208 - Overreacting

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I'm sure we all agree that our parents, our spouses, our children and our boyfriends and girlfriends are the biggest drama queens and kings in our lives. A while back, I blogged here about how my mother once found cigarettes in my desk drawer while I was out of the house. She was utterly upset by her nicotine discovery, and called me up to say that she would be taking these away from me. The fact that I had only smoked (half of) one didn't matter to her. She told me she didn't care if I went to another convenience store to purchase some. She was going to take that packet of cigarettes and that was the end of the story, according to her, as demonstrated by her hanging up the phone.

But not on my terms was that the end. I thought she had blown the whole thing in her mind way out of proportion, so I called her back to try to explain to her that I had only tried one cigarette and I didn't even like it. The dial tone rang and it rang and I tried again and again, each time I dialed, it was picked up by her voicemail service.

On the sixth or seventh time, there was no ringing sound - instead, it went straight to voicemail - and upon realizing that my mother had turned her phone off altogether to avoid more argument with me, in a compulsive fury, I raised my own mobile phone up high above my head, and smashed it on to the ground. Before I could even fathom what had just happened, battery, buttons, and bits of screen were scattered all over the ground in front of me.

Talk about overreacting.

People freak out about a great number of things, like lip piercings, and grades of B- or lower, and little boys who may or may not have drifted away in helium balloons.

Does this mean my daughter's having sex with her new boyfriend?
Does this mean we're all going to die in 2012?
The guy over there is sneezing and sniffing a lot, could he have swine flu?

Take the following story as a prime example of what I mean.

On December 19th, thanks to such social networking sites as Facebook and Twitter, over 200 people were able to gather beside a street in downtown Washington D.C. to have a friendly neighborhood snowball fight. As the snowball fight was well underway, a large maroon Hummer drove by the neighborhood, and members of the public decided to launch snowballs towards the vehicle.

It turned out that the driver of the car was a detective who, I guess, just wasn't liking the snow that day. He got out of his car holding a walkie-talkie in one hand, and waving a gun in the other.

Why on Earth would he take out his gun?


Apparently, it was because of the simple reality that he had been hit with snowballs.


I wonder if at any point he had considered throwing snowballs back at them instead of pointing a gun. Or considered throwing his phone at them. I also wonder what his mother was thinking when she heard about that.

127 - When someone invades your privacy

Oh, this post can go in so many directions...

My mother once rummaged through my desk drawer and found a pack of cigarettes that I had hidden in there. She called me up and said she was going to take it because she didn't like me having it. I retorted with: "I didn't take the condoms you hide in your closet, so don't take my cigarettes." And she came back with: "Well, I don't delete your porn off your computer."

Yes, the invasion of privacy. What she said actually infuriated me so much I actually threw my phone on to the floor real hard, which resulted in a shattered phone, and accomplished nothing.

I've read other people's text messages, only because I've had people do it to me. People have abused my trust and gone into my e-mail accounts to look around, and I, too, have guessed a password or two correctly before in my curiosity. There are just so many things that we hide under our beds, in the unknown hidden flaps of our wallets and purses, and, perhaps most interestingly, our heads. Secret entities can come in so many forms: the bottle of rum I occasionally take a sip out of that I placed behind all the other wines and spirits, the diary I locked up and never continued, the tiny notes I have in my friend's pencil case that got passed around in class, the money I'm saving up to spend on parties in the UK slipped in between the pages of a First Aid Guidebook. Everybody hides something, I'm sure.

Very recently, I've talked to someone that means a lot to me, and I haven't spoken to in a while. She really does care about me more than a lot of other people, and I often forget how much she does throughout the years because I rarely see her. The reason we've been avoiding each other, I believe, is because another person, a man, that is close to both of us, will get upset at our interaction. He doesn't like it when things happen behind his back, when things are out of his control.

He has the resources to actually spy on us, and read all my text messages and e-mails, follow me around everywhere I go. That's an invasion of privacy. I would hate it if I found out he's snooping around in my business.