Are friends electronic mail?

so i installed a password sniffer on my computer. it was one of those trial versions so not perfect. then i uninstalled it, remembering what i went through the last time i decided to snoop. i was reading my ex-girlfriend's diary almost daily for the last several months of our relationship. i didn't find out anything terribly bad (a few good things actually) by reading it, but i felt compelled to read it all the same. the problem was, i wouldn't have been able to stop reading it ever.

it's really awful having a line into someone's inner thoughts. that's why this time i resolved not to do it.

In a weird way, I've grown to like my friend even more through my betrayal of him. I've mostly been able to resist opening his mail over the last two years (not that I'm proud), but one or two of the missives I did open, from other people, allowed me to see clearly beyond the mask he routinely sports for me, and I liked what I saw. Also, I have on occasion opened the emails from myself, before he's had a chance to pick them up, and I noticed some things about myself - some good, some not so attractive. In contrast to my friend's correspondence and personal contact with some others, with me it seems he's far more likely to be doing the listening, letting me talk on and over him. And I thought all there was to know was Gary Numan.

:-)

Now he knows that I know he was cheating on his girlfriend; and he knows that I know he sometimes finds being with me 'hard work', and that he thinks my eyes are 'starey', and that he thinks my hair is like a 'frothy periwig' (Lawrence from Felt actually sacked a band member simply because they had curly hair, and I know, after reading an email sent to his brother, that that's what my friend would do if he had a band and I, by chance, was in it); and he knows that I know he is waiting to have surgery to remove an inflamed tubercle from just above his left nipple, and that he's worried its removal will result in him going prematurely bald (he's read that such inflammations are caused by excess oestrogen, and he wonders, irrationally, if cutting out said tubercle might cause a hormonal coup, leading to a sudden surge of opportunistic testosterone)'.

Tibor S. Crow? He writes for Wire, don't he?

Err...