You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News Page 12

  How about the innocent bystander, whose last memory is being plowed into by a Subaru full of naked humping yuppie? When a Connecticut woman was charged with causing a car wreck that killed a man, she tried to use the fact that she was mid-blow-job in her defense. While it’s unclear what reaction she was hoping for (“Oh, she had a dick in her mouth, well, happens to the best of us I suppose!”), the argument only helped convince the jury that her mother and father had failed as parents.

  Even humping in the back of a taxi carries risks beyond making a cameo on HBO. Unless you’re grotesquely double jointed, it’s pretty hard to wear a seat belt while having sex, and those come in handy when the cabdriver’s attention is being split between the road and the plate-glass divider full of squeaking pink ass directly over his right shoulder.

  2. ON AN AIRPLANE

  The mile high club is the ultimate fantasy for everyone who’s still stuck in the 1970s and has a limited imagination. If porn is any indication, stewardesses of yore were tall, skanky, and wholly unqualified to do their jobs. Even in the nonporno universe, you’re in an exotic place, high above the earth, and sharing close quarters with nothing to do. Who can blame you for getting a little amorous?

  Well, the police for starters: You can be arrested for joining the mile high club. There are also the potential safety risks. Plane sex is the only item on this list that combines the reckless risks of having sex in a car with the potential diseases of having sex in a location that’s teaming with poop. A twofer!

  And we’re pretty sure the payoff isn’t worth it. Airplane bathrooms aren’t famous for their roominess. Joining the mile high club is like having sex in a kitchen cabinet, if your kitchen cabinet has a bunch of faucets and handles inside and an audience of total strangers sitting within earshot of your clumsy, apologetic humping.

  1. THE WOODS

  Few things are more romantic than packing up for a weekend, heading to the great outdoors, getting a fire going, pitching a tent, and then crawling inside with your honey for some awkward, claustrophobic sex on uneven ground.

  Unfortunately, while nature enthusiasts may enjoy the freedom of humping under the stars, park officials say there’s some cause for alarm. See, you won’t just look like two sausages trying to fit in the same casing as you hump away in your sleeping bags. There are parts of the food chain where that shit smells like dinner.

  Specifically, the bear part.

  Park rangers in bear country caution against having sex for the same reason they caution against dipping a fresh salmon in honey and putting it down your pants. A bear thinks the juices your body produces during sex smell delicious. The better the sex, the more likely that sound you just heard isn’t “just the fire settling in for the night.”

  And while we apologize for how difficult that’s going to make it to ever achieve an orgasm in anything even resembling an outdoor setting, why would you want to? While some sex may be worth getting arrested by an air marshal, we’re hard pressed to present a single sexual experience on record that’s worth a bear attack.

  FIVE AWESOME THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW COULD MAKE YOU SICK

  THANKS to dedicated doctors and researchers, the number of common objects and activities you must fear has multiplied a thousandfold. Every day, medical professionals work toward a humanitarian goal centuries old: to catalog every possible way you can get sick and die.

  5. ART

  Stendhal syndrome is an “attack of dizziness, confusion, elevated heartbeat, or hallucination upon exposure to great works of art.” It was first diagnosed in the nineteenth century, when Stendhal took a trip to Florence and got a face full of aesthetically transcendent disease. Since then, there have been 107 documented sufferers, including Fyodor Dostoevsky.

  The diagnosis’s stipulation that the art must be great raises a number of troubling and ridiculous questions. Do doctors in the general proximity of the Louvre have a list of the works that qualify as great? Do they throw up their hands in befuddlement when patients fly into seizures at the sight of art the medical establishment deems “pretty good” or “just aight”? Could it be that Stendhal syndrome is simply a snootier version of the syndrome that teenage girls have been suffering from at Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake concerts for years?

  Until more is known, doctors recommend steering clear of anything that has shown even the slightest whiff of cultural value. Or they would if you couldn’t also get seizures from …

  4. MARY HART’S VOICE

  Mary Hart’s voice has always been known to hold tremendous power. It can determine what passes for tonight’s entertainment or sink a budding celebrity romance before it ever gets off the ground. But as recorded in a 1991 New England Journal of Medicine article, it can also cause violent epileptic seizures. The article relates the case of a woman who, upon hearing Hart’s voice, suffered “an abnormal electrical discharge in the brain, disorientation, nausea, and headaches.” She only got the seizures when she watched Entertainment Tonight, and they stopped as soon as she switched stations.

  Doctors call the syndrome reflex epilepsy, and almost anything can trigger it. People have been known to go into fits after seeing Pokemon cartoons, looking at the logo for the 2012 Olympics, playing Nintendo, or hearing the Sean Paul song “Temperature.” Although most doctors agree that the last one was merely an appropriate response to the stimulus.

  The fact is, you may not even know you have reflex epilepsy until you run into your trigger. One minute you’re asking the friendly clerk at IKEA how to pronounce the name of the duvet you’ve just purchased, the next minute you’re flopping on the floor trying to swallow your own tongue. The only way to truly be safe is to keep a piece of leather clenched between your teeth at all times.

  3. HULA HOOPS

  That hula hoop collecting cobwebs in your garage may well be the deadliest plastic circle since the O-rings on the Challenger. In 1992, a Beijing man was hospitalized with a twisted intestine after “playing excessively” with a hula hoop. Chinese papers said that the case was the third in a few weeks and blamed it on a hula hoop craze sweeping China at the time. This also represented the first time the phrase “hula hoop craze” had been printed in a newspaper since the thirties.

  Fortunately, the Beijing man was treated successfully and eventually able to return to work (presumably deep in an unstable coal mine). Not so lucky was the Korean woman admitted in 2006 for a perirenal hematoma developed after six months of routine “violent hula hooping.” In case you don’t know what a perirenal hematoma is, that means the hula hoop made blood come out of her kidneys. It looks like you’re going to have to somehow resist the lure of violently hula hooping for long periods of time.

  If you’re starting to think that the only way to avoid death is to shut yourself inside your house, don’t worry …

  2. STAYING SAFELY INDOORS

  Over the last decade or so, a wide range of seemingly unrelated illnesses have started to be attributed to sick building syndrome, which is basically any disease you get just by being inside. Victims have reported everything from headaches and fatigue to hair loss and neurological problems, all tied to starting work at a new building or moving into a new house. Because their symptoms differ so widely, and because “coming into work makes me sick” sounds like the lamest excuse ever, the disease wasn’t even really studied until recently.

  The current theory is that newer buildings, which are better insulated than old ones, may be too airtight for their own good, trapping toxic gasses and causing air to stagnate. And that air is filled with all the dust, gas, and molecular detritus left over from the construction process, as well as whatever stray compounds the drying paint and setting concrete decide to contribute. Think of it like a balloon full of poison, except you work inside the balloon, and instead of it being someone’s birthday party, your hair is falling out in clumps. Also, most people you tell about your illness call you a crazy liar.

  1. THE INTERNET

  Telling people about all the things
that will make them sick is one of the Web’s primary functions. But only since a recent report in Biologist, a UK science journal, has it been thought that the Internet could actually suppress your immune system, encourage disease, and speed the growth of tumors. The report cites studies showing that entering the twenty-first century, time spent using electronic media increased, while time spent in actual face-to-face social interaction dropped significantly. This lack of daily human interaction causes your body to slack off and fail to produce as many white blood cells and cytokines (those are good).

  While keeping your distance from a bunch of filthy human bacteria might seem like a good thing, your immune system actually needs the activity. After months spent sitting alone, surfing porn, your body’s natural defense system begins to atrophy.

  So really, it’s not the Internet that’s making you sick; it’s the crushing, crushing loneliness. If you want to stay healthy, don’t waste your time reading books or browsing the supremely addictive Cracked.com website. Go out and get some exercise. But before you do that, you might want to turn to the next section to learn about all the ways exercise can kill you too.

  FOUR THINGS YOUR MOM SAID WERE HEALTHY THAT CAN KILL YOU

  EVERYONE knows that fad diets aren’t to be trusted. But there are a few simple rules that seem never to go out of style. Exercise like a madman, hit the four food groups, get eight hours of sleep at night, and avoid stuff that’s high in fat. Do all those things and you’ll be well on your way to … a premature death. Yep, the ABCs of healthy living lead directly to an early grave. And we’ve known it for years.

  4. EXERCISING

  Exercise is good for you. Exercise is hard. Therefore the more you exercise, the better off your body will be, right? There’s no better example of this line of reasoning than the marathon, which is named for the legendary Greek messenger who ran 26.2 miles from a battle in Marathon to Athens, announced to the general assembly, “We won,” and promptly dropped dead.

  Ignoring the cautionary-tale shape to that story arc, the modern fitness movement made the recreation of the mythical death sprint their de facto symbol of peak physical condition (the ancient Greco-Roman sports of nude wrestling and lion fighting were presumably dismissed as too gay and too cruel to animals, respectively). And while it’s true that only the fit can possibly handle such a distance, it turns out it’s not necessarily good for the smug bastards.

  Running a marathon is, on balance, bad for your muscles, your immune system, and even your heart. It’s so traumatic that your body begins leaking injury-signaling enzymes. In an interview with Men’s Health, Dr. Arthur Siegel said, “Your body doesn’t know whether you’ve run a marathon … or been hit by a truck.” Siegel’s the director of internal medicine at Harvard’s McLean hospital, who ran twenty marathons before he was convinced to hang up his ridiculous short shorts by his research and all the heart attacks he kept seeing at the marathons he ran. Yes, heart attacks. It happens about a dozen times a year. Runners’ hearts give out or they go into complete renal failure. After hours of extensive research, we have it on good authority that doing anything to the point that your organs shut down is generally a bad thing.

  However, because our culture tends to view exercise as the physiological equivalent of putting money into your 401(k), marathon runners have been known to ignore their body’s “you’re goddamned killing us” message until they’re doing a horrifyingly faithful recreation of the first marathon ever.

  The truth is that, like most things, exercise should be practiced in moderation. As Spiegel advises in the article, you’re probably better off training for a marathon and then not running it. Of course, that won’t prove to the world that you’re a bigger badass than that Greek messenger.

  3. HALF OF THE FOUR MAJOR FOOD GROUPS

  Back in 1977, Senator George McGovern and the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition (SSCON) were asked to figure out why so many Americans were showing up at hospitals with the muscle definition (and often the heart rates) of a Jell-O casserole. Undertaking the most comprehensive study of American dietary habits in history, the SSCON revealed that, despite America’s unwavering commitment to lard-assed heart abuse, rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease briefly dipped during World War II. After rigorous lab experiments determined that you couldn’t Nazi hunt your way to low cholesterol, the committee arrived at a more practical explanation: meat and dairy rations. America got healthier during WWII because they weren’t allowed to eat all the beef and cheese they could fit their mouths around.

  Figuring that some self-imposed rationing might do some good, the committee drafted a report that urged Americans to “cut red meat and dairy intake drastically.” As bad as that news was for American taste buds, it was worse for cattle farmers. Since 1955, they’d been making obscene amounts of money selling the half of the USDA’s “four essential food groups” that contained cheeseburgers and milk shakes. Luckily for future manufacturers of scoop-‘n’-eat cheesecake and muumuus, by the time the SSCON released their report, they’d made enough money to hire an army of lobbyists. Soon after releasing the report, committee members were told it would need some revisions if they wanted to keep their jobs.

  Doing what politicians do best, the SSCON caved. The clear and direct “reduce consumption of meat” became, “Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.” To ensure that no other senators got any funny ideas about making Americans skinny, the meat and dairy industries spent millions to ensure McGovern’s ass got kicked to the curb in the very next election. American waistlines continued expanding, life spans continued shrinking, and nobody even dreamed of pissing off cattle ranchers ever again.

  2. GETTING EIGHT HOURS OF SLEEP EVERY NIGHT

  If there’s one lie that’s ingrained into America’s youth even earlier than “drinking milk turns you into a muscle-bound shit wrecker,” it’s the idea that you need eight hours of sleep each night. The bedtimes of children and the schedules of adults are structured around this one easy-to-remember bodily mandate. For years, it’s been dividing weekdays into three convenient eight-hour chunks of work, relaxation, and sleep.

  Dr. Daniel Kripke of the University of California, San Diego, conducted a sleep study that tracked adults from the time they were old enough to set their own bedtime to the time they took a permanent nap in the dirt. The study found that seven hours of sleep seems to be the “golden time” for maximum health. Those who got less than seven hours saw slight decreases in life span. The ones who got the magic number of eight hours? They were, on average, even worse off. Despite what your parents told you, Kripke found that eight hours is the duration at which sleep turns from “healthy and relaxing” to “slowest form of suicide imaginable.”

  Before you start petitioning your local representative to draft laws banning comfortable beds, smooth jazz, and the writing of Immanuel Kant (for the children!), the studies didn’t show that seven hours is the perfect length of sleep for everyone. Like anything involving the human brain, sleep is way too complicated for blanket rules. The problem, according to Kripke, is that people who naturally sleep less than eight hours a night think they’re not getting enough sleep. That’s why sleeping pills do such a robust business despite health risks that he puts on level with smoking cigarettes. People who need less than eight hours think they have to force their bodies across an arbitrary finish line their parents invented.

  So the next time you’re lying awake in bed, worried that you’re now seven hours and forty-eight minutes away from the alarm, just remember, eight hours is just something your parents made up because they wanted some alone time to have filthy sex on the couch where you grew up watching TV.

  Or maybe just count sheep.

  1. THE GODDAMN FOOD PYRAMID

  In 1992, the government decided to take another run at America’s rampant ass jigglery, this time designing an official info graphic that showed how many servings of different food groups you should get in a day. Just as the four food gr
oups had improved on 1943’s Basic Seven, which actually included butter as its own group, the food pyramid took a few steps in the right direction. For instance, it separated fruits and vegetables into their own categories and suggested that both were more essential than the cheese and burger groups. The USDA even created a villain, the tiny tip of the pyramid, fats and oils, which Americans were advised to use sparingly. Having outlined its complex nutritional morality play, the USDA dusted off its hands, sat back, and watched childhood obesity rise every year since.

  Again, the government had suffered from a crisis of testicular fortitude. Rather than suggesting that anyone eat less of anything, which could hurt the $500 billion food industry, the pyramid suggested that you eat bad foods less frequently relative to how many good foods you eat. It also followed the SSCON’s tradition of blaming the word fats rather than anything you might recognize from your grocery list. Food manufacturers responded by flooding the market with chips and cookies chemically engineered to be “low in fat,” giving Americans the green light to eat their way skinny.

  Of course, it wasn’t all on “the man.” The chart gave our fat asses too much wiggle room. Choosing from the items listed in each section, you could eat three cheeseburgers, down two glasses of OJ, three servings of fries (cooked in McDonald’s new low-fat lard!), a box of Lucky Charms, and go to bed telling your body it could thank you on your hundredth birthday.