by Melody Bowen
Shaking the Box
That's how I felt yesterday. I snooped. I shook the box. Figuratively speaking, that is. I didn't mean to -- sort of -- but I did it anyway. And I did it more than once, sometimes inadvertently, and it kept leading me to facts that I didn't want or need to know. Over and over again. It was surreal, come to think of it, how many times I found out things yesterday that I really didn't need to know.
Here's the bad part: I can't write about this stuff in any sort of detail. I'd love to really dish the dirt right now, but I just can't. I can't, I can't, I can't. What I can say is that I didn't mean to be so nosy yesterday. I didn't wake up yesterday intending to sleuth my way into discovering this crap. (Really! Well, OK, maybe just the first thing, but not all the things that followed -- swear!)
Here's the worst part: I brought this on myself. In an early-morning moment of curiosity and weakness of character, I did one little sort of semi-sneaky bit of snooping that revealed some pretty juicy information. Juicy information that is absolutely without a doubt none of my business. (Well, actually, at one time it *was* my business, but not anymore.) Once I had that juicy information -- and it had come to me so easily -- it made me dig for more until the guilt got the best of me and I stopped digging.
Then, later, a casual phone conversation with an old friend led me to more information that I didn't want to know (and, no, I can't write details about that either, dammit!). And, no, it had *nothing* to do with the dirt I'd unearthed earlier in the day. I left the conversation scratching my head and thinking how ironic it was to have two major revelations in the same day.
Then, it happened again. Again! While chatting with a friend, I asked one question too many about a topic that was, quite frankly, none of my business. I asked exactly one question too many, which was enough to leave me standing with my mouth hanging open stammering, "Oh... my... gawd..." over and over and again. I came away from that conversation with some pretty freaky mental images that will be damn difficult to delete from my memory.
And it kept happening. Over and over again it kept happening. By the day's end, I had fallen face-first into the kind of info that I didn't want to know so many times I was losing count. I realized that maybe "shaking the box" was my bit of bad karma for the day (except that I don't exactly believe in karma, but... well... whatever). Maybe that little bit of early-a.m. snooping opened the door for all kinds of other tidbits to just fall unwanted into my lap, all of which left me feeling somewhat disheartened, a little shocked, and even maybe a little sad. My snooping yielded nothing but a bunch of crap I didn't need to know.