In Greek mythology, there is the story of Alexander the Great who was faced with the challenge of untying the Gordian Knot, a fiendish knot of such intricacy that the very attempt to untie it usually caused people to go insane, or at least give up and pop a beer with their buddies instead. It's said that Alexander the Great approached the problem from a different perspective, taking his sword and slicing through the beastly tangle. Then he went on to conquer Asia.

So if your girlfriend asks you if she looks fat, the trick is not to get caught up in trying to extricate a safe answer from the dangerously knotted bundle that is her question. One must slice through it with precision and swiftness that befits a conqueror of your stature.

This I know. It's no mystery or secret code. There have been enough jokes involving this sequence of events in a relationship that steering clear of entanglements is not particularly difficult. The same is not true, however of the following question: "Do you think I should shave my head?"

This was posed to me by my girlfriend after we had concluded a short-but-endorphin
-producing make out session. Endorphins are a girl's best friend when used in the service of extracting potentially damaging information from a male cohort whose mind (and other various bodily members) is not remotely prepared to answer questions of a sufficiently sensitive nature. To answer hastily is to impale oneself on the horn of a dilemma that rears its head every time a question that matches the pattern is asked.

"Do you think I should shave my head?" she asked me. I stuttered gracelessly, my mind (and other various bodily members) off doing things usually only depicted on uncensored pay-per-view television channels, the question landing softly in my mushy sponge of an eardrum, which filtered further into the morass of insufficient gray matter, the one gift my parents swear they had nothing to do with. They're both pretty smart in their way, so I'm inclined to believe it, especially given my reply.

"That'd be a big mistake, honey. You'd look like a cancer patient."

Now about my girlfriend. She comes from a long and noble line of Scotch-Irish ancestry, whose fighting spirit and tolerance for haggis and bagpipes was inversely proportional to the amount of sunny weather they saw in a given year. Though valiant, strong, and fiercely independent, they passed down a skin disposition resembling the old joke about the polar bear in a snow storm. "Skin like porcelain," I think is the poetic description, and indeed, Emily is very proud and particular about her skin. It's like a valued artifact, a Yves Klein painted in the color Pale, a marble statue's clothing, a desaturated black and white photograph in which the blacks are gray and the whites are wintry in their suffusion. But if one has to boil things down to base terms, she is pale when paired with sunlight. I thought my response an apt description of her potential appearance should she undertake a de-furring.

Take note, gentlemen: When referring to her potential appearance, it is automatically assumed that your thoughts on the matter apply to her present appearance as well. This means, for questions concerning weight, mental condition, bust size size, her period, or clothes, and sometimes a combination of the aforementioned, at any given time, a man with a mate is subject to a battery of Gordian Knots which he absolutely must never unravel, untangle, or unwind, to his peril. He must slice through aggressively, evading the central purpose of the knot, bringing it to an end by shaving through the fibers of innuendo, subtlety, and just plain womanly deviousness that coats each question of similar stripe.

My un-Alexandrian response to my girlfriend's question, while theoretically correct (you would look like a cancer patient, honey), gave her a week or more of fodder with which to playfully abuse me. The lesson was learned, however. I quickly recovered, going on the attack and telling her if she shaved her head, I'd shave mine. I always wondered whether Alexander won Asia Minor with a short mane, as was customary for all young men of Greece. It would have been fitting.