My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

by Mary Roach

  “That’s okay,” said Bill. “If you look at me, I have more body too.” Then he announced the Cabernet had “legs.” He was swirling his glass like a cowboy with a lasso. The liquid rose dangerously close to the rim, then receded. “See? When it sticks to the glass and hangs down like this, it means, ah . . .” He looked at Jeanne, who stepped right in: “It means that it hangs down more.”

  They’re quite a team, Bill and Jeanne. I said the two of them, together, are like a fine French Bordeaux. What I meant is that their love continues to grow and mellow with age. I did not mean anything about preferring to lie down a lot in a darkened room. They knew what I meant. They gave me a hug, and we drank a toast to the day, to each other, to love, to free wine.

  Sit Back and Relax

  There is a special room in hell where the flames are extra hot and you must sleep sitting straight up. The sign on the door says: Reserved for People Who Reclined Their Seatbacks the Entire Flight. Most of us understand the discomfort we are inflicting on the poor schmo behind us and try to limit our reclining for the lights-out portion of the flight. If everyone leans back together, in the manner of a synchronized, unattractively upholstered Esther Williams swim routine, then no one is unfairly crowded.

  I had a seatback diva in front of me last week. We were barely airborne, and there she was in my lap. Using my computer would now entail making a slit in my belly flab and inserting the front half of the keyboard inside me, so that the bottom row of letters were rendered inaccessible and I would have to make do without the words banana, vixen, balaclava and many other colorful favorites.

  Defeated, I tried to watch the little TV mounted in the seatback in front of me. Alas, the screen was so close to my face that my eyes were crossing. Emeril had become a set of perfectly choreographed twin Emerils, which was one or possibly two more Emerils than I could handle. In desperation, I turned to my complimentary copy of the Sky Mall catalog and began to read. A mail-order company was selling “the Most Compact Washing Machine in the World,” enabling, I don’t know, Keebler elves to do laundry in their tree. “Tiki Head Tissue Box Dispenses Tissue Through the Nose!” another ad reported excitedly.

  “Who would buy this?” I said to the man in the middle seat, but he was busy waving down a flight attendant. “Miss?” He was holding up his knees. “Is there room in the overhead bin for these?”

  We hit a pocket of turbulence and Bloody Mary mix slopped onto the chinos of the man next to me. I pointed to the Most Compact Washing Machine in the World. “You need this,” I said. The man did not smile. His expression was just like the Tiki Head with tissues up its nostrils, displeased and clearly embarrassed about the situation yet resolutely stoic.

  More and more, you must board a plane like a general going to war. You must constantly defend your turf—your wee, airless kingdom. The occupier of the next seat will make his move upon your armrest the moment your vigilance flags. You will return from the bathroom to find an elbow planted in the little vinyl peninsula where your people once roamed free.

  The battle for armrest dominance has grown ever more intense in the era of the laptop computer. The airplane seat—designed to be a chair, and never very good at it—has now been asked to perform double duty as an office. Soon people will be bringing fitness equipment and hobby craft aboard, and the company that makes the elfin washers will need to get started on looms and rowing machines.

  Complex rules apply to the space beneath your seat, for it belongs, technically, to the person behind you. Not long ago, I was on a transcontinental flight when I was awakened by the woman behind me. “Excuse me?” She was holding a plastic juice cup. “Excuse me? This is coming in my section.” I had put my empty cup under my seat and it had slid backward, crossing an imaginary line in the carpeting. She was peeved. Her eyes were squinty and her nostrils were flaring, as though about to dispense tissues through the nose.

  People were staring, so I took the cup. Later that night, a pantyhosed foot made a stealth assault on the back of my right armrest. It was her: the Juice Cup Border Patrol.

  “Excuse me?” I nudged the foot ungently. “This is coming in my section.”

  Several hours went by without incident. I was beginning to drift off, when I heard a driving, tinny noise: ch-ch, ch-ch, ch-ch, ch-ch . . . The woman behind me had mobilized the most fearsome weapon in the modern airplane arsenal: the Overly Loud Headphones.

  I waved my hot towel in surrender.

  Sleepless in Suburbia

  Though I have always been a sound sleeper, I am frequently up at 4 a.m. This is around the time that my husband, Ed, having woken up at 3, will generally crawl back into bed. Ed goes downstairs to watch TV so that his tossing and turning doesn’t wake me up. This is very considerate, except that when he returns, he likes to chat about what he’s been watching. The other night, Ed had been watching an infomercial for something called the Steam Shark. I have a distinct memory of surfacing from the depths of sleep directly into the sentence “You can steam-clean around the base of the toilet.”

  Last night it was “Honey, Bo Schembechler died.”

  Schembechler, Ed explained to my inert self, was a beloved University of Michigan football coach. There is little difference between talking to me about college football when I’m asleep and talking to me about it when I’m awake. Eyelid position, basically, is the difference. Ed kept going: “He was the voice of the Wolverines.”

  I was partly awake at this point, and for some reason, the sentence struck me as the funniest thing I’d heard in a very long time. Different rules apply between the hours of 2 and 4 a.m., I find. Things that would ordinarily not even qualify as mildly amusing will often, at 3 a.m., strike the ear as high comedy.

  Worries are similarly warped. I recently spent the hour from 4 to 5 a.m. worrying about the placement of two shrubs we had planted in our yard that day. Ed came in from downstairs, and I unloaded my fears about the overly close positioning of the shrubbery. I made him promise that first thing the next day, we would dig one up and move it, lest they crowd each other’s roots. In the morning, we went out to look at the plants. If anything, they looked a little lonesome there at 17 inches apart, just as the label had recommended. I am now known far and wide as the Nervous Gardener.

  Anyway, once the laughter sets in, we’re both up. The topic of wolverines led to savage animals in general, and from there to a game called African Veldt. We frequently make up mindless games to wile away the time until the sandman agrees to take over the proceedings again.

  “First person to run out of animals is the loser,” I said. Ed pointed out that since I had been to Africa, the game was rigged in my favor. He made me name three animals for every one of his.

  “Fine. Leopard, zebra, elephant.”

  “Lion,” said Ed with great confidence.

  “Warthog, wildebeest, springbok.”

  A long time went by. The shrubbery roots were closing in upon each other. Finally, and with great hesitancy, Ed said, “Giraffe?”

  “Eland, gnu, ostrich.”

  “You can’t do birds.”

  “Birds are animals.”

  “Okay, ant,” said Ed, and then he rolled over. He took his bottom pillow and put it on top of his head. This is known as the Ed sandwich: pillow, Ed’s head, pillow. He does this because he can’t sleep if there’s noise in the room. There isn’t now, but there will be. I make noises while I sleep, and Ed has had many hours to devote to cataloging them. Common varietals include the Click, the Tommy gun and the Darth Vader.

  Light is also a problem for my husband. There can be no light in the bedroom, not even the light from the digital clock, which is hidden away on the bottom shelf of Ed’s nightstand, broadcasting the time to toddlers and gnomes. The room across the hall must also be dark. We can’t just close our bedroom door to block the light from that room, because this will make the bedroom too stuffy for
Ed to sleep. That room must also have its curtains drawn. If he could, Ed would draw the curtains on the windows of our neighbors across the driveway, and on down the street, all the way to the horizon.

  Kitchen Confidential

  I have certain expectations for a kitchen item that costs more than $300. I expect it to have a motor and a plug and a lengthy instruction booklet that I will fail to read, causing an incident wherein an improperly secured part dislodges itself, allowing food matter to be sprayed evenly and efficiently across vertical kitchen surfaces including the cook and a guest and the guest’s cashmere sweater set.

  So when my husband, Ed, announced he wanted to buy a pot—a pot—that costs $345, he encountered some resistance. Perhaps he had been anticipating this, for he did not refer to the pot as a “pot,” but rather as a “seven-quart pasta pentola.” He may also have pronounced “quart” as “carat,” hoping to appeal to some perceived female gem lust.

  A pentola, apparently, is a pot with a matching colander that fits inside it. It is the cashmere sweater set of cookery. I pointed out that we already have a very nice colander.

  “But this way, you just lift out the colander,” said Ed. “You don’t have to pour the pasta water into the sink.” Ed drew out the word pour, so it sounded like an elaborate or somehow heroic undertaking.

  “But at some point,” I said gently, “you will need to pour the pasta water into the sink, correct? Unless you plan to throw the pot away after using it once. If you’re the kind of person who spends $345 on a pot for boiling water, I suppose it’s a short trip to being the sort of person who throws a pot away after each use.”

  Ed hesitated. I could tell he was cooking up a story, and no doubt there is a special $350 pot for this too. He tried to convince me that pouring boiling water down the drain could “melt the caulk.” I knew this to be a bluff. Otherwise, the drain cleaner people would not instruct you to pour boiling water down the sink before you pour in the drain cleaner. And if you can’t trust the drain cleaner people, whom in this world can you trust?

  Ed shifted tactics. He began explaining the various high-tech virtues of this brand of pot, which was called All-Clad Stainless. The name refers to a process whereby steel outer layers are bonded to an inner core of aluminum. This way, you have the benefits of stainless steel, which is pretty and durable, as well as the benefits of aluminum, which is neither but redeems itself by heating up quickly and evenly. “So you get uniform heating,” said Ed learnedly.

  This made sense, except that we were talking about boiling water. “So, the idea is to make sure the boiling water in one half of the pot isn’t hotter than the boiling water on the other side?”

  Ed was humming to himself. “I can’t hear you.”

  Later, I read on the Web that the All-Clad “molecular bonding” process was developed by NASA.

  The man who answered the NASA telephone had not heard of All-Clad. His name was Bill. I asked him how the astronauts make pasta. Bill said they put the pasta pouch into a warmer. “Then they take scissors and cut it open and eat out of the package.” These were my kind of people.

  To make Ed feel excessive and wasteful, I told him the sum total of the cookware on board the space station is a warmer and a pair of scissors. Then I felt bad. Because what it came down to was that Ed simply wanted a decent pasta pot with a lid that fits. The one we have came without a lid. It was an All-Clad that Ed had got half price, thinking he could order a lid to fit it. And the reason he bought this half-price, lidless pot in the first place was to avoid arguing with his harpy of a wife, who is reliably, pointlessly, tediously cheap. When Ed called to order the lid, he was told they did not make a lid for this pot. “It was an experimental pot,” the woman said enigmatically.

  In the end, we compromised. We bought a nice, new pot with a lid that fits, and made do without the cashmere colander insert.

  Best Cheap Fun!

  The price of a movie has gone double-digit. You need a major-league contract to afford an afternoon at the ballpark. Has fun priced itself out of our lives? Not at all.

  Photo booths. While you wait for your strip to be developed, reach up and feel around the top of the booth. People often toss their embarrassing outtakes up there.

  Bubble Wrap

  Your cat. Blow into his face. Stick your finger in his mouth as he yawns. Put him on a leash and try to take him for a walk.

  The sight of a dog wearing one of those medical lamp shades on its head. For immediate gratification, do a Google image search for “Elizabethan collar,” which is what veterinarians call it.

  Wave at people while you drive.

  Helium Balloons

  The weekly police roundup in any small-town newspaper. I am still laughing over the report of a man seen running naked down a neighborhood street. A policeman who arrived to investigate noticed a note on a car windshield that read “Gone to get parts.” The officer misread this as “Gone to get pants” and, satisfied that this explained the man’s nudity, returned to his beat.

  Bumper Cars

  The commuter ferry on a blustery day. My brother comes to visit me once a year, and if the weather’s dramatic, we always head for the ferry dock. Go on the weekend and have the ship to yourself.

  Order a dish off the Chinese-language side of the menu.

  Attempt to sneak a bottle of water onto the plane.

  Come visit me in jail after someone from Homeland Security reads the above.

  Any toenail polish color besides red.

  Bubblegum

  Type “yink” into your spell checker and read the suggestions out loud.

  Those 25-cent horsy rides outside the Walmart.

  Root for the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium.

  Request a phony page on the White Courtesy Telephone I once heard (in a hospital) “Al Bumin, dial operator. Al Bumin, operator please.” Someone in my dorm in London once paged “Mahatma Coat.

  Did you know there’s a brand of dishwashing detergent in Iran called Barf? Or that Japan sells a sports drink called Pocari Sweat?

  Supermarkets in foreign countries.

  Launch a message in a bottle with your e-mail address. For maximum exoticism of response, remember to do it when the tide is going out, not coming in.

  Lie down in a cow pasture. If the herd is far off, yell to get their attention, then immediately drop down and lie flat. The entire herd will come galloping over and form a tight circle around you, staring down at you with intense bovine curiosity. I have tried this three times on two different continents. It’s marvelously surreal.

  Late Night Infomercials

  Armpit farts. Here’s a variation that will make you feel less childish (but fools no one). It works best in humid weather. Lie on a wood floor, pull up your shirt and press your slightly damp lower back into the floor as firmly as you can. Then pull away quickly. This is also a good lower-back strengthening exercise, but who cares.

  1-800-WasteMyTime

  It was late in the afternoon, and I was putting the final burnishes on a piece of writing that I was feeling pretty good about. Yes, okay, it was an e-mail, but it was a clever one and I hated to lose it. My cursor had frozen. I tried to shut the computer down, and it seized up altogether. Unsure of what else to do, I yanked the battery out.

  Unfortunately, Windows had been in the midst of a delicate and crucial undertaking. The next morning, when I turned my computer back on, it informed me that a file had been corrupted and Windows would not load. This was followed by some mysterious lines of code, which I took to be my computer saying, “Serves you right, careless pea brain,” in its native tongue. More graciously, it offered to repair itself by using the Windows Setup CD.

  I opened the special drawer where I keep CDs that I have no intention of ever using. There was an IKEA how-to CD, which featured young Swedes assem
bling kitchen cabinets with nothing but a sardine can key and untrammeled wholesomeness. Mostly, there were CDs of music that my friends are always burning for me, unbidden, because they think I’ll enjoy them.

  But no Windows CD. I was forced to call the computer company’s Global Support Center. My call was answered by a woman in some unnamed, far-off land. I find it vexing to make small talk with someone when I don’t know what continent they’re standing on. Suppose I were to comment on the beautiful weather we’ve been having when there was a monsoon at the other end of the phone? So I got right to the point.

  “My computer is telling me a file is corrupted and it wants to fix itself, but I don’t have the Windows Setup CD.”

  “So you’re having a problem with your Windows Setup CD.” She had apparently been dozing and, having come to just as the sentence ended, was attempting to cover for her inattention. I recognized the technique from a thousand breakfast conversations.

  “We took that rug in weeks ago. Should I call the cleaners?”

  “No, thanks. I’m good.”

  It quickly became clear that the woman was not a computer technician. Her job was to serve as a gatekeeper, a human shield for the techs, who were off in the back room, or possibly another far-off continent, playing cards and burning CDs for their friends. Her sole duty, as far as I could tell, was to raise global stress levels.

  To make me disappear, the woman gave me the phone number for Windows’ creator, Microsoft. This is like giving someone the phone number for, I don’t know, North America. Besides, the CD worked; I just didn’t have it. No matter how many times I repeated my story, we came back to the same place. She was unflappable and resolutely polite.

  When my voice hit a certain decibel, I was passed along, like a hot, irritable potato, to a technician.

  “You don’t have the Windows Setup CD, ma’am, because you don’t need it,” he explained cheerfully. “Windows came preinstalled on your computer!”