Our technology labor-saving devices are killing our marriage.  Well, maybe not killing it, but from time to time they take a few unsportsmanlike whacks to our knees, maybe nibble at the ankles a bit, usually when we're short on time and highly in need of good entertainment.

Our two biggest foibles?  The iTunes library and the Netflix queue.  My beloved has more of his stuff in the library, he being the one who came into the marriage with more than 400 CDs and more into music in general.  I have more opinions in the category of cinema, having grown up in a family that went to the movies a few times a month and considered it to be high entertainment.  Plus, as a writer and reader, I'm always looking for someone who can tell a fresh story.  He taught himself to play the guitar shortly into our marriage ("Hey listen to this! It's 'C'.")  So it makes sense, this division of technological labor.

However, sometimes one of us chafes at the other's clear dominance in a category, backstabbing each other with the line-up like the cast of Desperate Housewives. 

I've started turning on the iTunes library while I work in my home office (sometimes as much as nine hours a day).  I don't LIKE to hear Kenny Rogers or Metallica more than once in a week. If I have to interrupt my train of thought to banish "To All The Girls I've Loved Before" one more time, I swear I'll delete it.  I feel pretty strongly about this forced introduction of country music into my little sheltered bubble of singers/songwriters and "Hollaback Girl."  I don't want to think about the small town of 5,000 I grew up in and ran screaming from at 19.  I don't want to be reminded of dead-end jobs, pick-up trucks and borderline alcoholism as an entertainment form.  GAH.  MAKE IT GO AWAY.

My beloved, on the other hand, chafes against the documentaries featuring aging academics, the estrogen movies, the alt/indie, Memento/Eyes Wide Shut fare.  So I knew I was in for it when the latest DVD arrived yesterday. 

I was upstairs, innocently working on my spreadsheet. 

Beloved: (bellowing from downstairs) "YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!"

Me:  "What?"

Beloved: (rushes up stairs and waves red envelope in my face)  "SYLVIA????"

Me:  "What about it?"

Beloved: "First Mean Girls, and now this? Why don't you just snip my vas deferens now?"

He leans over me and brings up the Netflix home page on our home computer. I attempt to ignore him.  Sylvia Plath was a great writer, dammit.

Beloved:  "Sign in."

Me: (feigning indifference) "What's the password?"

He is now purple.  "LIKE YOU DON'T KNOW THE PASSWORD WHEN YOU'VE BEEN SECRETLY GETTING IN HERE EVERY DAY AND MOVING UP YOUR CHOICES?  THEN YOU THROW ME EIGHT MILE AND THINK EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY?"

Me: "Calm down. You're really making too big of a deal out of this."

Beloved:  "Easy for you to say. You can watch Gwyneth Paltrow without throwing up."

Me:  "I'm sorry, I can't hear you over Willie Nelson here."