Dave Barry - Bad Habits

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.

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.

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: