> She is trying to take advantage of you.

New comment on your post "Ze Robots are comink"
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> She is trying to take advantage of you.

I feel sorry for you, Jim. As they say in scientific circles, "You aren't even wrong." It dawns on me that you, after decades of being married and after twenty years of making heroic, love-motivated sacrifices for your invalid wife, have never been tortured by pining for a love denied you.

Love was always really easy for you, wasn't it, Jim? In our student days, you used to brag to me about how you could make a visit back to Germany and there was always one certain woman who was ready, willing and able to resume an intermittent love-affair with you, no questions asked and no pining involved. Does your language even have a German word for "pining" in the romantic sense? Would the male German mind puzzle forever over the idea of "tarring" or "turpentining" for "La Femme Fatale de Zwiebeldorf"? You dumb Kraut, why must I always explain everything to you?

Alright, here is your free lesson in "Romance 101". [Oh gee, why do I even bother?] But because you took me on that tour of Munich, you crypto-Nazi, showing me all the hidden shrines and sanctuaries of the NSDAP, I will explain to you the whys and wherefores of how the most desirable and love-worthy women think -- or at least "emote" and "rationalize".

There was once a garden where a woman offered an apple to a man. Can you capiche the scenario, Jim? I'm afraid it doesn't get any more primitive or primordial than the absolute Genesis of male-female relations. Now please keep in mind the specific case of Odna Mona, the ageless beauty whose charms and wiles ensnare American males on a coast-to-coast basis, and we're not talking radio-shows either, Jim, although Mona listens religiously to such a show and envies Yours Truly for being good buddies with that frequent star of the airways, Monsieur le ne plus Ufologique Peter Barnes Davenport. Love is like getting a job promotion, Jim. It's not _what_ you know, it's _whom_ you know. Odna Mona loves to ask me the most abstruse questions about my erstwhile boon companion Peter Davenport, who once visited me at my Vaierre [Wallingford Revier] apartment in Wallingford, where you also have been. That visit is your shared circumstance with Peter Davenport, and you may some day impress a young French or Swedish beauty by boasting that although you have never met Peter "Coast-to-Coast" Davenport, you were one in an apartment which Peter Davenport also once visited. She will throw her arms around you and beg you to tell her more about Peter. (I can provide you with lots of details, if needed :-)

Odna Mona knows that I am her source for titillating tidbits about Davenport the Man and Davenport the Stargazer. I tell her just enough spicy factoids to keep her intrigued.

But let's get back to your stupid, cretin, bourgeois, Joe Sixpack, unbelievably naive and detestably ignorant idea that the high-earning, medical professional Odna Mona R.N. L.P.N. Q.E.D. would try to take financial advantage of her pining, love-struck woe-is-me tortured-soul Arthur by letting him pay his fair share of $700-per-month to live in the same house with her in between her lucrative, high-income jobs as a nurse. These nurses make a fortune in salary, Jim, and a three-month gap is nothing to them. The purpose of charging the swooning wooer $700 a month is to make him _suffer_ not financially but emotionally, to make him _pay_ for being in love with the unattainable woman, for daring to assume that she would find him worthy of a second glance or a third thought. But you, Jim Hagestolz, have always had easy access to your own choice of very ordinary women, not the rare beauties like Odna Mona. Did I object when you seduced my cousin in San Francisco? No, because you kept it secret from me and Aardvark while we were in Mexico. Did Aardvark and I refuse to go with you to the mobster-run Firelight strip joint in Seattle? No, because we were curious about what was old hat and voyeuristic commonplace for a Rube like you. At that time, Aardvark was in love with Nurse Den-Mother, and you got to see true love up close when you went with Vark and me and Den Mother to water-ski at Lake Goodwin. But did you learn anything about pining, excruciating love? Apparently not, because you went blithely traipsing around America as a non-pining field researcher for the Dictionary of American Regional English (D.A.R.E.) and I dare say that youremain totally ignorant of the awesome love immortalized in such Country Western songs as "If the Phone Don't Ring, You'll Know it's Me" and "All My Exes Live in Texas." Poor Jim Kraut, spent years in America at two universities and did not learn the slightest thing about Love American-Style.

On the telephone, Odna Mona asks me about you, Jim. She wants to know if I told you about the time when I first caught sight of her as the young beauty whose gleaming locks were a-curlin' and a-streamin' down her winsome backside in the store window that I was trying to sneak past lest our quondam co-worker Jessica S. importune me to give Jessica a short break. Then Jessica could not believe it when Mona and I began asking each other ever more personal questions until Jessica's mouth was gaping in sheer disbelief Then six years later Jessica came running out of Murphy's Pub to tell me that Mona was back in Seattle. But where is Jessica now when I need her more than ever?

In your Teutonic rationality, Jim, and in your romantic Fahrvergnügen you may not believe the following roughly accurate description of why Odna Mona tortures me into writing her so many despairing love-letters in a style and heart-ache such as you have never been privy to. Just humor me, please.

Nurses, and American women in general, love to complain about the men in their lives, and about the men _not_ in their lives. Some American women, who do not yet have a fiance or even a boyfriend, make elaborate plans for a wedding that has not yet occurred to any man they know. These same nurses, when they work together with someone like "La Femme Fatale de Zwiebeldorf" personified in  Odna Mona, take extreme delight in hearing how Mona tortures the poor Arthur who loves her through five-year gaps and twelve-year gaps and whose love for her grows even stronger the more he is deprived of her. One nurse will spend hours on the phone with Odna Mona scooping up the latest quasi-Bachelorette details and passing them on toMona's former co-workers who are all starved for True Love stories and real-time suggestions of what the femme-fatale nurse ought to do to Arthur to torture him even more and see how he reacts. Then they try the same things on their boyfriends. When Nurse Mona forwards the love-struck e-mails to her erstwhile co-workers, they print out the love stories and hang them up like X-rays in their nursing break-room. It becomes a real-life drama for all the nurses in the whole hospital. The nurses start comparing notes about guys who try to date them. One nurse will say, "He wants to date me, but he refuses to drive into the city. What should I do?" The nurses will take turns explaining the love-struck e-mails to one another. If a foreign phrase in German or French or Russian pops up, there will always be one smart nurse who knows the foreign language and will briefly take on a starring role by explaining the foreign expression to all the other nurses. Oftentimes the whole breakroom will be full of tearful nurses bawling their hearts out, until the nursing supervisor comes in and says, "What's the matter with you girls? What has got you so upset? Get back to work, all of you!" But one little tiny nurse from Kazakhstan, the only one who understands Russian, will choke off her tears and explain to all the American nurses the whole story of what the Russian word "суженое" means in Russian-language love stories, until even the nursing supervisor bawls her heart out and the whole hospital closes down while the entire nursing staff wails and sobs and hugs each other.