It’s almost as if the cosmos and I are two women working in adjacent cubicles who start to have their periods at the same time–just as the anxiety about my rapidly-failing and once-fluent German language abilities mounts, so too does the volume of masterfully bad German that’s come my way in the last week.

First of course there was the entire flimsy-plot-engendering snafu perpetrated by Scotty in the Oscar-nominated serial-killer indigenous whale-rider civil-war epic Columbus tearjerker my boyfriend is in. And then I got an email from my friend Jason, who is bilingual (but one of those languages is not German), which roughly translates as: “I to go to the one party for the dog coming from Amanda every night.” Then today I got one from my brother (subject line, “I speak German!”) that said, “Bek, how is my German man doing? The new Microsoft Office 2003 has a large translator.”

This can’t be coincidence. It has to be a sign–the universe, sending me a poorly-translated email of its own asking if I am packing any tampons, because we are so so so in sync!!!