background triggers?

Is there any way to write a statement trigger that runs in the
background? In my testing, when I have an After Insert For Each
Statement trigger, the function call does not end until the trigger is
finished processing.

What I would like to do, and please let me know if there is a better way
to do this, is to have an after event statement trigger run in a
separate process so the function call ends when it ends and the
statement trigger gets executed on its own time.

The use that I have for this at the moment, and I can think of many
other uses, is that I want to populate a statistics table each time that
a table is updated. But the code to populate the table takes 10 seconds
to run. I don't want the user to have to wait 10 seconds to add a record.