Prove To Me You're Not A Robot

"Prove to me you are not a robot" she said to as I was sitting at the table eating breakfast. Her statement startled me as of the hundred or so things I would have predicted she could have said to start our Sunday morning this was not even on the list - and I'm pretty creative. It was also odd because I had spent the past few days trying to convince her otherwise - that I was a robot - on advice from my podiatrist. It was just another example of one of my hair-brained ideas having a diametrically opposite result to what I had planned. Now I had to spend the day proving my humanity to her - which is not nearly as fun as it sounds. Being a scientist would mean that she would run me through a battery of experiments including (but not limited to) a liquid chromotography test of my blood, some electroshock therapy, DNA sampling and a spinal tap (incidentally these are all usually part of our Sundays anyways- I've gotten used to it and put up with it because my girlfriend has a wicked sense of humour, loves watching birds of prey and has a never-give-up, can-do spirit especially when she is reading poetry). She also listed me as a assistant to the author of her as-yet-to-be published article: "Experiments With/To My Boyfriend/Test Patient #1".

"Someone let the gorilla out of his cage!"she screamed as she raced into the kitchen first thing Monday morning nearly making me spill my milk. I'm usually in a state of confusion for the first few hours on Monday mornings only returning to normal functioning after a scalding hot coffee and a slightly burnt bran muffin. This statement made me more confused than usual and also threw me into a panic as I wondered "did I let the gorilla out of his cage?" quickly followed by "I don't remember purchasing any cages recently" and then "did she say gorilla and if so she is probably either referring to my paper mâché project that I hung in the dark whose shadow is purposely gorilla-like or my aunt, whose resemblance to a gorilla is definitely a big pink elephant in whatever room she is in". And it was also abundantly clear who "someone" was referring to. She has started calling me "someone" last summer as a pet name. I would say "sweetie" and she would say "someone" which she told me was Tswana for "sweetie" and it was a real term of endearment among the people of Botswana. 

"The pie crust was not flaky enough!" she exclaimed Tuesday as we were getting ready for work. I was attempting to tie my necktie which is already challenging enough on most days and the shriek did not effect my ability to focus. She works as a sports psychologist and had me undergo regular household and personal tasks while she shrieked and called me names so I could practice performing under pressure. I thought back to the pumpkin pie we ate the previous evening while watching the dog show on TV. We both felt that the pie crust, while reasonably flaky, was nowhere near as flaky as the head judge nor as tasty - she resembled a large piece of glazed ham (the contrast on our TV is shot and everything looks fairly glazed) which explains why the TV looked like it had been licked afterwards. And yet, I was worried that my interpretation of her statement was far too literal - probably a result of the course I was taking at the local community college that was teaching me to be as literal as possible all of the time. I wanted to ask her "flaky enough for what?" but I knew in this heightened state that she would throw something at me- butter, flour, ice water, salt - in fact, if I had a bowl and a rolling pin handy in our bedroom I could possibly make a flaky crust that might soothe her, as flaky crust usually did.

"What is wrong with my pig?" were the first words I awoke to early on Wednesday morning. I blinked a few times as my eyes became used to the extreme brightness I was surprised to find in our room. She was situated on the floor of our room and had plugged in every light source in the house so she could really see what she was working on. To call the room "bright" would be understated and misleading as "incandescent" or "painful" were more accurate. How she was able to see without hurting her eyes became clear when I noticed that on her pillow was a walkie-talkie and she had spent the evening downstairs on the couch watching a marathon of coverage of rare Swedish musicals. This made the collection of lamps even more confusing until I remembered that she had won our game of Scrabble last night and we had agreed beforehand that the winner got to choose their prize. I was more than slightly unsettled when she laughed really really slowly and loudly after she had won. And the pig? How did that factor in? Was it a euphemism for me (she had called me animal names in the past, but almost always ones that were already extinct) or the name she had given her right shoulder which had been tight recently or perhaps she had bought an actual pig (I had learned not to put anything beyond her or to underestimate her in any way for fear of reprisals and sanctions).   

"You are a product of the universe" she said lovingly while hugging me goodbye on Thursday as I left for work. Over the past month I had been called many things - "a product of the East Borneo jungle", "a sacrificial lamb of the universe", "a product of a Venn diagram" and "a topographical map of the universe" being a small sampling. Today's comment was strikingly normal and easier to comprehend and analyze compared to the others. I greatly enjoyed my moment of happiness brought on by this before being cast like a pair of dice on a high-stakes craps table (I compared an overwhelmingly large amount of my adult life to games of chance - possibly as a result of all of the slideshows I watched in the evenings strapped to a chair while water was dripped on my forehead and loud, ear-splitting head-banging metal was played). Very soon after I thought that she was passing me a message through some sort of code probably due to her somewhat rational fear of eavesdropping postal workers (my beautiful and caring mom delivered the mail-  not even to us- and had once called my wife "cute" which sent her over the edge as she had been aiming for "gorgeous" and ever since she had a mistrust of all things mail-related). I had a full day at work, and much of it now would be dedicated to cracking the code and enacting the first steps of the plan or else she would probably re-key the house, again, only permitting me access after performing Evita on the front steps (easily her favourite musical though she thought some of Tim Rice's lyrics were patronizing.)

"I was riding on the train at night" she said in her best story-telling voice. This is how my Friday began. She had been sitting, cross-legged on the end of the bed watching me sleep all night (I had wondered why I thought I kept hearing train whistle noises while I slept). You think you know all about someone and then they unearth this nugget. It probably shouldn't seem like such a big deal, I mean she only rode on a train once and this doesn't sound like it should knock me for a loop. However, I spent the first five years of our relationship believing she was scared of trains. In fact she had me dismantle my train set that was given to me by my grandfather on his death bed (actually he used that bed for regular sleep as well as the occasional wrestling match) and I had to sell my conductor's hat. What made it extra odd is that she had me go to her "people who are afraid of trains" support group which involved hours of spousal sensitivity training and a week in a light deprivation chamber where all we could hear was horrible train accidents. Her morning confession threw me into aspiralling  depression for much of Friday - had she recovered from her fear which would be cause for much rejoice or had she been lying to me the whole time when she knew that I loved and adored all things train? What could her motivation be? As I sat there in bed unable to shake some horrible thoughts about our relationship, she sat there, watching me, eating toast. This moment became her inspiration for a series of expressionist paintings that, while very good, could have depicted me either fully dressed or with a few actual muscles and no covered with bread crumbs and smears of jam.

"When you put it that way, I am definitely not interested" she proclaimed as she stormed into the kitchen and then immediately turned around and stormed out after quickly grabbing the last orange. The first question that popped into my head was "does that mean our regular Saturday cribbage game with my cousin who smells odd is cancelled?" and my second thought is "should I know what she is referring to?" and my third thought was "do I smell something burning?" The answer to all three questions was "yes" but only the burning dish rag needed my immediate attention. As I doused the fire I wondered what she could be talking about. What did I put what way and what was wrong with that? I had learned through trial-and-error that semantics were extremely important to her (which was hard for me to get used to as my previous girlfriend spoke in a series of grunts and growls). One incorrect word, even when both of us knew exactly what I meant, resulted in hours and hours of Twister even when I begged to stop. Just like everything else, she is hyper-competitive when she plays Twister and it is not uncommon for me to need multiple ice-packs and Tensor bandages post-game. I tried to anticipate what she wanted to hear (and often what she wanted to see and taste as well, while I was at it) which led me to buying many sound effect recordings and having them on cue at all times in case she desired to hear a specific sound like a cheep, or a roar, a roll of thunder or the cry of a newborn. The police were once summoned by a concerned neighbour after a full evening of gunshots and explosions - they did say it was their first sound-effect disturbance they had ever fielded - so there is that. I was also very interested in making her interested in things I had to say, as that was infinitely more fun then when she was not interested as that usually led to me having to make large, aesthetically-pleasing flower arrangements in order to share a couch with her again in the evening. When I wasn't able to share the couch, I had to lie on the throw rug like our cats (like all cats, they are quite territorial, and I always got the worst spot - the urine spot).

"Pawn to king 4, checkmate" she stated confidently as we sat in the car as it was warning up early Sunday morning. We were on our way to her mother's house for brunch, an experience I jokingly referred to as "The Bludgeoning" or "The Wafflehouse" depending on the weather. Her chess reference caught me off-guard, though you'd think I'd be used to this by now. As we sat there shivering in the cold morning air, I decided that she was either finally making her move in our correspondence chess game we never finished years ago or possibly she had come up with a good ending to her book she had been writing. So much of her time the last few years was spent researching and writing a book that was intended as a how-to book about tapestries, but ended up being a best-selling cookbook. I also wondered if she was making fun of my new haircut which made me look strikingly like a pawn. The haircut had gone horribly wrong because my hairdresser decided to continue tickling me while cutting my hair and accidentally took off much more hair then originally planned, resulting in an oddly conical shape that worked perfectly for my Papal-inspired Halloween costume, only many months too early. When I had returned home yesterday to show off my new 'do, I incidentally opened a can of worms both literally and figuratively, which resulted in literal and figurative worms everywhere. Surprisingly, she just sat there at the kitchen table, drawing pictures of Ganhdi and Mother Teresa as Manga characters. Seeing her at the table reminded me of our blissful early days before the roast beef incident and the gravy dilemma. As I sat beside her in the car I wondered if next week could be any more or less normal then the one that was coming to a close.