Old Exes Posting #1

So, this guy I dated for two months broke up with me, citing the fact that I wasn't going to church with him. Okay. This is the same guy who also designs weapons of mass destruction (WMD). I vividly remember our first conversation initiating me into the world of making WMD for the US government.

We were in a dimly lit restaurant, just getting to know eachother over glasses of wine in an atmosphere of sheer romantic ambience. I started off asking, "So, tell me about what you do. You're an engineer, right? What do you design?" thinking he probably created harmless things like chairs and lamp bases and rolodexes. Engineers seemed to design benign, yet varied, items. For example, I had one friend who made tractors for Caterpillar and another designing maxi pads for Kotex. He surely fell somewhere in the line between agricultural machinery and feminine products.

He swallowed a sip of wine and looked at me. "I work for Defenders ---. I design guns and the ammunition that they shoot."

I blinked.

He continued, "Well, see they had me working on ammunition for a while, but now they switched me to a group that's designing the lever that lifts the gun up in the tank. So they can shoot it." Really? "Before, when I was designing" (here, he lowered his voice conspiratorially so no one else in the restaurant could hear), "bombs, I was working on much more high-tech stuff. Ammo and gun stuff is not that complex, you know?"

I listened with a slightly morbid fascination, not unlike that one would have toward a bad car accident, because this was so impossible. I work in human rights, don't own a gun much less know how to shoot one, and even despise hunting (although I really don't have the moral high ground on that last one, since I eat meat and have a particular weakness for corn dogs). Here I was sitting across from a guy who probably created the very kinds of situations that other people have to fix, no doubt shot little rotund forest creatures for fun, and was probably living for the day when we could all legally carry our own WMD as he saw envisioned by the Constitution's right to bear arms.

He was pretty excited about his work, too. In fact, because I couldn't understand all the jargon about gun pieces, volleys, bores (is this even right?), he brought home a 90-page manual from work on how to design a tank gun. The manual was marked bright red: "HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL." He must have really liked me.

Nevertheless, after about 2 months, Gun-maker broke up with me. He cited my lack of enthusiasm for church (could this relate to that Easter Sunday when I slept in while he went to church?)

He said, "I really wanted someone who would go to church with me just one day a week." Why? So you could design bombs five days a week with a clean conscience? Although, I must admit that I'm not free from hypocriticism here, since I dated him for 2 months. After all, I could have disengaged myself from him and his choice of career, but I stayed with him for a while. Oh well. Next time, I guess I'll just stick to the engineers from Kotex.