is the fastest way to find out who exactly it is that you are dating.  If you say that you “aren’t the type of girl who does that” or you’ve “NEVER looked through someone’s computer/cell phone”, you’re fucking lying, and we all know it.  Snooping is something that EVERY girl does, we’re all just too embarrassed to admit it (except for people like me, who blog about it on a public forum).  Along the same lines, you as a boyfriend will pretty much never know that your girlfriend has snooped on you unless she has made one of two Rookie Mistakes: being sloppy, or calling you out on something she found while snooping.  Girls, let me just remind you, if you are going to log on to your boyfriend’s Facebook, you must immediately sign him out of the chat, and mark any new messages you’ve read as unread after you’ve combed through them.  These are the two easiest ways to get caught.  Also, please, for the love of all that is holy, never fucking call out your boyfriend on something you’ve found.  I have an anonymous friend who is an expert at this stuff, and she devises full-scale situations in order to avoid having to admit that she’s snooped just so she can call out her boyfriend on dirt she’s uncovered.  While I commend her unending slyness, these things never work and almost always blow up in your face.  You will be immediately labeled the “Crazy Girlfriend” and any evidence of tomfoolery you might have found will not hold up in the Court of Relationship Law (to parallel police searches, you need a fucking warrant or else your evidence means about as much as two cents is worth . . . i.e. nothing).
   

This guy is not buying the shit that you're selling, so you might as well pack it up and bring it elsewhere, you Crazy Bitch

 2.  I talked a little before about how the internet has created shortcuts (mostly for dating) and I think the same thing applies to this situation - me snooping through your electronics is just taking one more shortcut, as I’ve been socially trained to do by living with computers.  Instead of asking you what you’re thinking or where you are going, I can see where you’ve checked in, what websites you’ve been visiting, and who you’ve been texting (and about what . . .).  It’s not like I’m really even that interested – I just want to make sure you’re a good guy that’s not going to dick me over or lie to me because you think I’m a “Stupid Girl”.  Some of the time, for me at least, I just want to know what the fuck it is that you’re thinking, which almost (in that twisted, girl logic kind of way) makes it your fault – if you just told me what was going on and stopped giving me reasons to be suspicious, I wouldn’t want to look through all of your things.  You’ll be pleased to know, however, that of all of these reasons, the topmost one is that maybe I’m just fucking obsessed with you.  Maybe I just like you a whole lot and I want to know more about your brain because you fascinate me endlessly.  Is the expression of that sentiment a little strange when you know that I am showing it by sneaking through you shit?  Yes, yes it is.  But by now I hope you’ve fucked enough girls to realize that we are all insane and show how we feel through means that don’t make sense.  WE SNOOP BECAUSE WE CARE.

3.  Snooping is instant gratification.  Another reason we as girlfriends feel so inclined to invade your private internet life is because we know we will find out at least one little thing that we didn’t know before, even if it’s just that you’re the type of guy who uses Internet Explorer (Ew.)
   

What is this, 1997?  Get Firefox at least, you asshat.

 

4.  Honestly, on a broader note, I probably wouldn’t have to be so crazy if I wasn’t constantly being sold the idea of the “cheating man” by society.  You can say that that’s not your fault, that it’s the result of a bunch of feminism and slutever, but you’re wrong.  You know who produces Our Lord ‘Sex and the City’?  A guy.  His name is Darren Starr.  And since that’s where the bulk of my knowledge about men has come from since I was what, 11 years old? I think it’s pretty safe to say that I’ve been being spoon-fed the idea that all men are lying/cheating on me all of the time for as long as I can remember.  We’re taught to be suspicious of our boyfriends and to hate other girls, and we are told that we have to be possessive because men simply cannot help themselves when they are placed in front of a girl they find attractive (as though your poor little man brain simply cannot operate in the presence of a vagina.  Give me a break.  And a piece of your Kit Kat bar.).  These misconceptions are everyone’s fault, but when we all start to personally play into and reinforce them, we quickly find that we are contributing to the cycle of Stupidity – that is, we expect guys to cheat, so we go crazy on them with snooping, which causes them to freak out about how we are psychos and break up with us anyway (the exact end result that we were trying to avoid).  You see how dumb this is, right?  Are we going to stop doing it?  Fuck no, that’s why it’s called a cycle, bitches.
   

Aww, look!  Darren Starr took his horse out for a nice dinner!  How sweet!

5.  Don’t even act like you aren’t egging me on by leaving your laptop open and logged into Facebook in front of me when you leave to go take a shower.  You know damn well what’s going to happen as soon as I hear the water running from the faucet.  

6.  On the same note, do you (as a boyfriend) ever feel like I might be looking over your shoulder and memorizing the key-strokes you tap out as you type in your password?  Well.  Your suspicions are real.  I’m fucking watching you.  

7.  It kind of doesn't even matter what you do as a boyfriend - there will be snoopage.  My boyfriend**, bless his little heart, has never given me a single moment of suspicion that he might be cheating on me (and he's right to refrain from cheating, because aside from my mole, I'm fucking flawless.  Also, I know how to make a bomb using regular household items and I will not hesitate to kill a bitch).  Does this mean I didn’t go through his entire internet history one time when he was doing laundry and left me with his laptop?  No, it doesn’t.  But I did it out of love.  Again, I snoop because I care.   I want to know what you’re doing and I want to create imaginary reasons inside of my head for why you are doing it.  Oh, at 12:45 am you were browsing through the anal porn section on Redtube?  Obviously the anal sex area of our relationship must be lacking, and while I’m not going to let you stick a lubed up basketball into my anal cavity EVER, maybe me knowing what you’re looking at while your jacking off will help to stimulate our sex life.  I’M JUST TRYING TO SEE WHAT YOU NEED.

Yeah, that's not gonna fit.

The moral of this long ass story isn’t that you as a boyfriend should lock your phone or erase your computer history – it’s pointless my friend, because we will find other means to see what you are doing.  Instead, the moral is that you need to accept the fact that snooping is going to happen.  We all do it.  It’s not going to stop.  Planting any sort of seed of doubt in our minds to begin with will only make it worse, so stop lying to us.  Be truthful.  I don’t care if it hurts me.  I just want to know what you’ve been doing every waking second of every day ever, not because I think you’re lying or cheating on me (although sometimes maybe), but because I’m fucking bored and because you agreed to be in a relationship with me.  Mostly, I want to see if you’re just as much of a freak as I am.

Because let’s face it, we’re all freaks, okay?  We girls post THOUSANDS of pictures of ourselves on Facebook, and then we get scared when someone says they’ve looked at them.  I’m sorry but isn’t the reason you are on the internet to begin with because you want people to notice you and think you are pretty/interesting?  You’re crazy if you think that no one has looked through your public profile that in depth before, and you know you’ve done it to countless other girls.  Let’s drop the fucking pretense already.  My personal search history on Google alone is enough to indict me in a courtroom setting.  Seriously, the shit I have looked at on the internet is both physically and emotionally repulsive, and maybe if I knew someone was keeping tabs on it, I wouldn’t be as prone to visit the sites I do.  But even then, I don’t think that it would deter me.  And knowing that people are snooping on you shouldn’t stop you from doing whatever you’re going to do anyway.  The underlying theme here is honesty:  we need to be honest with ourselves when we post a ton of personal shit all over the internet and know that someone is likely going to stalk us, and we need to be honest with each other by talking shit straight to the face of the person we are bashing instead of creating message threads and code names and hiding all of our secrets out in public on the internet (because that’s an oxymoron and you’re dumb).  Most of all, we need to be honest in relationships – come right out and say that you are a freak or a psycho.  It’s okay.  I’m one too.  Maybe, if we are on the same level of mutual freakiness, we could get together and date, get married in a freaky psycho wedding where we snoop at each others vows before hand, and possibly have a freaky little baby together.  That last part is unlikely though, because I fucking hate little kids.

*Statistic based on absolutely no evidence or research whatsoever.
**He probably won't be my boyfriend for much longer after reading this.  Love you!

Little Kids

By now I bet you're beginning to see a trend emerging, but before I acknowledge it, I want you to hop into my proverbial DeLorean so we can take a little trip back to September through December of 2011 (a mere five months ago, this won't take long).

If you don't know what this movie is, it is well past your bedtime and you are too young to be reading my blog.

As a poor fuck with a penchant for online shopping, I decided last semester that I should be working all of the jobs, and thus relied on the glorious black hole that is Craigslist to find myself some supplemental babysitting income.  If you didn't already know (how would you not know?), Craigslist is sketchy as PHUQ, and while I did happen to get lucky and find an absolutely awesome family to babysit for (who lived in a mansion and essentially payed me to play Wii and eat gourmet dinners with their daughters), I also stumbled into the four month long misfortune of babysitting the Anti-christ himself.  We will call him "Seth", which happens to actually be his real name that I haven't changed at all because the name "Seth" properly captures his personality to a degree that I cannot replicate using some other moniker.

As a brief preface, I should say that I am not usually the kind of person people want around their children, nor am I the kind of person that seeks children out, pinching their cheeks and squealing in a high pitched voice about "how ADORABLE!!!" someone's kid is.  I don't know what to do with kids - I'm not sure how to speak to them and I find that they generally make me uncomfortable.  Kids always smell like something unnatural, which is a strange concept to me because most babies smell delicious.  How does a small baby go from smelling so good to smelling like an old piece of dirty bacon?  I'm not sure, but that's how children smell to me, and I don't like it.  As for infants, I'm downright afraid of them - I had to hold my cousin's five month old baby at Thanksgiving and I nearly sent myself into a full-fledged panic attack because she was so small, and what if I got her sick or dropped her by accident and she died?  I would be THAT cousin who killed the baby, and then what?  How do you get a job after you kill a baby?  That sort of background really only looks good on a resume if you're trying to become an abortionist, and honestly, that's not where I thought my life was headed.  The whole thing just doesn't work for me, and you know what?  Apparently there is a small amount of girls out there that struggle with this whole "kids" and "babies" thing too.  I can't be the only one who doesn't like or know how to act around children, and maybe my fellow frigid women out there can identify with me when I say that I simply prefer to nurture more important things than kids, like my blossoming alcohol addiction or my collection of Jeffrey Campbell's.

Think about it - would you want your child hanging around me all day, mimicking my mannerisms and learning how to properly pronounce the word "cocksucker"? Didn't think so.

Anyway.

So I found Seth's mom via my Craigslist extravaganza, and after determining that she wasn't going to harvest my organs, we agreed that I would watch Seth and his brother Carter two to four days per week.  I don't know how I didn't see the omens of horror, or at least notice something weird was going on prior to my first day (I'm mostly referring to the fact that Seth's mom had tattoos on the inside of her earlobes and had to show me a picture of her ex-husband just in case he showed up at the house so I would know he wasn't allowed in), but I was blissfully aloof.  I figured I had garnered such awesome success from my other Craigslist family that everything was probably going to work out just as swimmingly with this one.

Well.  Cue the start of the Twilight Zone music.

On my first day, I went to the house and the boys' mom was already gone.  The house lay in abandon, and as I let myself in I remembered that I had never actually met Seth and Carter before.  My central nervous system responded to this with a spurt of good-natured anxiety - hope I can remember their names and not get them confused!  So jolly, I was.  So carefree.  So naive.  I waited for the boys to get home from school, my body spread on the sofa like a 120 pound sack of potatoes, and I turned on the TV to catch the ending of Intervention (LOVE other people's pain).  Things were wrapping up pretty nicely as Alice agreed to go to rehab, when all of a sudden I hear the bellowing howls of an animalistic fury rapidly approaching the house.  A moment later, two miniature boys came barreling into the living room, beating the ever-loving shit out of one another.

Carter is unimportant - the kid is a chubby brown-noser who obviously feels the need to take responsibility for his younger brother since he is the first-born.  Yadda, yadda, yawn.  But Seth.  Seth, my friends, is a fucking SOCIOPATH.  The boys stopped hitting each other when they noticed a stranger was in their presence (I believe their vision is based on movement), and Seth swivels his head with a look of curious indignation, shooting daggers of both interest and anger out of his tremendous blue eyes.  He approaches me head on, and, standing three inches from my face, says, "Who are you supposed to be?"  And for a moment there, I honestly didn't know.  Who the fuck AM I supposed to be, you know?  And so I'm staring back at this kid, caught in a haze of what I now recognize as supernatural forces, and I see that he literally has no emotion behind his eyes, his features just a hollow, dead shell masking the utterly impenetrable darkness that is encased inside of his six year old body.  He's still grilling me as I meekly whisper "I'm . . . I'm Vick," and as the words register in his brain, clicking and whirring through his sub-human cognition, he breaks his stare and life resumes.  He turns away, rips off his school shirt, and begins humping the television set with great passion and fervor.

Just so you guys are aware, if you Google image search "dead behind the eyes", this is the first photo that comes up.

Every encounter I had with Seth over that four month span of time was fucking awful and emotionally scarring.  The sheer amount of physical and emotional abuse I endured persists in my memory so vividly that I pray to Allah every night that I have not now become apart of some larger cycle of violence that will later on cause me to abuse my own children*.  I don't understand how Seth even managed to continue living on the most fundamental, day-to-day level - the kid NEVER ate.  I would spend hours learning to cook the random foods I was supposed to prepare for dinner only to have him glance at his plate and tell me that no, he would not be eating that trash, and like the battered housewife I was, I would bring his perfectly prepared meal back into the kitchen and weep softly into my apron.  Seth's energy source wouldn't be such an interesting facet of his personality to me if he wasn't so active - he destroyed everything he came into contact with.  He was like a hurricane on Adderall, and instead of using his power for good, he would shred his mother's books, eat his own homework, and attempt to punt the family's teacup chihauhau.  Seth's body was a mashed ball of wiry muscle, something you'd see on a Neanderthal, and for some time I thought that he might be a throwback: some unfortunate mixing of genes that had laid reticent throughout thousands of years of human history only to gain expression in the year 2006 when a woman with ear tattoos would pro-create for the second time and produce Seth.  Ultimately, things proved much worse.  You see, after my four months of work with Seth, the only conclusion I could draw up was that he actually IS the unholy spawn of Satan himself.  Seth was born soulless, a robot of destruction that the Dark Lord had chosen as his vessel for conquering the fallen race of mankind, and there is not a single doubt in my mind that Seth will one day kill us all.  Mark my words, twelve years from now, you will look up at the six o clock news and find yourself confronted with the icy cold gaze of Seth, who will have just been convicted of (at the very least) brutally slaughtering a nice suburban family.

It's a gross generalization to think that all kids are like Seth - they aren't and can't be, mostly because I think there is some sort of law in the universe where Satan can only have one reincarnation alive at a time.  I will even go so far as to say that some little kids are okay, namely infants (though they do scare me with their fragility) and those who have just learned to talk, because they are like weird little drunk people who smile a lot and make you laugh.  It's really between the ages of five and eleven years old that we begin to see how fucking wretched little kids are.  From age five onward, kids start getting a real handle on human language, and also on human emotion.  They can smell both fear and annoyance, as Seth proved one day when he began copying everything that I was saying and I nearly lost my shit and killed him (which, when I think about it, I am extremely lucky that I didn't, because then the infernal soul of the devil would have been forced to occupy some other living body, and mine would have been nearest.  Close call, you guys.  Close fucking call.)

Who's a pretty girl?

What's even worse is that it's during this time frame that kids begin to understand they can manipulate you to get what they want, especially if they aren't your child.  Little kids will cry and plead and throw unending tantrums, reducing your emotional stamina to a pile of smoldering ashes before you finally cave in and give them whatever it is that they desire.  They can pull the Mommy card on you and run screaming into their parent's arms, pointing at you as the bad guy and causing a fiery hailstorm of disapproving looks and "you should be ashamed of yourself" 's.  But even parents get the shit on (both literally and figuratively) when it comes to little kids.  How many times have you seen a mother with her crying child at the store, begging for the kid to stop and ultimately picking the child up like a 40 pound holiday ham and dragging him/her out of the store?  And how many times have you judged that woman?

Are you fucking kidding me, People of Walmart?  I can't.

Let's be real, probably a lot, and though sometimes it is genuine bad parenting (see above), I feel like most of the time it's because the little kid is a fucking manipulative freak.  Kids are just an entirely other species - they don't know what anything is or where they are, they are helpless to adults yet know how to flip the script on us so that we are helpless to them, and everything they touch somehow becomes more sticky that the cockroach semen-covered items for sale at Rite Aid.  Every time a strange kid has approached me, they have either asked for something I have and am unwilling to give up (Uh, no you can't have this ice cream cone.  I just bought it.  With money.  That I earned.  From having a job.  Which you don't have.  Because your small and lazy.), or they have said something completely fucking weird to me and totally ruined my day (See: "If you're a lady why do you have a mustache?"  I'M IN BETWEEN WAXES YOU LITTLE PIECE OF SHIT).

The nail in the coffin of little kids (absolutely HORRENDOUS way to start a sentence, but you know what I mean) is that I can clearly remember some of the messed up horseshit I used to do to my own parents/strangers when I was a kid, and it fills me a swelling balloon of self-loathing when I look back on it.  Did you know, for instance, that my younger sister is blonde and small and the polar opposite of me in every way?  And did you know, as further background, that my mom used to work mornings cleaning houses and nights waitressing (with an hour off to get us from school in between) to support us financially?  And, getting to the exact summit of this tragic look backward, are you aware that one day we dressed my sister's My Size Barbie up in one of her swimsuits and set her out to float face down in the swimming pool, and then told my sister to hide when mom came home from her morning job, and she did, and when mom walked in, exhausted from her first half of the day, and asked where Jess was, I said I didn't know, and that I think she went out back a little over an hour ago, and then my mom went out back only to see what looked like her youngest child floating dead in the swimming pool?  Because that's fucked up you guys.  That's some seriously fucked up shit right there, and that is something the mind of a nine year old girl thought was hilarious and appropriate at the time.

More like My Size Dead, am I right?

Little kids just suck.  They are small assholes who we all, as a society, give a free pass to be dicks because we think they can't be held accountable for the bullshit that they pull.  To offer a horrible metaphor (mostly because this is one thing I know we all did to our parents growing up), we watch little kids as they take a sip from our Life's water bottle only to ruin the entire drink with a foul looking backwash that is the direct result of eating old Skittles they found on the floor of Life's minivan.  I'm not even sure what that is supposed to mean, but the one thing I am most definitely certain of is that little kids are slowly ruining my life.

P.S.  Do you want to know what Seth the Antichrist had said to me on my last day of babysitting?  He looked me dead in the eye before I put him into his bed and said, "I wish you didn't exist." Don't worry Seth, after babysitting you I wish I didn't exist too.


*I'm not procreating.