On privacy

The past two days have been very long ones for me. My father-in-law has just decided to walk out on a relatively happy 33 year marriage. To make matters worse, he has ended it in favour of his best friend's wife. It's coming completely out of the blue and everyone is pretty shocked. And all I keep thinking is "good god, I know I'll be leaving in a few months too, but at least I tried to work on my relationship!" And that's probably not fair. My mother-in-law isn't the easiest person to get along with and obviously I don't know the inner details of their life together. I can't really blame him for leaving... but I can blame him for going about it poorly. And for coming to me to see how everyone is doing and putting me in the middle, rather than asking them himself and facing up to his decisions.

Anyway, I promise, I am actually getting around to a privacy musing, bear with me. *smiles* I told R about this as soon as I knew, so he knew it would be a turbulent time. I didn't talk to him yesterday. But I did talk to another very old and dear internet friend. We talked for almost 12 hours, in fact. At some point I said something about really wanting a drink, but I don't drink alone. It's a very strict rule I have. He laughed and said he'd drink with me. I kind of thought it was cheating a bit... but I wanted that drink so that's what we did.

Now, I don't really drink. Usually only once every other month or so. Sometimes much less. These days when I do, it hits me pretty hard. I can confidently say that I only had two drinks last night... unfortunately, those two drinks had about 6 shots of jack in them. *looks ashamed*

As my typing slowly got worse, he suggested we bypass the keyboard altogether and chat with the wonderful yahoo voice feature. Now, I've done this with him a couple of times, but really rarely. Maybe three times since I've known him. And those other times.... well, we weren't exactly having a normal conversation if you catch my meaning. *chuckles* Although, I suppose that is pretty normal for us...

*shakes head quickly* Anyway! Back on target... I was a bit apprehensive because that's not really part of our relationship. But we chatted, had a great time, and all was fine. Slurred speach is a little easier to understand than a thousand typos, apparently.

But this made me think... I was going privacy crazy over talking to someone that I've known a long time over voice. It's not like he gains my phone number or anything. I'm still onlly available to him when I want to be. Where's the privacy issue. On the other hand, R has given his phone number out to two new girls in a week!

I guess it's a good balance, having one person privacy mad and the other person completely lacking all concepts of personal privacy. *chuckles* He's very good about other people's privacy, especially mine. He just doesn't see the need for his own.

Maybe I should change the name of my post to "On drunken evenings"....