How to Torture a Boy

Last night I learned a delicious new fact. If you're ever in the mood to be truly evil, subject a 20-something male to an evening of Lifetime channel made-for-TV movies.

Still in recovery from my weekend, still suspended in relationship limbo as Sailor attends to his family business (thereby not really communicating with me), irritated with work, I camped out on the sofa for a solid evening of nourishing food and TV-watching. Only I couldn't find anything good on, so I landed on a Lifetime movie about a 16 year old girl who gets pregnant, has a baby, and then suffers as her mother insists on taking over the raising of the child so that she can have a "normal" childhood. Like all other movies on the channel, one begins to watch with a high degree of skepticism, and despite oneself, gets completely sucked in by the sheer melodrama and pathos of what is being depicted. At some point, one of my male roommates wandered in and parked himself on the other end of our sectional. I warned him that he wouldn't like what I was watching. I apologized for the lack of depth in the programming I had chosen. Heck, I even admitted that the damn program was causing me to weep in spite of myself. And yet he stayed. But he complained the entire time, throwing out sarcastic remarks here and there about the sheer stupidity of the characters, how the "teenage" characters where clearly being acted by people in their late 20's and how generally insipid the plot of the movie was. I can't say I didn't agree, but I was sucked in nonetheless. There's something so satisfying after all, of watching a program that depicts drama far worse than your own, at least because it illustrates that things aren't actually that bad. After a while, the utter misery he was clearly experiencing in being subjected to this drivel began to surpass the pathetic brilliance of the movie itself, and my enjoyment began to stem from his lack of it. He clearly could have left. He has a TV in his room. But he stayed, and because of this, I can't deny that my entertainment eventually shifted from the TV to him.

When the movie was over, I handed him the remote, and as I left the room I looked over my shoulder to see that he had flipped to a football game. Clearly an attempt to channel some much needed testosterone. I giggled and went upstairs to call Lulu to brag about what I had just done. We had a good laugh at his expense.

Speaking of roommates, my girl one and I seem to be engaged in an entertaining game of "hot potato" with a Styrofoam takeout container in our fridge. We have two refrigerators, and she and I share the smaller one. A couple years ago, after a spat of disagreements over available food space, I rearranged the shelving situation so that we were each assigned our own, with the remaining space designated as "first come, first served." It's worked out pretty well and we rarely seem to clash over fridge space anymore. Yet a couple of days ago, a white takeout container holding something resembling Chinese food appeared on mine. Needing the space it was taking up, I figured she had misplaced it, so I moved it to hers. Yesterday I saw that she moved it back to mine. I laughed when I saw it again this morning, and not wanting to be a *complete* jerk, moved it down to the "first come, first served space." I'm beginning to think it actually belongs to one of the five million significant others/friends of roommates who visit our abode at any given time. But I still think it was sort of entertaining.