*beep* “Hi, guys. This is [Mr. W]. Lily called Cindy and said that our passports and visas are ready to be picked up, and she wants to know if you want her to pick up your passports and as well.”

In the above sentence, who does “she” refer to? Grammatically, the pronoun (“she”) would refer back to the subject (Lily), so doesn’t it sound like Lily called me to tell me that our passports/visas are ready to be picked up and Lily asked if I wanted to pick up passports/visas for Mr. W’s friends, as well? When I heard Mr. W leave this message on his friends’ answering machine, I told him that it sounded convoluted as to who was asking whom to pick up the passports because all he said was “she.” The remainder of the message, he told them to call him back and let him know so he could tell “her” (meaning me). This led to a dispute because Mr. W insisted that he’d made a point to say my name so that they would know that it was me who was offering, not that our travel agent, Lily, was forcing me to take other people’s personal documents into my own hands. I told him that he’d only said “she” and he said that because he’d said my name, then the “she” obviously meant me. I said it did not, and then he claimed that the message he left was “Lily called us and said our passports and visas are ready to be picked up. And Cindy called, and asked me to call you guys to see if you want Cindy to pick up your passports as well.” I KNOW he didn’t say THAT. Cuz as soon as he said “she” in the first version I had typed up there, I winced. It’s the editor and writer (and copywriter) in me.

And then Mr. W characterized this dispute as a “fight”, and complained that we “fight every day” about stuff like this. I asked for other examples. He brought up the day before while we were having dinner with Vanessa, and the day before that when he and I were watching Ally McBeal.
The dinner dispute was when Vanessa and I were talking about weight loss and dieting, and Mr. W interjected, “I’m coming back at like 210, 215 now.” Both she and I thought he was saying he’d gained 20, 25 lbs recently, and then I realized that he meant he’s coming back from the GYM at his lunchtime workouts at 2:10p, 2:15p now instead of the regular time when lunch is over. So I explained that to her and he was lost and I told him that Vanessa and I were on the same page, confirmed that with Vanessa, and that was the end of that. He called that a “fight”? The Ally McBeal thing was because we thought we may have been viewing the 4 episodes in the wrong order on the DVD, since the episode names weren’t displayed in a list, they were displayed in a block of 4, so we didn’t know whether we were supposed to go from the left top episode to the right, or straight down. We picked one, and there was a scene where Ally was making reference to all the strange guys who’d asked her out that week and she talked about some fat guy or strange event that we hadn’t seen in a prior episode, so Mr. W said something to the effect of, “See? We did skip something cuz we never saw that happen.” There was another place where he made a similar comment. But later, he denied ever even thinking that we may have viewed the episodes in the wrong order or that we may have skipped an episode, which is still confusing to me, but we went back and forth with me saying, “But you mentioned it TWICE!”. But anyway, his dramatic overcharacterization of those 2 disputes as “daily fighting” offended me yesterday evening and I’ve been irritated ever since.

I know fights, I’ve been in fights. I’ve fought when some sleezeball treated me like crap and told me it was my problem if I didn’t like it. I’ve fought when I was cheated on and lied to. I’ve fought when someone twisted something my mother said and published it to brag to his deluded friends. But I’d never fought physically or thrown things. And I know of Mr. W’s past fights with women he said had “volatile tempers”, who cheated on him, who screwed him over, who had psycho fits over stupid things like going thru his personal stuff and finding something he owned that they didn’t like. Women who had neighbors call the police on them for screaming and cussing and physically fighting with their men on the streets outside their homes. And he wants to lump ME into dramatics like that?! You’d think he’d know the difference.

I’m actually dizzy and lightheaded right now, and I’m not sure if it’s because I’m so irritated about all this, or because I couldn’t sleep all night from being bothered by this. Maybe I’m overindulging in his fatalistic, dramatic outlooks, and maybe it’s cuz I’m PMSing. But I hate, hate being wronged and I feel wronged often in this relationship. Who cares if his friends misunderstood his message? They could probably pick up the meaning through context if they had half a brain cell. I was just pointing out that it sounded convoluted, it’s not a stupid fight. (When I went to pick up the passports, by the way, travel agent Lily mentioned that the “friends” had picked up their passports that morning already, so now the friends can feel bad when they hear the message that we offered and they didn’t.)