It really DOES hold the world together!

What you need to do on the second date, ladies, is put your life in the gentleman’s hands, because all the awkwardness is so much easier to bear when trees and cows and people are rushing up at several hundred miles an hour.

Let’s have a big blonde welcome for the lovely and talented Josh The Pilot, also known as Person Who Put Me Into a Very Small Aircraft and Totally Did Not Let Me Die.

Also, men, an excellent second-date strategy? Kick things off by asking your date how much she weighs. Josh did not do this outright, possibly because he wanted a third date, possibly because he did not want his face bashed in, but it is my understanding that he had to do some guesstimation to figure our center of gravity. This involved, apparently, performing all sorts of horrible scary calculations involving numbers, some of which were, I’m afraid, decimals.

“You’ve heard of ‘the envelope'?” an airport employee asked, pointing at the computer. “That’s the envelope.”

The envelope, as it happens, is highly disappointing. Turns out it's a graph, with lines, and quadrants, and further math, and is not very exciting at all. I was hoping for a large, Tic-Tac-Dough-style dragon, or a wall of flames, or, at the very least, an actual envelope.

Given the size of the plane, though, it’s probably safe to say that I accounted for at least a third of the total weight. I fly on a regular basis, but on large commercial jets featuring multiple engines and massive cargo holds and enormous, odorous passengers crammed into the seat next door. This plane… this plane had clearly come out of a box from K-Bee, accessories sold separately.

I followed Josh around the Micro-Machine as he prepared it for flight. (It was a Cessna 172RG, I later discovered when I reported in to my Air Force father, and he said “Ooooohhh.” It was not a good “Ooooohhh.” “What?” I said. “Let’s just say,” he told me, “that when that thing was probably built, a Democrat was in the White House, and I ain’t talking about Clinton.”)

I watched as Josh drained some fuel out of the tank (“You’re going to put that back, right?”) “What color do you see in there?” he said, holding a vial of it up to the light.

“Blue.”

“Guess what that means.”

“The plane is pregnant?”

I trotted after him to the other side. “What’s that?” I said, pointing at an irregular silver section.

“Duct tape.”

“What?”

“It’s not like it’s an important part of the plane,” he said.

“The WING isn’t an important part of the plane?”

I think the Home Depot section of the aircraft was probably closer to the fuselage, but in my world? Every part of the plane is important. Every part. The brakes are important. The airspeed indicator is important. The little bags of peanuts are important, and I want them all certifiably duct-tape free.

This is the very first time I’ve been able to say this regarding a second date, but: He opened the door of the airplane for me. And you know what? Planes have keys. The man needed a key to start the airplane. I sincerely hope this is also not the case on fighter jets (“SCRAMBLE! SCRAMBLE!!” “Oh $&#%, I left the keys in my other oxygen mask.”)

Our plane, however, perhaps because it was, I don’t know, older than God, did not start, which was temporarily excellent because it provided me the opportunity to bust out the Princess Leia impression (“Would it help if I got out and pushed?”) but it ceased to be so once I saw Josh bang on the console to get the thing going.

(I reported this incident to Nick the NASA Poobah, and there was a pause on the other end of the line, which I presumed was a small moment of silence in honor of Josh’s ego. “A pilot,” Nick said, “would rather stand in front of a group of strangers in his underwear rather than have something go wrong on an airplane in front of a woman.”)

Josh told me to latch the window, and I did, and then applauded myself for having helped fly the plane. Later, I retracted the landing gear, which, according to NASA regulations, fully qualifies me to command the next space shuttle mission.

I will say this: I can Velcro up a sandal, and occasionally start a dishwasher, and every now and then flush a toilet without creating too much destruction, but I will never, ever, successfully guide any object heavier than fuzz into the air and over the ocean and back down again in one piece. Josh did this, without effort, and with a medium-sized passenger constantly pressing her headset mike against her face yelling “Red Five, coming in.”

We landed and took off a couple times at an isolated airstrip, and one of the landings was a little bumpy, about which I said absolutely nothing, because let’s face it, I am frequently unable to find the state of Florida, let alone a barely-lit strip of land in East Pieceofcrap.

“Remember that second landing?” Josh said as we drove away from the airport.

“Uh-huh,” I said, watching the ground go by at an altitude of three and a half feet.

“Yeah, I did it blind.”

“You what?”

“The landing lights,” he said. “They short-circuited, and I had to land it blind.”

“Well I,” I said, “can recite the entire preamble to The Canterbury Tales in the original medieval English.” Which is slightly less impressive, but the last time I checked, nobody really cared how much Chaucer weighed.