n'est pas

New Out-of-office autoreply from the ever-prolific Billows

I'm spending a long weekend with my girlfriend Lydia.

Lydia, whom I probably haven't mentioned before, is German and by all accounts genetically superior to any woman I have ever met. I have even gone so far to apply phrenology to her head and discovered that her skull dimensions are indicative of a remarkably high intellect and that the distance between her nose and chin reflects superior leadership qualities. Her only imperfection, if you’d call it that, is her unrelenting desire to take over the world under a brutal totalitarian regime. She has her hobbies I have mine. I for instance enjoy tennis. The key is that we support each other.

Right now many of you are asking how Lydia and I met? Well, our love affair started rather suddenly. We were both coincidentally running through a field of wheat in the early afternoon sun when we both unexpectedly tripped and fell on top of one another and proceeded to make love. At least that's how I remember it. The police report has it as a foot chase, a tackle, and a sexual assault. However, I couldn't press charges against her once I saw her face in court. Her bewildering eyes staring at me, much the same way they were in the field when she was choking me for no good reason. To say I dropped the charges out of intimidation is hardly a substantial claim. I dropped the charges out of love. And it is this love that compelled me to change my story.

It was perhaps my reversal on the assault charges that redirected Lydia’s homicidal feelings towards me into somewhat less homicidal feelings. Her new outlook on me promptly started a whirlwind love affair, complete with full access to my credit cards, the use of my apartment, car, and pretty much everything else I own.

About now you're probably wondering about how good our sex life must be. Well as I said before, Lydia is German, and like most Germans she likes sex to be as well planned as possible. The standard German rule of thumb is to produce the greatest possible orgasm with the least amount of energy. Foreplay consists mainly of drawing up schematics of each sexual position and then determining the proper movement, thrust, and weight distribution of each maneuver verse the amount of calories needed to perform it. And once we’re done with a fully clothed rehearsal, we commence in an act of sex that has the precision of a laser beam and the efficiency of a Japanese auto factory.

Unfortunately, sex hasn't solidified our relationship as it has for so many other couples. From my understanding, sex usually leads to unintentional declarations of love just before lift off, but in our case I've been the only one screaming "I love you" while she lays totally silent engrossed in some kind of repetitive breathing pattern. Undeterred, I began saying "Ich liebe dich," which means I love you in German, but that must of tried her patience because she reprimanded me for improvising during a our well choreographed sex itinerary. I, perhaps the more emotional of our dyad, asked why she never says the words "I love you" back to me. Furious, she explained that the 1.2 seconds it takes to say such words would totally throw her off her very well laid out schedule. She further explained that if she were to say those words once a day it would add up to her being off by 8.4 seconds a week and more than a minute after a year. I certainly couldn’t argue with how terribly inefficient my request was, but nonetheless it made me angry to hear it. So there I stood, conflicted between whether to walk out of the room in a huff or to see if she was still amorous enough to finish the last three sexual maneuvers; #4A, #15, and #31, in that specific order. I choose the later and found to my chagrin that the mood was indeed broken. As Lydia reattached her bra she yelled at me once again, this time informing me that the time involved in this totally unnecessary conversation would be coming straight out of our sex life.

So that's where our relationship left off as of last week. Since then we have hardly talked. And during these last seven days of silence I have learned that I can't live with out her. So I have come to the conclusion that I must ask Lydia to marry me. The problem with this realization is Lydia's tight and uncompromising schedule. In light of her pet peeve with inefficiency I have worked on getting the proposal down as much as I can. I figure it'll take 3.4 seconds to pop the question, and then when you factor in her dramatic pause, answer, and the time it takes to put the ring on her finger, I'll be approaching a total time of 12 seconds. From looking at her yearly planner she doesn't have an opening for an unscheduled 12 second marriage proposal until July 2008; which happens to be around the time she expects Western Europe to fall to her brutal air campaign, but just before she launches her blitzkrieg on China. I personally don't want to ask for her hand in marriage when most of the Far East is still resisting her quest for global supremacy. And even if I did, what time does a dictator have for a guy like me? All the killing, persecution, and oppression will demand almost all of her attention, leaving me what, a wedding ring and my own private Gestapo death squad to order around willy-nilly? That's only half a marriage. I want the other half. The half filled with snuggling, cutting out coupons, and inviting other ruthless despots over for drinks and maybe a game of pictionary. How can I have that half? I don't know, maybe I'm silly for thinking this can work, but isn't that what love is about, making things work? I mean if Lydia can cause the whole of Europe to fall in 7 months as planned she could certainly make our marriage work, right? Anyway, I'm taking a personal day to get my head together on this.