I feel like I don't matter.

Boyfriend and I agreed that we would see Letters to Juliet when it came out. He picked the last movie we saw, which was Kick Ass, and while I enjoyed it, it was a little gory and violent for my taste. Since we alternate movies, I picked Letters, but Boyfriend kept putting it off. He finally agreed to see it Friday, but it was no longer showing at the Drafthouse. For those of you who don't live in Texas, the Alamo Drafthouse is the only RIGHT way to see a movie.

Since it was no longer showing, he grudgingly allowed my alternative: Sex and the City 2. We were going to see it last night. But when he came home from work he pouted and insisted that I just LOOK at the movies playing at the Drafthouse to see if there was maybe something playing I was interested in. So I looked and found that Robin Hood was playing at 6:45, and Sex and the City was playing at 6:30. I told Boyfriend the times for both, then I told him I was buying the tickets for Eclipse's midnight release and that we could go see Robin Hood instead but he had to go to the Eclipse showing with me.

He agreed. So we get to the Drafthouse at 6:15 and the girl behind the window informs us that Robin Hood is sold out. And I start laughing so hard because it's just funny. Karma? Fate? Destiny? Kismet? I wasn't sure what it was, but it felt very good. I told the girl we wanted tickets for Sex and the City instead and she smiled. Boyfriend looked absolutely miserable.

And so we went to see Sex and the City. Boyfriend was far from the only man in the room. Other men had been dragged in by girlfriends and wives, but he was the only one who refused to laugh. I heard male laughter two or three times during the movie. Boyfriend downed three beers and closed his eyes and made irritated noises the entire time.

It kind of hurt my feelings. I TRIED for Robin Hood. If he had been like me and had just purchased his tickets ahead of time online we would have been able to see Robin Hood. But he insisted that it wasn't necessary, that it would be fine on a Sunday for Memorial Day weekend to show up to an action movie and expect to get in. It was entirely his fault, and he just acted like a thwarted child the entire movie, and then when we left he complained about how it was ten times more awful than the first Sex and the City movie.

You know, we watch his stupid westerns all of the time, and even though I hate gun fights and I hate John Wayne, I don't complain about his movies. I just cuddle up to him and watch and enjoy the costumes, if nothing else. Sometimes I like the movies, like Tombstone, but mostly I think they're boring and bad. But he can't extend the same courtesy to me. It makes me feel like I'm the only one that cares, and if I tell him at any time he's hurt my feelings, he doesn't apologize. He says, "Oh well, you'll get over it," and if I push the issue he screams and yells and then ignores me for the next three days or until I apologize to him.

Apologize? For what? For having feelings? For saying that he hurt them?

Sometimes I want to leave him. But every time I think of packing my things and taking off, I remember all of the sweet times that far outnumber the bad times, and I know that I love him, so I stay.

But the thought pops up every now and again.

I could just leave. And would he miss me?

By all means, pretend you're innocent. It doesn't change the fact that you're guilty.

I was extremely irritated when I got home last night, even though I'd taken precautions to prevent anyone from ever trying to look up my dresses again while I'm sitting at my desk at work. I spoke to Boyfriend, and mentioned that I was actually considering complaining to our owner. Not just because it happened, but because he was bragging about it and talking about me inappropriately to other people. That is above and beyond what anybody could stand.

I actually made a point of saying something about it on my facebook status without naming the culprit. I knew, of course, that Ed is a friend on my facebook. I wanted to see what his reaction would be. Would he ask who I thought it was? Would he ask how I knew someone was doing that? Would he say he would never do something like that? He actually had the nerve to write as a comment, "That sux. Sorry to hear."

Yes, it does suck, you fucking rat bastard. It sucks that you pretend to be a friend to someone, all the while objectifying them and then bragging about what a hot piece of ass I probably am to your other co-workers. Unfortunately, you just happened to say it in front of someone who is a true friend, who told me about it because they thought what you were doing and saying was wrong. And then you have the nerve to tell me that you're sorry someone is that low when it's YOU WHO DID IT?

You know what? Dizzy tries to look down my shirt an awful lot, but he at least admits it, and he always tells me when my shirts are falling down low enough for him to manage to see down them. He also has no problem telling me if he's caught a glimpse of my underwear because my jeans ride down when I'm sitting. He notices, and he tells me.

Ed goes out of his way to get a look under my desk, and while he's probably never seen anything, he's pretending to feel sorry for me and to be innocent. What a fucking prick and a half.

I don't know if I'm more humiliated or outraged that my co-workers are constantly trying to upskirt me.

I went on an out of town job with a co-worker who I also consider a good friend. He's three times my age, but we both watch and love Bones, and we like the same music and he's got kids my age, and he's just a fun conversationalist.

On the way out to Taylor, which is a small farming town about forty minutes outside of Austin, he somehow drifted to the inappropriate things that happen at the South location of the family owned business we work for, and while discussing the way the nicely endowed ladies over there dress, I made a point of saying that I wear dresses to work, but they're knee length and work appropriate.

That's when Creamcicle (so named because of the color of his shirt) told me, "You need to get some banners or something to hang from your desk, because the guys from the South store are always talking about how they try to look up your skirts when you're sitting there."

Of course, I was outraged and shocked. I talk to all of the guys from the South store when they come in. I consider them all friends and fun to talk to, and I trust them to behave professionally. When I pressed Creamcicle about which guys in particular, he told me, "All of them, but the one I hear it from constantly is Ed."

Ed.

He used to work at our store. We talk all of the time, we've even gone to lunch together a few times. He stops by on Mondays on his way out to Lago. He's one who I never would have thought of as a pervert. But it makes sense. When he comes by the store, he never moves in past the front of my desk. He always stands as far back from the desk as the drums will allow him. He never talks to anybody else. He only stays for a few minutes...except on the days that I happen to be wearing a dress.

Now, I cross my legs habitually from my younger days when I only wore dresses, even when I'm wearing jeans my legs are crossed. The odds that he, or anybody else, has ever managed to see up my shirt are pretty slim. But just the idea that I'm being sexually harassed and I didn't even know it really bothers me.

I was off Wednesday, but first thing I did this morning was tell Manger Man that I needed banners for my desk. He asked me why. Well, I'm not one to beat around the bush or lie, so I told him point blank what the guys were up to, and that I was angry and humiliated and I felt like it's not fair that I'm sexually harassed and TALKED ABOUT by male co-workers at the other store just because I'm feminine and like to wear dresses.

He told me to take whatever banners I wanted, and he apologized for not knowing. The guys from my store weren't surprised, and informed me that I'm referred to as "the hot blonde" and "totally fuckable" and all sorts of degrading things by the guys at the other store who have never bothered to get to know me but have seen me sitting at my desk.

There's a big part of me that wants to go to the owner about this. I feel like the issue should be addressed. But I don't know if I I want to go through the trouble.

Because Boyfriend bought a PS3, I'm going to get fat and lose my arm and be miserable for the rest of my life.

Boyfriend foolishly purchased a PS3 last week. We already have an x-box, and I use that exclusively for netflix. The closest I come to gaming is playing Sorority Life on facebook, and I really don't even do that well, so I have absolutely no interest in the new system. I mean, come on, you have to insert a DISC to use netflix on the PS3. It's more hassle, and I don't want to bother with keeping up with a disc that didn't even come with a case.

Not only does Boyfriend want me to pay him back for half of the stupid thing, but he set it up in our bedroom and we discovered that the TV we have in the bedroom isn't compatible. So he made me help him carry that behemoth into the living room and then bring in the huge flat screen LCD thing in here. He said he would set up the x-box in the living room later.

I assumed he did it yesterday. I'm off on Wednesdays, and so I like to do my work out. There's not enough room in the bedroom for me to do my workout DVD, so I do it in the living room. However, when I went in the living room today to do it, the X-BOX wouldn't turn on. I tried to set it up, but there were a million different cords and wires behind the TV stand and I wasn't sure what did what and what needed to go where. After I successfully electrocuted myself and scraped my leg on the fucking stand, I decided just to get the DVD player from the closet and set it up. I've done it before, after all, and it was simple.

Except I scratched my arm on a wire rack in the closet trying to get the DVD player out, and then on my way out of the bedroom, I was pulling the door closed as I walked, tripped over the DVD player cord and wound up slamming the door. Which wouldn't have been a problem if our anal roommate hadn't been home. This same roommate who keeps turning the thermostat down to 65 degrees even though this is summer in fucking Austin, Texas so it's making the electric bill high and freezing me to death. Seriously, my feet and hands turn purple and I can't feel them. But he doesn't care because HE likes it that fucking cold.

He got pissed that I "slammed the door", and after twenty minutes of trying to make the DVD player work (which it wouldn't no matter how many combinations of red, yellow, white I tried, and after shocking the shit out of myself a SECOND time, I went back into the bedroom. He heard me open my door and came out saying "Hey" and I promptly swung the door shut (it didn't even close all of the way) ran into my bathroom, and slammed THAT door shut. So he told Boyfriend I was slamming doors left and right. Asshole. I'll show HIM what it's like when I slam doors willy-nilly just for the fucking hell of it.

I slammed the bathroom door accidentally, of course. I was just trying to get to the sink before I got blood on the carpet because I realized as I was trying to set up the DVD player that the scratch on my arm was deep and bleeding. I can't stand it when I bleed. It freaks me out and the smell makes me sick, it's like wet copper. I don't like the smell of wet pennies either.

So I text boyfriend at work and tell him I'm NOT going to bitch at him when he comes home, but basically it's his fault that I electrocuted myself twice, tripped, slammed the doors, scraped my leg, and gashed a gaping wound into my forearm.

He told me I need to calm down.

Calm down? I'm bleeding like a fucking pig with its throat cut, my fingers stings from electrocution, I'm crying because my cut and my scrape hurt like fucking hell, and our roommate yelled at me through the door for tripping and accidentally slamming a door. I'm also in my bedroom, not saying anything to anyone or making any noise. Except the sound of typing. Exactly how do you get calmer than completely silent?

I told him he could calm down for both of us.

He said, "Am I really trying to tell you to control your temper while I'm at work? This is rediculous."

And since that pissed me off I said, "It's ridiculous, not rediculous. And I'm in my room! What more control can I possibly exercise?"

The way it feels to me now is that Boyfriend betrayed me by not setting up the X-BOX in the living room like he promised. It's his fault that all of this stuff happened in the first place because if he had just kept his promise, I wouldn't have had to go behind the TV to mess with wires or drag out the DVD player or anything like that.

I'd be happily working out.

And what it all comes down to is that no only is Roommate mad at me, but I'm also not working out so I'm going to get fat like my sister who eats her feelings, and since I'm cut I'm going to get Ebola gangrene and my arm's going to fall off, which I won't mind because it'll be a fat arm by that point, and I'm never going to be happy again because I can't get my endorphins without my exercise, so I'm going to be fat and miserable with no arm and Boyfriend is to blame because he bought that damned PS3 that I don't even use!

I know I have problems, but my ex-boyfriend has bigger ones.

I'm a complete head case, I know. My friends call me a paradox wrapped in a mystery topped with an enigma. I don't even understand myself sometimes, but I know that I'm not a cruel, sick, psycho freak. I may like to have my towels folded a certain way, and I may freak out when Boyfriend loads the dishwasher wrong or puts the dishes up in the wrong cabinets, but I've never hurt another living creature. I mean, I've hit my sisters plenty of times, but I've never really, truly hurt them.

But I know people who do enjoy torturing other living creatures. The kind that are completely defenseless and harmless.

So when I was a senior in high school I had this boyfriend (Matt) who had this best friend (Josh) who dated my best friend (Jenn), and these two boys were two of the biggest assholes sometimes. I don't mean they said really mean things just to hurt people's feelings. I mean they did mean, cruel, malicious things just for the hell of it. Like burning the stuffed Eeyore that Matt's ex-girlfriend had given him. What the fuck was that about? They'd been broken up for months by that point. Or the time they burned the Spongebob just to watch its face melt. It was just sitting there. They would sign onto AIM under anonymous names and make fun of people who pissed them off or annoyed them.

They insulted the three gay boys we went to school with, refused to speak to them even when they were at our group outings, and made such vicious jokes about them while pretending they weren't there that they actually made one boy suicidal. We had this one boy in our group who nobody really liked, but he didn't have any friends so we invited him to hang out with us. Josh and Matt never gave him a chance, told him to shut up, that he didn't matter. They made fun of him when they found out that he had tried to hang himself. I can't see how I didn't try harder to make them stop.

But I think the worst thing I ever saw them do was kill the fish. I'm not talking about going fishing and cooking fish. I can understand that, while I don't condone it.

I'm talking about cruel, torturous, cold-blooded murder of innocent creatures just for sheer amusement. Just because they were bigger and the fish were weak and couldn't fight.

It started out like any day. We got out of school and went to hang out at Matt's house. His parents lived upstairs, and Matt had the entire lower level to himself. He practically lived alone, and his parents were really cool and didn't bother us. So we always went there. We were sitting in the computer room when Matt's dad came downstairs. (I don't really recall what we were doing. Probably watching stupid online videos. We seemed to do that a lot back then.) He said, "Matt, I'm cleaning out the fish tank. We have too many fish. Can you take the extras and flush them?"

Now, that request in and of itself upset me. Why did the fish need to be flushed? They were alive, and they lived by a lake, for crying out loud. Why not just drive the freshwater fish to the lake and set them free? They had a chance of surviving that way. Flushing them alive seemed cruel. It's certain death in a stinky sewer.

Completely not bothered by this request, Josh and Matt agreed to help. They collected the extra fix in a bucket of water, and took it downstairs. His younger brothers, Tyler and Colin, followed. They passed the bathroom , though, and I thought, "Wow, they're actually going to free them in the lake. That's so sweet!" What followed next was horrifying.

Matt opened the door and stepped out onto the downstairs patio, setting the bucket on the concrete. He reached his hand in, picked up a fish, and threw it full force against the brick wall of the house. There was a sickening thud, and and then a wet smack as the fish fell off of the wall and splatted wetly onto the concrete floor. Scales and blood stayed behind on the wall. And the fish was still breathing.

Josh picked it up and punted it like a kickball into the yard. It flopped feebly for a few seconds before it finally stopped moving. I was freaking out, shocked by the turn of events. I thought they were going to free the fish, and here they were murdering them.

By this time, I was screaming hysterically, and so was Matt's chronically ill younger brother, Tyler. We watched in horror as Josh and Matt each reached in to take another fish. Josh got more creative with his method of killing. He even crushed one under his foot after he smashed it against the wall.

And Tyler and I acted. Horrified, disgusted, and traumatized, we lurched forward and took the bucket which still held three or four fish and together we hauled it back inside the house. (At this point, I only weighed about a hundred and five pounds, and I had no strength to speak of, so it was an effort for the two of us to get it inside.) We barricaded ourselves inside of the bathroom, locking the door to save the lives of the fish. Matt and Josh yelled at us to stop being babies and bring the fish back out. We wouldn't. We were determined to give them a humane death since we couldn't save their lives.

But then we realized we faced another problem. We couldn't stand the idea of flushing the fish down the toilet alive. That seemed like a hardly better fate. But we couldn't take them back out there to suffer the death by brick wall and punting method. So we waited. The fish were in a bucket, and without filtered water they just slowly fell asleep. There was theoretically no pain involved as they slowly drowned. (It's weird to think of a fish drowning, but when a fish "breathes" water, it's actually filtering out minute particles of oxygen which are too small for human beings to breath, so when there is no filter in the water constantly introducing new oxygen, fish only filter water and drown.) Drowning is supposed to be the least painful way of dying. As long as you don't fight it, which the fish didn't. After they ceased moving, we flushed them all one by one and came out of the bathroom.

Their torture didn't end there. Matt recently told me that his friend "Joey put a live tarantula in a microwave and turned it on to see what would happen to it. It freaked out for a few seconds before exploding, and it was so fucking awesome." I'd like to stick him in a microwave and turn it on. He has a cruel streak, and I'm wondering now why I never saw that same cruel streak turned on me. He never hurt me, never insinuated that he wanted to hurt me, at least not physically. Sometimes he said some really mean things.

I think maybe Josh outgrew that phase. Except that he likes to pour salt on slugs to watch them slowly melt. I can't stand that, either. It totally grosses me out, and I feel sorry for the slug. It must hurt to be slowly melted into sludge.

To this day, I cannot understand why the hell they felt the need to torture the fucking fish like that, or the tarantula, or the slugs. It was sick, twisted, and wrong on so many levels. And you can tell me that boys will be boys and all of that bullshit, but when I tell this story to other guys they don't find it funny at all. In fact, they think Matt and Josh are seriously fucked in the head and should seek psychiatric help. I'm inclined to agree with them.