Bad Habits

by Dave Barry

  So I have rejected jogging as a way to get in shape. In fact, I was about to give up altogether when I discovered body-building magazines. Body-building magazines are published for people, mostly male, whose idea of being in shape is to have muscles the size of lawn tractors. You’ve probably seen these magazines: they’re full of pictures of people who have smeared Vaseline all over their bodies and are wearing bathing suits no larger than a child’s watchband; they are trying to smile in a relaxed manner but end up with more of an intense grin, because they have enormous muscles lunging out from all over their bodies, and Lord only knows how many bizarre chemical substances coursing through their veins.

  These people obviously do not jog—I doubt they ever leave their gymnasiums, for fear their muscles will lunge out and kill innocent bystanders—but they are obviously in terrific shape. At least they look as if they’re in terrific shape, which is the important thing. If Jimmy Carter had spent his time body-building instead of jogging, he would be president today. His aides would have carried him into the presidential debates and propped him up against his lectern, and when it was time for him to make his opening statement, he would have just stood there, Vaseline shimmering on his muscles, grinning intensely at the audience. Who would have dared to vote against him?

  So I’ve been reading body-building magazines, hoping to pick up some tips on getting in shape. The idea seems to be to lift a lot of heavy objects until you get dense. Density is much sought-after in the body-building world. For example, Muscle Digest magazine, in its October issue, refers to one promising body builder as “one of the most dense body-builders in senior level competition.” Evidently this is considered high praise.

  So I plan to lift heavy objects, starting with my typewriter and working up to a 1962 Volkswagen, until I get fairly dense, after which I intend to smear Vaseline on my body and maybe run for president.

  A Cold Cure? Who Nose?

  I say we give the medical community two more weeks to cure the common cold, and, if it doesn’t, we turn the problem over to a more competent outfit, like the Sony Corporation. Sometimes I wonder what the medical community is thinking. We give it buddles of money to buy office furniture and white coats and other medical devices, and all it seems to want to do is invent obscure new operations nobody you know or I know ever needs:

  CHICAGO—A team of surgeons at the Warpfinger Medical Institute here has successfully implanted a tiny electronic device into the right tonsil of a fifteen-year-old boy. “We don’t really know why we did it,” said a spokesman. “We just had this tiny electronic device and this fifteen-year-old boy, so we figured, whY not? Next week we’re going to install the battery.

  Meanwhile, millions of people are out here getting common colds and generally making the world a tackier place to live in. You have two kinds of cold victims: your nose blowers and your snorters. For overall ability to make you want to walk out of restaurants, I’d have to give the edge to the nose blowers. And they are everywhere. Americans think nothing of public nose-blowing. They encourage it in their young. My fourth-grade teacher once spent two hours instructing us on nose-blowing. She never married.

  As far as I can tell, the only groups trying to do anything useful about the common cold are the cold-remedy companies that advertise on TV:

  (The scene opens in a pleasant suburban home. The husband walks in through the front door and speaks to his wife, who is wearing a bathrobe and lying on the floor.)

  HUSBAND: Are you ready to go visit my father at the Home for Sickly Old People?

  WIFE: I don’t think I can, dear. It’s this darn cold. I have a fever of 112

  degrees and I can no longer move anything on the left side of my body.

  HUSBAND: Here, try some Phlegm-B-Gone.

  WIFE: Phlegm-B-Gone?

  HUSBAND: Phlegm-B-Gone.

  (The scene shifts to an impressive office with a big desk. On a shelf behind the desk is a huge collection of books. It is actually the complete Hardy Boys series, but the camera doesn’t get close enough for you to realize this. A medical-looking actor, wearing a white coat, is standing in front of the desk, holding a clipboard.)

  MEDICAL-LOOKING ACTOR: Medical tests show that Phlegm-B-Gone, a collection of medical ingredients, is extremely medical when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care. Get back on your feet with Phlegm-B-Gone.

  (The scene shifts to the Home for Sickly Old People.)

  WIFE: Gosh, that Phlegm-B-Gone, with a collection of medical ingredients, is great! I’m back on my feet again with only a slight limp!

  HUSBAND: I’m beginning to feel a little feverish. How about you, Dad? ... Dad? ... Dad?

  Some people think the way to avoid colds is to eat a lot of vitamin C, something on the order of nine billion pentagrams a day. My wife believes in this approach. She’s always choking down vitamin C pills, which are the size of toaster-ovens. She gets colds anyway. My approach is to drink large quantities of beer. It seems to work. Since I started drinking large quantities of beer, I have not had one cold that I remember clearly.

  Male Delivery Room

  NOTE: If you are a little kid, and your parents have not yet told you about sex and where babies come from, do NOT read this column, because it contains a lot of stuff you would kill to find out.

  Things go in and out of fashion. Take water. For years, water was unfashionable, something to wash bird droppings off the car with. Today, water is fashionable, something to be advertised on national television by great men such as Orson Wells. (I use “great” not in the sense of “superior” but in the sense of “Considerably larger than Zanesville, Ohio.”) So today you’ll see people paying $2.50 and more for fancy-looking six-packs of water. Five years ago, these people would have been considered stupid. Today, they are considered fashionable. Stupid, but fashionable.

  Another example is babies. They were out of fashion during the seventies. Young couples were too busy. They’d say: “Should we have a baby? Should we embark on this great human adventure, which brings with it great responsibility, but also great joy and fulfillment? Nah, let’s play tennis.”

  But babies are back in fashion. In the past year or two, many a couple has decided to sacrifice material things for the chance to create a new life, a life capable of love and hate, a life capable of dreams and desires, a life capable of excreting things in large volumes from three or four orifices at the same time.

  But before you decide to have a baby, let me warn you, particularly you males: They have changed the rules.

  When your parents had you, the responsibilities of childbirth were clearly defined:

  THE WOMAN went to the doctor regularly, read a lot about pregnancy, made sure she ate the right foods, kept track of the baby’s growth inside her, bought baby clothes and furniture, told the doctor when contractions began, timed them, made sure she got to the hospital on time, went to the delivery room, went through labor, and had the baby.

  THE MAN smoked Cigarettes.

  This system is obviously fair, and it worked well for years. But somewhere along the line, some sinister granola-oriented group got to the medical community and the women’s magazines and convinced them that the man should become more involved. That’s right, men: they want you right there in the delivery room when it happens. Not only that, they want you to go to classes at which people openly discuss pregnancy.

  I found all this out the hard way.

  Let me assure you that I want to play a responsible role in my wife’S pregnancy. I am willing to pace for hours in the waiting room with the other fathers-to-be and old copies of National Geographic. I am willing to go to classes on how to pace in the waiting room. But at our classes we don’t talk about pacing: we talk about what goes on inside a pregnant person’s body. I don’t want to know what goes on inside a pregnant person’s body. I don’t want to know what goes on inside my own body. I think if the Good Lord had wanted us to know what goes on inside our bodies, He would have
given us little windows.

  Another thing we do at our classes is practice breathing. That’s right: breathing. The idea is the man helps the woman breathe steadily and imagine she’s on a beach; this takes her mind off her labor and helps her relax. They haven’t told us men how we’re supposed to relax. I can see it now: my wife will be breathing steadily, imagining she’s on a beach; I will be breathing shallowly, imagining I am lying on the delivery-room floor, because I am lying on the delivery-room floor.

  I could go on: I could tell you about how the women in the class talk about really personal things in hearty, cheerful tones while we males stare intently at various ceiling tiles. But you’ll find out anyway, if you haven’t already.

  At our last class, the leader said we’re going to see a film soon. I just know my wife will have to drive us home afterward.

  Tale Of The Tapeworm

  The human body is an amazing machine. Mine is, anyway. For example, I regularly feed my body truly absurd foods, such as Cheez Doodles, and somehow it turns them into useful bodily parts, such as glands. At least I assume it turns them into useful bodily parts; otherwise, there must be a huge wad of Cheez Doodles hidden away in my body somewhere, and eventually it will have to be removed in a major and fairly disgusting operation.

  I learned about the human body in high school biology class, which covered everything except sex. Sex was covered in health class, which mainly involved how many different kinds of venereal disease there are (fourteen million); how high school students get venereal disease (merely by holding hands firmly); and whether it is a good idea for high school students to get venereal disease (no). These days, of course, high school students learn about the more positive aspects of sex, which is why so many of them have vacant smiles.

  In biology, we learned about all the different systems of the body, mainly so we could find out how many things could go wrong with them. My biology teacher would describe, in loving detail, the many diseases we could get, and we students would imagine we were getting them. I went home with a new disease every night.

  I was particularly susceptible to parasitic worms. The teacher was always telling us about these little worms that were trying to get into our bodies, often disguised as pieces of pork, so they could be parasites. We spent several classes on tapeworms, which get into your intestines. When I was writing this column, I decided to brush up on tapeworms (we should all brush up on tapeworms from time to time), so I looked them up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which says:

  “Tapeworms ... occur worldwide and range in size from about one millimeter (0.04 inch) to more than 15 meters (50 feet) ...”

  Think of that. Assuming you are a person of average height, at this very moment you could contain a worm nearly ten times as long as you are. If you suspect that you do contain a fifty-foot tapeworm, I advise you to feed it raw pork or whatever else it wants. Do not try to get it out, or anger it in any way; we have enough trouble in the world without huge, angry parasitic worms thrashing about.

  If anything besides tapeworms goes wrong with your body, you should get a large quantity of money and go to a doctor. Everybody is always picking on doctors just because they charge high fees and rarely cure anything, but this is unfair. I mean, look at it from the doctors’ point of view: they are healthy, intelligent people who spend years in medical schools, dealing with lots of other healthy, intelligent people; then they have to go out and deal with members of the public, most of whom are sick and have no medical training. As far as doctors are concerned, the worst part about practicing medicine is having to deal with sick, untrained people all the time. Some doctors solve this problem by becoming surgeons, who wear masks and deal only with patients who are unconscious and strapped down. Others become specialists, who issue opinions from motor yachts and never see patients at all.

  But most doctors are stuck in offices, and eventually they have to see actual conscious patients. What is worse, these patients generally insist on trying to explain their medical problems. Doctors hate this. I mean, they didn’t spend all those hours learning such things as where the pyloric valve is located just so they could listen to some idiot patient talk about medicine. So most doctors follow this rule: The patient is always wrong. This is why most doctor-patient conversations go like this:

  PATIENT: I broke my leg.

  DOCTOR: What makes you say that?

  PATIENT: A tree fell on me, and my leg went “snap.” Look, a jagged piece of bone is sticking out of my thigh.

  DOCTOR: The symptom you describe could well be caused by a dysfunction of the endocrinological system.

  PATIENT: But my leg ...

  DOCTOR: I’m going to schedule you for a series of tests at the Mayo Clinic next month, and in the meanwhile, I’ll consult with several specialists by marine radio. I suggest you avoid fatty foods.

  So if you know what’s wrong with you, your best bet is to tell your doctor you think something else is wrong with you. That way you stand some chance of actually getting treated.

  Injurious To Your Wealth

  I understand “M*A*S*H” is going off the air, which means I will have to get a new doctor. For the past few years, I have been telling my life-insurance agent that my doctor is Alan Alda. My agent needs to know who my doctor is so he can increase my life-insurance coverage, which he does roughly every couple of months. He’ll call me up and say, “Dave, I’ve been reviewing your files, and I really think we need to increase your coverage, now that you have a child.” And I’ll say, “But, Jeff, we had the child two years ago, and we have used that excuse to increase my coverage four times since then.” And he’ll say, “Oh yeah, right. But I still think we ought to increase your coverage, because, ummmm, the cost of living has been going up.” And I’ll say, “It sure has, Jeff, especially the cost of my life-insurance premiums.” And he’ll say, “That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about, Dave. Think how difficult it would be for your wife to pay your life-insurance premiums if God forbid you were dead.”

  This goes on for a half hour or so, until finally I agree to increase my coverage because otherwise I won’t be able to get off the phone and earn enough money to pay my premiums. Then Jeff says, “All I need, Dave, is the name of your doctor.” I don’t know why life-insurance companies always want the name of your doctor. Maybe they use it to check your credit rating. Or maybe they have a master list of really incompetent doctors, doctors whose patients come in with minor ear infections and wind up getting open-heart surgery, and if you have one of these doctors your premiums are adjusted upward. All I know is that Jeff won’t get off the phone until I name a doctor.

  I used to give him the name of the doctor who gave me my physical examinations for my life-insurance application. He was a terrific doctor, because he specialized in insurance examinations, which means he was not the least bit interested in the internal workings of my body. All he was interested in was filling out the insurance application, which is a long list of questions, sort of like the college-entrance examinations, except that the correct answer is always no. If you answer yes, you run the risk that you won’t be allowed to pay the premiums, so the doctor reads the questions very quickly and checks “no” before you get a chance to answer:

  DOCTOR: Have you or any member of your family or anybody you played with as a child ever had any funny tingling sensations?

  YOU: Well, I ...

  DOCTOR (checking “no”): Have you ever sat bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night with a sharp pain in your abdomen and thought it might be appendicitis but couldn’t remember whether your appendix is on the right or the left side so you woke up your spouse and he or she was somewhat irritable?

  YOU: Well, once ...

  DOCTOR (checking “no”): What about endotoxic infections? Salmonella typhosa? Acne? Clostridium botulinum? Semicolons? Ricketts? Tired blood? What is the capital of Idaho?

  YOU: Would you mind repeating ...

  DOCTOR (checking “no”): Okay. Now cough.

>   I liked this approach, because I never had to spend more than ten minutes with the insurance doctor, and he never tried to inject any foreign substances into my body. So I always said he was my doctor, until he retired, which is when I switched to Alan Alda.

  I picked Alan Alda because he is a peck of fun. This is because he is in the Korean War, which, as you know if you watch “M*A*S*H,” is a zany, wacky, fun war, so much fun that it has been going for ten years now. I always figured that if I got sick, I could be flown directly to Korea, where Alan Alda would heal me within a half hour and introduce me to one of the several dozen attractive nurses who work in the M*A*S*H unit, and we could all go off and drink martinis and talk about how awful war is and then make lots of hilarious remarks, except for the nurses, who never say anything because their job is to mop Alan Alda’s brow.

  But “M*A*S*H” is going off the air, so I need a new doctor. I’m seriously considering Robert Young, who stunned the medical world a few years back when he discovered that virtually all major psychological disorders can be cured through the regular use of caffeine-free coffee.

  Psychiatrist For Rent

  Psychiatry has gotten a lot of attention lately because of the recent court case in which John W. Hinckley, Jr., was charged with being sane. Those of you who do not understand our legal system probably thought Hinckley had been charged with shooting the President and several other people, because that is what he did. But everybody knew he had done it, so the trial would have been fairly short:

  DEFENSE ATORNEY: My Client, John W. Hinckley, Jr. ...

  JURY: Guilty.

  So to put some meat on the trial, the judge decided that the prosecution would have to prove that Hinckley was sane. Apparently, being sane is now a federal offense. As a result, the lawyers pretty much ignored the actual shootings, which everybody had seen on television anyway, and instead spent the bulk of the trial showing the movie Taxi Driver and getting testimony from rented psychiatrists, who explained that Hinckley clearly was or was not insane, depending on which psychiatrist happened to be on the witness stand: