When GTB and I moved in together back in April, one of the tasks of setting up house was organizing our CDs. He had a lot, I had a lot, we had a lot in common. So we went through and pulled all the duplicates out and then, gulp, put the rest on the shelf together. No “this is my side, this is your side” system here. Nope. We alphabetized them all as one giant collection. There they still sit, nestled happily together in obsessive-compulsive order.

The duplicates went to a box in the basement. I hadn’t thought of them until GTB went down there looking for Christmas decorations. Coming across them, he found it just plain silly that we are letting them take up space in our house, and said so to me.

“We should just sell them or give them away,” was his idea.

Yeah, I freaked a little. I’ll be the first to admit I’m a commitment phobe, and that stuff like this scares me. Do I think GTB and I are ever going to be apart from each other again? No, of course not. But the idea of purging extemporaneous music from our lives now possibly resulting in a days-long battle over who gets to keep “OK Computer” if the shit ever does hit the fan…well, it gives me hives.

Needless to say, we didn’t combine our book collections. He’s got his shelves, I’ve got mine. Done.

Though I know I’m being ridiculous about this, GTB coddles me by saying things like, “But they are OUR books now, not ‘yours’ and ‘mine.'”

Mmm hmm. But I still want to know which of OUR stuff is actually MINE. Go ahead and call me crazy. You wouldn’t be the first.

So, when GTB’s computer decided to crap out last week, and he started spending absurd amounts of time on MY laptop, I should have known trouble was coming.

Monday night, a few minutes before walking out the door to see Alisa, I remembered I needed to send a work email. GTB was sitting on the couch, watching Monday Night Football with my computer on his lap. His fantasy football team consisted of the Seahawks’ defense, so he was pretty wrapped up. Semi-understandable. When I asked him if I could have MY computer for a couple of minutes, while promising to open a new web page so as to not lose his fantasy football grid page, he begrudingly handed it over.

When he passed it to me, I noticed he was in my settings page, obviously screwing with my battery-preserving features.

“Are you messing with the settings on MY computer?!” I gasped.

He was. He explained that he feels that the battery runs out of juice too quickly, so he was seeing if there was something he could do about it. I told him he could mess with the batteries on his own computer and to leave mine alone.

“But, honey, it’s OUR computer,” he explained.

I gave him a quick, but stern course in “Leave My Shit Alone,” and went on my way to Alisa’s.

Last night, I got home from the gym just as he and a friend were sitting down to watch DVRed episodes of “House.” A disagreement about whether or not one bit role was being played by the nerdy guy from “A Different World” prompted me to go grab my laptop from the other room. I opened it up, looked up Dwayne Wayne on imdb.com and pronounced GTB the winner of that particular argument.

During the time that it took me to stroke GTB’s ego in this way and to watch one commercial, my computer screen dimmed itself.

I seethed. My vision turned red and I could hear the blood rushing in my ears.

“You’ve been fucking with my computer, haven’t you?!” I growled. I had orginally set the automatic dimmer for like ten minutes or something. He had changed it to dim after two minutes.

“Yes,” he sheepishly admitted. “But only because I wanted to make the battery last longer!”

I can get over the ludicrous idea of maybe losing CDs someday. I don’t mind when he rifles through my purse for a piece of gum without asking. I actually kinda like it when he answers my cell phone when it’s one of our mutual friends or my sister. I want to spend the rest of my life sharing all kinds of things with GTB.

But you just don’t fuck with a girl’s computer.

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