Ask Mr. Smartypants

I never saw it coming, never saw the little signs of discontent, the rut we had fallen into.

I guess a part of me thought we'd be together forever.

But then, a few weeks ago, my weightlifting partner broke it off.

"Look, this just isn't going to work out," Sam said. "It's not you, it's me."

He gave all the standard excuses why the relationship had to end.

-- "I'm so focused on work right now that I can't be there for you. You deserve more."

-- "I feel like I'm holding you back. You're just so strong that I think you could accomplish more without me."

-- "We want different things. You want to concentrate on chest and back, but I'm ready to explore my biceps and triceps. I'm tired of feeling like a failure, of trying to live by your rules."

Then, I had to go through the seven stages of grief:

Acceptance: "I will wander the weight room alone, except for the old guys and the man-girl-person squatting 650 pounds in the corner.

Anger: "How could he leave me after all I've done for him? I never let the bench press bar smash down on his neck. Well ... hardly ever."

Denial: "He can't make it without me. Who else is fat and weak enough to make him look slim and strong? He'll come crawling back."

Depression: "I'll show him. I'll buy a birthday cake at Wal-Mart and eat it in the dark, with a gallon of chocolate milk made with half and half."

Fear: "I'm not smart enough to lift alone. I have no idea how much we do at each station, and I still think the traps, the glutes and the hammies are Austrian street gangs."

Guilt: "It's my fault, I drove him away by singing along with the fantastically inappropriate music that plays in the weight room, and the dance routine I choreographed to accompany Lionel Ritchie's 'Hello' couldn't have helped."

Shock: "I never thought it could happen to us."

In the beginning it was beautiful, every Monday and Thursday at 10:30 in the morning for 90 minutes of intensity. Together, we became more than the sum of our parts, getting stronger, working harder and building endurance. But then, it all began to slip away. The truth is, we had been drifting apart for months.

Messages left on cell phones, "Hey, sorry I can't make it today, I got tied up," replaced regular attendance. We were both guilty of it; we both took it for granted.

When he broke the news, I tried to hold on to something, saying, "What about just Mondays, or just Thursdays? What about every other week?"

But he said, "It's not going to work out," and looked away.

We agreed to stay friends, but even that is unlikely, because, like all gym friends, I have no idea what Sam's last name is. Beyond his max bench press, I know nothing about him. He may be a terrorist. He may be the United States Secretary of Agriculture. I'm simply not sure.

I know eventually I'll run into him, working out. I realize he may be spotting for someone else.

I just hope "Hello" isn't playing when it happens.

Are you ready to wake up in Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer's bed? It's probably a question you've never asked yourself (I have pondered it only rarely), but that opportunity is suddenly available at www.andrechristmas.com, where the lieutenant governor's personal home and his companionship are for rent.

Bauer, visions of the 2010 gubernatorial race twinkling in his eye, dreamed up an innovative way to raise money: His new Web site offers items for sale ranging from premium wines to pieces of art to, yes, a two-night stay in his Charleston home. The items, those that aren't his, have been contributed to his campaign.

Not available: air taxi service and flight instruction.

Available: racing school at which, the site promises, you'll "Buckle up and drive an actual Nextel Cup stock car for 8 heart pounding laps around Lowe's Motor Speedway."

That package is $1,000, and the school is run by Jeff Gordon. Surprisingly, Bauer isn't offering a $199 version along the lines of "Let Andre drive you from Charleston to Columbia in under an hour. Feel the excitement as officers pull you over and draw their guns."

The lieutenant governor has always been innovative. It was Bauer who, in 2000, suggested we sell corporate naming rights to South Carolina's parks and monuments. I always thought the idea had potential.

Rose Hill Plantation, a fount of secessionist history, could have become Yankee Candle Plantation. Kings Mountain State Park could be renamed Waste Management Kings Mountain Landfill State Park. In a phone conversation Wednesday, Bauer said he's thinking outside the box.

So Bauer got hammered this week in the press, ostensibly for his new strategy, but in reality, for his honesty.

People and corporations who give significant cash get access to politicians, whether the shared time be over coffee, on the phone or in the Lincoln Bedroom.

They then use that access, bought and paid for, to convince the candidate that their worldview is correct and that their path should be one of ease, their enemies smited.

In return, the politician uses the money to get elected and gets on with the smiting.

Other politicians rail against a culture that has people exchanging political contributions for tangible rewards then play the same game on the sly. Bauer simply said, "I'm telling people that if they contribute to my campaign, they'll actually get something in return, in addition to good government."

Bauer thinks every politician criticizing him will be copying him in six months. He said fundraising for his likely run at the Governor's Mansion will be difficult in this economic climate, and creativity is called for. He said he checked with the Ethics Commission, and it's all legal.

So yeah, it's a little weird that you can fork over up $3,500 to spend the day at a Nextel Cup race with our lieutenant governor, bending his ear on whatever issue suits your fancy, but let's tell the truth and shame the pundits: When did anyone ever attend a $1,000-a-plate political dinner for the squirty chicken?

I've been trying to decide how I'm going to use my extra second.

Scientists have announced that the earth's rotation is slowing down (I noticed time was grinding to a halt during the presidential election), and in order to keep the clocks in tune with the planet, we'll need to add a second to 2008.

It will be added at 6:59:59 p.m. on New Year's Eve, as if that night isn't long enough.

Clocks and calendars are funny things, our attempts to organize time into equal and predictable segments, so that our wives can tell us when we're late planting gardens, putting up the storm windows, smoking the antelope and laying in the firewood.

Much of the story of scientific advance is the story of evolving calendars and clocks.

The Earth, sun and moon don't dance to our tune, so adjustments are always needed, no matter how precise the measurements become.

Leap year, an extra day in February every four years, is an adjustment. The fact that years that end in 00, like 1700, 1800 and 1900, are NOT leap years, is a more precise one. The fact that every 400 years, years that end in 00 (1600, 2000, 2400) ARE leap years, is a truly tiny adjustment.

But back in the day, huge adjustments were needed.

During the early days of the Roman Empire, the week was eight days long and there was often an extra leap month, Mercedonius, lasting 27 days.

Mercedonius usually came in alternate years (without it the year lasted only 354 days), but only if the pontifex maximus (high priest of the ancient Roman religion) said so.

That's old-school religious power, is what that is. Imagine if Benedict XVI said, "Fine, you wanna sin, now we're having February twice, which means even more pro basketball." Picture the horror.

But starting in 46 B.C., things operated on the Julian calendar, which was fairly accurate. It was only off 18 hours per century. That doesn't seem like much, but by 1582, the calendar had fallen behind the seasons by 10 days.

So that year, the Gregorian Calendar was adopted, with its "years that end in 00" rules, and in order to get things back in sync, the calendar went directly from Thursday, Oct. 4, to Friday, Oct. 15, just once.

It had to be done. Everyone was planting their crops 10 days late, and wives had no idea when to yell at their husbands.

Imagine turning on CNN to find that, rather than getting an extra second, we were skipping 10 days. Imagine the chaos that would ensue.

Me: "Quinn won't be having her birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese this year, and I won't have to spend endless minutes figuring out what to get you for our anniversary. They've canceled Oct. 5-Oct. 14."

Angela: "Quinn was born in July, and we were married in November."

Me: "Fascinating. I did not know that."

But with our modern calendar, we won't be getting any extra months or losing any two-week stretches. All we can look forward to is the occasional bonus tick.

At least musing on all this did help me decide how to use that second on New Year's Eve.

It's a night for romance, if you know what I mean.

The Sunday before Thanksgiving, after a fevered weekend of housecleaning, I realized my family was hunched on the edge of disaster. We live on the broad, sloping plateau of disaster, but we try to avoid venturing right out on the tip.

I went to the garage to hurl yet another bag of refuse into the trash cart, but it would not hurl. It would only perch.

Three days of heavy cleaning in preparation for the arrival of my relatives (or, as we call it, "Fillertasia") had filled it to the brim.

Garbage day, Friday, sat five days in the future. And in between me and deliverance stood the most refuse-intensive cooking week of the year.

I did not panic, a good thing because in the coming days I would also have to deal with:

An enraged e-mail dispute between my mother, who wanted "three hugs and a kiss" from my sister over the holiday, and said sister, who responded with: "Tell her if she touches me, I'll cut her. Tell her I'll cut her bad."

Mom showing up at my house 24 hours late, because ... she's Mom.

A peanut oil fiasco that included four stores, dozens of 32-ounce bottles, a shortage, a surplus, a bubbling overflow and a driveway oil slick that will take longer to clean up than Alaska after the Exxon Valdez but, in all fairness, harmed fewer blue-footed boobies.

A 34-pound pile of leftovers that I was incapable of throwing away (emotionally, I am a child of the Great Depression) and that no one, after the first day, was willing to help me eat.

But if you know me, you know that oil disasters, the threat of gangland violence between my mother and sister and the need to eat a pile of food the size of a 5-year-old child are all par for the course. The trash problem, though, hounded me.

Even in the best weeks, we fill the cart pretty much to the brim, leaving me wondering just how we create 100 pounds of garbage in seven days. I find it even more confusing in light of the fact that when Angela and Quinn go away, my trash will fit in a hat.

In one week spent alone, my total refuse production is seven pieces of meat-wrapping paper from the Fresh Market, a tiny pile of vegetable peelings and seven plastic tooth flossers, stuffed in two empty Breyers containers.

But Angela just throws things away, whether it be spoiled food, ripped clothes or daytimers from 2001. She thinks we're the Rockefellers.

As the week went on, the trash, and the desperation, mounted. But late Thursday night, after the meals had all been eaten, my salvation appeared by the roadside, via the half-empty roll carts of folks who apparently are smart enough not to have the whole family over for holiday meals.

I crept down the street, dropping bags here and there, till my surplus was exhausted.

Of trash, that is. I'm still working on the surplus food, but I'm almost done. A couple more days of asparagus casserole for breakfast, gravy for lunch and cranberry sauce for dinner should do it.

I need to finish it up before someone (I'm not naming any names) throws it all away,

There are no more Hittites.

This utter lack of Hittites sprang to mind last week when Bob Jones University apologized for a policy that, up until 2000, forbid inter racial dating.

I don't think the Hittites went quietly. I think they were full of Hittite cultural love. "The Pride of Canaan," they probably called themselves, and did they frown on the idea of their comely daughters dancing the mambo with the lazy, flat-faced Moabites down at the malt shop? They most definitely did.

"If I ever saw you dancing with a Moabite, I don't know who I'd kill first, you or myself," fathers likely told their daughters. "I didn't spend three years on the border fighting the Ammonites to come home and see you neck with some freakin' Moabie."

To be fair, Hittite culture might have been worth preserving; it might have had a lot going for it: Broiled lamb with lemon, the multiple wives, the flowing robes and hip deities.

But regardless of how classy Hittite culture was, it isn't any more.

There are no Hittites now, and no Moabites. Even the memory of the differences between them has faded. Tribes and cultures merge, blend, move on, die out and, in all but name, are forgotten.

In America, there will come a day when there are no black people. I have no idea whether that day will be 200 years from now or 2,000, or 10,000, but it will come. Likewise, there will come a day when there are no white people in this country.

Trends suggest there will be a lot of brown, mildly Asian people.

And just as there is no more nation of Canaan (that's where the Hittites and the Moabites hung their hats), there will someday be no United States of America, though I hope its ideals persevere and, dare I say, are even improved upon.

I know there will come a day when there will no longer be an ethnic group, with a shared tribal heritage, known as the Jews. For thousands of years, the Jews have been a distinct tribe, but now, 50 percent of all Jews marry people who do not share their ethnic background (me included).

There is one fact on which the Bible and the scientific community agree entirely: All humanity springs from one group of common ancestors living in one place.

Call it Eden and call them Adam and Eve or call it Central Eastern Africa and call them Homo Sapiens: We share common ancestry 100 percent. The differences between our little "tribes" are not mountains dividing us from "the others," they are molehills, separating us from our brothers.

The thing about the fact that there are no more Hittites is this: The open, loving and accepting Hittites who lived back in the day, were they to find out their descendants had blended with the descendents of 100 other tribes, likely wouldn't mind.

It would only be the prideful Hittites, the hateful Hittites, the xenophobic Hittites who would be enraged at their loss of cultural purity.

Which Hittite will we be?