Omnibus: The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically, My Life as an Experiment

by A. J. Jacobs

  But I’m OK with it. It doesn’t cause my shoulders to tighten. Nothing I can do about it. I’ve reached an unexpected level of acceptance. For once, I’m savoring the present. I’m admiring what I have, even if it’s thirty-two square feet of fake marble and an angled electrical outlet. I start to pray. And, perhaps for the first time, I pray in true peace and silence—without glancing at the clock, without my brain hopscotching from topic to topic.

  This is what the Sabbath should feel like. A pause. Not just a minor pause, but a major pause. Not just a lowering of the volume, but a muting. As the famous rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, the Sabbath is a sanctuary in time.

  At about 1:30 I hear Julie come home. I call out and pound on the door.

  “Where are you?”

  “In here! In the bathroom!”

  I hear her footsteps approaching.

  “You can’t get out?”

  “No, I can’t get out.”

  “How long have you been in there?”

  “Four hours.”

  There was a pause. I knew she was weighing her options. A few months ago, when she had trouble opening our bedroom door, I had made her pretend she was in a prison movie and shout “Attica! Attica!”

  Julie is more mature. After a few seconds, she just opened the door. I am free. I can return my emails, make my calls. It’s kind of a shame.

  All my sleep has fled because of the bitterness of my soul.

  —ISAIAH 38:15

  Day 101. Another sleepless night. I lay in bed, adjusting and readjusting my pillow, unable to stop obsessing about this horrible news segment I caught on TV. It said that the recidivism rate for meth addicts is 80 percent. This freaks me out. If Jasper someday tries a little meth—“What’s the harm?” he’ll say to himself, “my parents were always in favor of experimentation”—he’ll get addicted forever and end up hollow eyed and slack jawed in a county jail. Maybe it’s true. This whole loosey-goosey parenting style is too dangerous.

  A few months ago, right before my biblical year began, Julie and I went to Baltimore to attend the wedding of Sara, the daughter of my Orthodox aunt Kate, and I sat next to one of Kate’s friends. She had a wide-brimmed white hat that wouldn’t be out of place at Prince William’s wedding, a peculiar counterpoint to the black-hatted Hasidim who were there.

  She told me that her background was completely secular. But when she had kids, she and her husband made a deliberate decision to become religious.

  “I didn’t trust American culture.”

  “No?” I asked.

  “Well, what does American culture teach?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. “I think there are lots of different American cultures.”

  This was the wrong answer.

  “If you turn on the TV, you see ‘buy, buy, buy, sex and violence, buy, buy, buy.’ We decided to live by a different code.”

  They explored several religions, including Hinduism, but ended up diving into Orthodox Judaism, since they were born Jewish.

  They didn’t become ultrareligious because of a charismatic leader or the truth of the Bible—they did it for the structure. And now their kids have grown up into responsible young adults. I met one of them. A nice computer geek.

  It’s something I should consider. More structure for Jasper. In my pop culture–tainted mind, I keep coming back to this conundrum:

  Would I rather have Bart Simpson or one of the Flanders kids? A couple of years ago, I would have chosen the loveably spunky Bart. No question. But nowadays, now that I have my own three-dimensional son, I’m leaning toward the Flanders progeny. Yes, they may be a little creepy, they may sing loud songs about Noah’s ark, but at least you know they won’t spend their free time burning down the cafeteria or skateboarding off a canyon. I’d sacrifice some individuality for the knowledge that my son will outlive me.

  “Behold, I have taken upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes.”

  —GENESIS 18:27

  Day 103. I’m trying to pray for a half hour a day in three ten-minute intervals, usually in the corner of Julie’s office, a couple of feet from the basket full of Real Simple magazines. A half hour’s no record, I know. But at least I’m not glancing at the clock every minute as I did in the beginning.

  And once in a while, I actually find myself looking forward to those ten-minute sessions, especially at night. It’s a decompression. When I was a kid, I spent several minutes each night before bed picturing water-skiers slaloming over choppy waves. I don’t know how I came up with the ritual. It’s not like I was a big fan of water skiing—I had tried it at camp and ended up with a gut full of lake water. But I found visualizing it relaxing. Maybe prayer will serve the same purpose. I get to close the door, close my eyes, and sink into a meditative state, or as close to one as my brain will allow me.

  Plus, I’ve discovered another category of prayer that I like: praying on behalf of others, for the sick, needy, depressed—anyone who’s been kicked around by fate. Intercessory prayer, as it’s called.

  I’ve read a bunch of articles about intercessory prayer recently—mostly about how it’s sprouted up all over the internet. You can place prayer requests on websites like ePrayer.com and CyberSaint. (Recent examples include “I am expecting my first child. Please pray for a speedy delivery,” and “Please pray for me to complete my thesis work, it is delayed by eight months.”)

  Intercessory prayer can be found sprinkled throughout the Bible—with everyone from Moses to Paul pleading with God for the sake of others. Abraham is the first to try it, and he’s far from successful. It’s a curious scene. God announces to Abraham that he’s considering laying waste to the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

  Abraham asks him: “Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; wilt thou then destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it?”

  And the Lord said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

  Abraham answered, “Behold, I have taken upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking? Wilt thou destroy the whole city for lack of five?”

  And He said, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.”

  It continues. Abraham is able to haggle the Lord down to ten people—if there are ten good people in Sodom, God agrees not to smite it.

  In the end, though, as you know, Sodom didn’t meet the quota.

  At first I found the whole passage comical. I mean, here’s Abraham sounding like a salesman at a bazaar trying to get rid of his last decorative vase. But on reflection, what’s wrong with what he did? It’s actually a noble, beautiful—if ultimately doomed—attempt to save the lives of his fellow humans.

  I’m not finished with my year, so I’m withholding judgment, but my rational side says that intercessory prayer today is no more effective than Abraham’s effort. I still can’t wrap my brain around the notion that God would change His mind because we ask Him to.

  And yet I still love these prayers. To me they’re moral weight training. Every night I pray for others for ten minutes—a friend about to undergo a cornea operation, my great-aunt whose sweet husband just died in their swimming pool, the guy I met in a Bible study class whose head was dented in a subway accident. It’s ten minutes where it’s impossible to be self-centered. Ten minutes where I can’t think about my career, or my Amazon.com ranking, or that a blog in San Francisco made snarky comments about my latest Esquire article.

  The Bible says not to boast, so I’m not going to say that I’ve turned into Albert Schweitzer or Angelina Jolie. But I do feel myself becoming a slightly more compassionate person.

  The odd thing, though, is that to be fully compassionate, I might not want to tell these people I’m praying for them. I recently read about a new study of 1,802 coronary artery bypass patients. The patients who knew they were being prayed for actually had more complications than those who
didn’t. Perhaps they thought, “Well, if I’m sick enough that I need people to pray for me, I must really be in bad shape.” In case that’s true, I’ll pray secretly and hope they don’t read this chapter.

  …The treacherous are taken captive by their lust.

  —PROVERBS 11:6

  Day 105. So, lust. This week, my job at Esquire has forced the issue.

  Before I explain, let me confess that lust has been one of my biggest failings so far this year. Ever since that first day when I spotted that gym ad of two gorgeous sweaty people clutching each other after what was apparently a very vigorous workout, I’ve been trying to smother my libido.

  I try not to think about sex. I try not to talk about sex. I try not to glance at women on the street. The problem is, my heart’s not in it. Thanks to my thirty-eight years of staunchly secular life, I’m having a hard time adjusting to the worldview that sexuality is sinful. Well, some sexuality is sinful, as anyone with a DSL line can tell you. But I’m having trouble getting worked up over a moderate amount of sexuality in culture.

  I’m guessing that this has a lot to do with my previous wrestling matches with sex. In high school and college, I experienced some startling dry spells. To justify my involuntary abstinence, I told myself that I was above such crass human motivations as sex. I had better things to do than think about women. And what is sex, anyway? Just some skin contact necessary for DNA mixing during procreation. I didn’t need it. I tried to turn myself into a neo-Puritan. I was pure intellect, with my body just a shell to transport that brain from place to place.

  It didn’t work. My attempt to stifle my sex drive didn’t make me a more righteous person—I just got more frustrated and unhappy and preoccupied with sex. So for years, I’ve thought that as long as I remain faithful to Julie and don’t let my libido run rampant, what’s the harm in a little sexuality in culture? A racy joke, an unacted-upon fantasy, a movie with partial nudity? It never bothered me much.

  But now everyone expects me—or more precisely, Jacob, my biblical alter ego—to embrace extreme modesty and total restraint. No carnal thoughts, no carnal words. It’s a reasonable expectation, I suppose. Modesty has been a huge part of the Judeo-Christian tradition for a long time. Orthodox Jews follow rigid modesty rules: women cover their hair and cannot wear a dress revealing their collarbone. Some conservative Christians also conceal flesh and shun R-rated movies.

  So I’ve been trying. The difficulty is, the level of sexual imagery in modern life is astounding. I knew intuitively this was true, but when you tune into it, you just can’t believe it. I click on the Yahoo! finance page, and there’s this blond model in a low-cut dress looking at a computer screen and nibbling alluringly on the temple of her glasses, apparently very aroused by the latest S&P 500 report. Even the suburban-mom character on Dora the Explorer has clothes that are disturbingly form fitting. Or maybe that’s just me.

  A few weeks ago, I heard that the Rev. Billy Graham, before he arrives at a hotel, has his room swept for potentially tempting images. I decided to sweep my own apartment. I stashed away all magazines that we had lying around, like the one with Jessica Alba in a blue skintight suit.

  Next I took out a roll of masking tape and got to work censoring the images around the apartment. Anything that has the potential to stir my libido got covered with a piece of tape.

  The woman in a geisha outfit on the box of Celestial Seasonings tea.

  The photo of a cute chef with the unlikely name of Crescent Dragonwagon on the spine of a cookbook.

  The bosom of Julie’s friend Sharon in a photo from our wedding, since said bosom is both ample and prominently displayed.

  My censorship raids were actually pleasantly nostalgic. When I was a kid in the 1970s, my dad subscribed to Playboy, which he got, as they say, for the articles. My mom did not approve. Whenever a new Playboy would arrive, my mom would give me a black Magic Marker, and, while Dad was at work, we’d go to town on the latest issue. We’d scribble thick black bikinis on all of the Playmates of the Month and Girls of the Big 10. I liked this a lot. Too much. Mom eventually caught on that I was spending several minutes inspecting each photo before I censored it. So the raids ended.

  And these late-2005 censorship raids are about as effective. In other words, they are completely counterproductive. Every time I spot the masking tape, I’m reminded of what lies beneath. It makes me think about sex more, not less.

  Anyway, back to my job and lust. Esquire is a tastefully lascivious men’s magazine, but lascivious nonetheless. So avoiding sexual imagery there is even more difficult than in my home. And it got worse a few days ago. My bosses decided that it’d be funny to assign me an article about a hot young actress. You know, tempt the Bible guy.

  The actress I’m interviewing is named Rosario Dawson. And to be a properly prepared journalist, I have to rent her movies, which is a quandary in itself. Because from the looks of it, there’s a good deal of wantonness and harlotry and coveting.

  So I joined a movie rental service called CleanFlicks. A Utah-based company started by a Mormon man, CleanFlicks is the Netflix for the highly religious. It sends you sanitized Hollywood movies with the violence and sex chopped out. Also, profanity, including “the B-words, H-word when not referring to the place, D-word, S-word, F-word, etc.” (The S-word and F-word I know. But the B-word? The D-word? So many options. It’s like working on a dirty New York Times crossword puzzle.)

  A week later, I get a couple of DVDs of Rosario’s movies in bright yellow envelopes: 25th Hour and Josie and the Pussycats. I pop them into my player. It is a confusing couple of hours. The CleanFlicks films are full of non-sequitur jump cuts and intermittent sound, like what I imagine a Voice over Internet Protocol phone call from Tanzania is like. (When I was finished with Rosario’s movies, I couldn’t resist ordering Kill Bill on CleanFlicks, because I figured it’d be about five minutes long. It actually broke the hour mark, but made no sense whatsoever.)

  A couple of Rosario’s movies weren’t available on CleanFlicks—but they can be found on one of its competitors, ClearPlay. This is an even more sophisticated bowdlerizing service. You download the censoring filter from the internet and then plug that into a specially equipped DVD player. The beauty of ClearPlay is that you can customize which offensive material to block and which to let through. (Incidentally, CleanFlicks has since been forced to stop cleaning flicks; a Colorado court ruled that it was violating copyright laws by slapping fig leafs on the movies. But ClearPlay is still going strong.)

  I download the filter for one of Rosario’s movies—Oliver Stone’s Alexander—and it looks like I hit the sin mother lode. Take a look at what it’s got:

  NonSensual/NonCrude Sex Talk

  Thematic Sexual Situation(s)

  Homosexual/Lesbian Characters

  Implied Marital Sex

  Implied Premarital Sex

  Implied Extramarital Sex

  Revealing Clothing

  Some Suggestive Dancing

  Some Suggestive Dialogue

  Threatening Dialogue

  Intense Action/Adventure

  Intense Life/Death Situations

  Scary Moments

  Nongraphic Injury/Wound

  Intense Battle Sequences

  Alcohol Consumption

  Rape Topic

  Intense Thematic Elements

  Suicide

  Murder Topic

  Dysfunctional Relationships

  In other words, Thursday night at Tommy Lee’s house. (My friend David pointed this out; I can’t make such comments myself.)

  I suppose CleanFlicks and ClearPlay mean well. But they weren’t so helpful. I had the same problem as I did with my masking-tape endeavor. I was so focused on what they were cutting out, I probably conjured up far more sinful things in my mind than if I had just watched the suggestive dancing and thematic sexual situation(s) all the way through.

  I have made a covenant with my eyes; How then could I look upon a virgin?

&nb
sp; —JOB 31:1

  Day 107. I flew out to Los Angeles yesterday and drove to the hotel. I noticed that my sense of geography has changed. I paid attention to the locations of all the churches and synagogues in the same way that I used to pay attention to pop culture landmarks (Look, that’s where they filmed the mall scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High)!

  Today is my interview with Rosario. I arrive at our meeting place: an aggressively Californian café with organic root beer and whole wheat bagels. Rosario comes a half hour late, as is required by a secret celebrity handbook.

  Things start off better than I expected. Yes, she’s beautiful, with skin out of a Clinique ad, but she’s wearing a bulky beige sweater and jeans. Very discreet, not overly revealing. Second, she seems unfazed by my project. This is L.A., after all, home to calf implants and Crispin Glover, so the strangeness bar is set pretty high.

  And, finally, she is one of about three people thus far who claimed my topiary looked good. “I’ve always loved big beards,” she says, adding cryptically, “When I was a kid, I wanted a beard of my own. I thought it’d be nice to stroke it.”

  So I am feeling good.

  And then we start the interview proper. It soon becomes clear that my bosses could not have picked a worse celebrity for me to interview. She is the single most raunchy actress in Hollywood. She has absolutely no ClearPlay-like filter in her brain. Over the course of two hours, I hear about her grandmother’s sex life, her sex life, her conception with a broken condom, her breasts, her mom’s R-rated piercings, her ex-boyfriend’s bedroom noises, and on and on.

  I feel like there are three people at this interview: Rosario Dawson, my regular old secular journalist self, and my biblical alter ego.

  Every time she talks about the handcuffs you can buy at the Hustler store, my alter ego Jacob winces. Meanwhile, the secular journalist does a silent little cheer. Because I know that a racy quote from a beautiful woman is men’s magazine gold.