Bad Habits

by Dave Barry

  PROSECUTING ATORNEY: So, Dr. Warble, would you say that the defendant is sane?

  PSYCHIATRIST: Oh yes indeed, very sane. Extremely sane.

  DEFENSE ATTORNEY: I object, your honor. The defense rented this psychiatrist, and he is supposed to say that the defendant is insane.

  PSYCHIATRIST: Oh yeah, that’s right. What I mean is the defendant is insane. Sorry.

  The defense psychiatrists proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Hinckley shot the President because he (Hinckley) was in love with Jodie Foster and had watched Taxi Driver many times, so he was acquitted. This makes sense to me. I think we can all agree that anyone who fell in love with Jodie Foster and watched Taxi Driver many times would have no option but to shoot the President. I think Hinckley should be set free, and Congress should pass a law requiring Miss Foster to date him.

  The only flaw in the Hinckley trial is that it left a lot of people with the impression that psychiatrists are just a bunch of bearded voodoo doctors who espouse confusing and wildly contradictory theories that have nothing to do with common sense. This is totally unfair. Many psychiatrists are clean-shaven.

  To understand why psychiatrists behave as they do, you have to understand the history of their profession. In primitive times, people believed that psychiatric disorders were caused by demons who possessed people, and primitive psychiatrists cured them by gouging holes in their skulls so the demons could get out (I am not making this up). Now, of course, we know that this is silly. The modern approach for getting rid of a demon is to have a priest dive out a fourth-floor window, as you know if you saw the fine documentary movie The Exorcist, which I imagine John Hinckley saw thirty-five times.

  The other big cause of psychiatric disorders, besides demons, is your father. The man who discovered that fathers cause virtually all psychiatric problems was Sigmund Freud, who is known as the Father of Modern Psychiatry. Freud also discovered that if a trained analyst probed a patient’s past for several hours a week, week after week, year after year, the analyst could make an enormous amount of money. Of course, the analyst must be very skilled, because otherwise the patient might go off on all kinds of irrelevant tangents unrelated to the father:

  PSYCHIATRisT: And what seems to be the trouble?

  PATIENT: I’ve been having these horrible, splitting headaches.

  PSYCHIATRIST: And when did these headaches begin? Around the time you realized your father was a horrible man?

  PATIENT: No, my father was a wonderful man. My headaches began last week, when I was working under my car and the jack broke and the car fell on my head. I’ve also been bleeding from my ears.

  PSYCHIATRIST: I see. And was your father’s name Jack?

  And so it goes, for a decade or so, until the patient realizes that his head aches because forty-seven years earlier his father wouldn’t buy him an ice cream cone.

  Freud’s approach is based on the fact that the human personality is actually made up of a number of parts: the Ego, the Libretto, the Sense of Humor, and the Tendency to Be Irritable in the Morning. The Libretto is trapped in the subconscious with nothing to read and consequently thinks about sex all the time. This embarrasses the other parts, so they clean up the thoughts before you actually get to think them. For example, let’s say the Libretto thinks about a sexual organ. By the time you get it, the other personality parts have turned it into an aquarium, so that’s what you think you’re thinking about, you nave fool. What this means is that everybody is actually thinking about sex all the time, although this becomes obvious only under intensive psychoanalysis or at office parties.

  Freud’s brilliant pioneering paved the way for new discoveries by future generations of psychiatrists, all of whom disagree with him and each other. We can only regret that Freud did not live to see his theories come to fruition, and maybe watch Taxi Driver a few times.

  Oaf Of Hippocrates

  NOTE: Before you read this article about medical care, let me warn you that I am not a doctor. I did, however, study First Aid when I was in the Boy Scouts. We scouts used to meet in the Methodist Church basement and apply tourniquets to each other, and we got really good at it. We once applied a tourniquet to Randy Lape that was so elaborate he couldn’t move any part of his body, and he probably would have lain there until he starved to death if the choir hadn’t shown up for rehearsal.

  I have forgotten my First Aid training, except for one rule: When you encounter an injured person, you’re not supposed to move him. At least I think that’s the rule. Maybe the rule is that you’re not even supposed to touch him. Maybe you’re supposed to run away. Frankly, it’s all a blur in my mind, along with the Morse Code, which is the other thing I learned in Boy Scouts, God only knows why.

  Anyway, I just thought you should be aware of this before you read this article, assuming you still want to.

  You should get a thorough physical examination at least twice a year, unless you have to pay for it personally, in which case you should get one every eight years or whenever you think something is really wrong with you, whichever comes first.

  You can usually tell when something is really wrong with you, because you feel really lousy even when you haven’t been drinking. Sometimes you can cure yourself merely by calling your employer and saying, in a sincere, sick voice, that you won’t be coming into work. If you have faked illnesses in the past, you should subtly let your employer know that you really are sick this time. Retch frequently, and say something like “I’m really sick this time. Really. (Pause here for a retch.) Honestly.”

  If you still feel lousy, you should identify your symptoms and try to figure out exactly what’s causing them. Here are the most popular symptoms:

  Sharp, stabbing pains in the chest or stomach—These are usually caused by being stabbed in the chest or stomach with a sharp object, but it could be something worse. Dull, aching pains in the head—These are usually caused by a headache. Often, you can cure yourself merely by being irritable; if that doesn’t work, you may need aspirin or brain surgery. Vomiting—This is usually caused by eating clams.

  If your symptoms don’t go away, you should call your doctor’s office. Notice I say “doctor’s office,” not “doctor.” Under American Medical Association rules, doctors are not allowed to talk to patients over the telephone, because this would be unethical.

  So when you call the doctor’s office, you will talk to a medical personnel wearing a white outfit, whose job is to make an appointment for you to come in roughly six weeks later. If you are really sick, and you are a regular patient, the medical personnel may agree to talk to the doctor on your behalf, and your doctor may agree to phone the drugstore and order you a little bottle of pills that costs $34.38. But if you are really really sick, too sick to go to the drugstore, too sick to walk, too sick to even move, the doctor may want you to come to his office right away and sit in the waiting room.

  Assuming you can get to the doctor’s office without dying, your first job is to find a good seat, ideally one that is close to the tropical-fish tank and as far as possible from patients with visible fungus. Then you should read an old copy of National Geographic. Doctors like to have National Geographic in their waiting rooms, because it reminds patients that in many primitive countries people are not fortunate enough to have the kind of medical care we have here in the U.S.A. Many patients feel so much better after reading it for a couple of hours that they don’t even need to see the doctor. They just pay their bills and leave.

  But if you still feel sick, the medical personnel will order you to undress and put on a garment that gives your secret bodily parts a high degree of visibility. Then they’ll take some blood out of your arm and make you go into a bathroom and urinate into a glass container. While you’re in there, the medical personnel will hide, giggling, in a closet, so that when you emerge you have to parade around, bodily parts flashing in every direction, looking for somebody to give the container to. None of this has anything to do with curing you. Why on earth would they want
your blood and urine? They’ll just throw it away. The point of all this is to determine whether you are really, sincerely sick, sick enough to actually see the doctor.

  If you pass this test, you get to go into a little room and sit on a table covered with cold waxed paper for about forty-five minutes—this is the final test—while the doctor watches you through a secret peephole. If he is satisfied that you qualify, he’ll bustle into the room and prod you with various implements, muttering all the while. The doctor is not allowed to tell you directly what is wrong—again, this would be a breach of ethics—you have to listen closely to his muttering, and interpret it. Here are the standard doctor mutters, translated to laymen’s terms:

  “Uh huh”: This means “Oh my God.” “Ummm”: This means “Good Lord.” “Ah hah”: This means “I vaguely remember seeing a case like this in medical school, but it hadn’t advanced nearly this far.”

  After the doctor has finished prodding you, either he will send you to the hospital, which will give you a battery of extremely humiliating tests designed to weed out people who are not serious about being hospitalized, or he will call the drugstore and order you a small bottle of pills that costs $34.38. If he spent much time in the Boy Scouts, he may also decide to apply a tourniquet.

  “Great Baby! Delicious!”

  I have been a father for nearly six months now, so needless to say I know virtually everything there is to know about raising babies. The main thing is discipline. You have to ignore all those bleeding-heart psychological theories about being sensitive to your baby’s many delicate emotional wants. These theories are based on the insane premise that babies have many delicate emotional wants. In fact, babies have only one want, and it is hardly delicate: They want to put everything in the entire world except food into their mouths. As far as babies are concerned, the sole function of the world is to provide objects for them to drool on. If you were to open up a baby—and I am not for a minute suggesting that you should—you would find that 85 to 90 percent of the space reserved for bodily organs is taken up by huge, highly active drool glands. Scientists at a major scientific university recently conducted a study in which they collected, in scientific jars, all the drool that a six-month-old baby produced in one twenty-four-hour period. They were stunned at the result. Many of them had to go home and lie down.

  The greatest threat to your baby is educational toys, which you are required by federal law to buy several dozen of. Educational toys are advertised in baby magazines, which arrive by the thousands in the mail when you have a baby. In a typical ad, a baby is looking thoughtfully (for a baby) at two pieces of plastic. According to the ad, the pieces of plastic are helping the baby “acquire skills of problem-solving.” In fact, the only problem the baby is solving is the problem of how to get both pieces in its mouth. These so-called educational toys are merely encouraging your baby to act stupid.

  This is dangerous. If you let your baby continue to stick things in his or her mouth, he or she will have a hard time in later life. I mean, suppose your child goes to a major Wall Street law firm for a job interview, and ends up putting all the waiting-room magazines and ashtrays in his or her mouth. He or she would make a poor impression, and would end up having to be a bum or work for the government.

  So obviously, your job as a parent is to straighten your baby out. You’ll have to be tough. Here’s how I handle my five-and-a-half-month old son: When he’s lying on a blanket, putting various federally required educational toys in his mouth, I say firmly: “Robert, if you keep putting those educational toys in your mouth, I am not going to give you an allowance this week.” If he doesn’t respond to that, I up the ante. I say: “Robert, besides not giving you any allowance, I am not going to read to you from the famous Greek epic poem the Iliad, usually ascribed to Homer.” So far, Robert has continued to put educational toys in his mouth, but I think he’s getting worried.

  Of course, once you get your baby away from “educational” toys, you’ll have to occupy it with new, more meaningful activities. The best activities are games. Here are some excellent, meaningful baby games designed by a distinguished panel of baby experts:

  Oklahoma Baby Chicken Hat

  Grasp your baby firmly and put it on your head like a hat, stomach down. Then stride around the room and cluck like a chicken to the tune of “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” bouncing in time to the music.

  Wild Teenage Babies from Outer Space

  Lie on your back and hold your baby over you, facing down; move it slowly up and down, like a flying saucer, making flying-saucer noises and feigning great fear when it appears to be about to land on the planet Earth. (NOTE. Wear protective clothing for the preceding two games.)

  Attack of the Baby-Eaters

  Lay the baby on the floor, face up. Announce that you are very hungry, and start nibbling at the baby’s toes, then its hands, and finally, with great gusto, its stomach. Every now and then, yell: “Great baby! Delicious!”

  These games will teach your baby many meaningful lessons, the main one being that the world is full of deranged people.

  The only other major problem you’ll have with your baby is feeding it solid foods. Many kinds of baby food are available, all of them disgusting. Basically, the baby-food industry takes things that no normal human being would ever dream of eating, such as squash, and grinds them into mush and puts them in little jars. Babies, of course, hate baby food; they would much prefer the kinds of things you eat, such as cheeseburgers and beer. If we fed babies normal food, they would be full-grown, productive adults in a matter of weeks. But this would destroy the baby-food industry.

  As I noted earlier, babies do not take solid food through their mouths, which are generally occupied with other objects. Babies absorb solid food through their chins. You can save yourself a lot of frustrating effort if you smear the food directly on your baby’s chin, rather than putting it in the baby’s mouth and forcing the baby to expel it on to its chin, as so many uninformed parents do.

  B–Sts And Baby Care

  WARNING: This article contains the word “breast.” I checked with an editor, and he said I could say “breast” as long as I used it scientifically, rather than to arouse prurient interest. For example, I could say: “Two breasts plus two breasts equals four breasts”, but I could not say: “Hey, get a load of that breast.” Anyway, I just thought Id warn you in case you don’t want to read the word “breast.” The rest of the article is about raising babies, and it’s very informative, so for the benefit of those of you who want to read everything but the paragraph with “breast” in it, I’ll let you know when you’re about to come to it.

  The most important thing to remember about raising your baby is that you must not take anyone’s advice, except, of course, mine. Many people, such as your parents, will try to advise you, but you must ignore them. If they knew so much about raising kids, they wouldn’t have screwed you up so badly.

  Most people make babies out to be very complicated, but the truth is they have only three moods:

  Mood One: Just about to cry. Mood Two: Crying. Mood Three: Just finished crying..lm-# Your job, as a parent, is to keep the baby in Mood Three as much as possible; this means you have to figure out why it’s crying. Here’S a tip: Babies never cry because their diapers are dirty. You change their diapers only to make yourself feel better. You could leave the same diaper on your baby for months and it would be perfectly happy, although considerably heavier and less pleasant to be around. So that leaves only two reasons your baby cries: It is hungry. Some other reason. If your baby is hungry, you should feed it.

  WARNING: The next paragraph is the one with a breast in it. So you should either skip it or be prepared for some very explicit talk.

  You can either bottle-feed or breast-feed your baby. Many noted health fanatics strongly recommend that you breast-feed your baby on the grounds that it is very good for the baby. This may be true, but the real advantage of breast-feeding is that only female persons can do it. This mea
ns you male persons do not have to get up at the insane hours babies like to get up at. At first you may feel guilty about this, and you’ll get up in the middle of the night to give the female person moral support. But after a while you’ll get so good at morally supporting her that you’ll be able to do it without even waking up. In the morning, when the female person is exhausted from lack of sleep, you can commiserate with her. You can say: “I know how you feel. This morally supporting is no bed of roses, either.” She’ll really appreciate hearing this.

  If your baby doesn’t stop crying after you feed it, it is crying for some other reason. You can try handing it back and forth and saying: “What do you suppose is wrong?” This does no good whatsoever, but it is an old traditional ritual and it passes the time. You can also try making funny faces; this teaches the baby that its parents may be brain-damaged. Or you can give the baby educational toys. My wife bought our baby several dozen expensive educational toys, designed by experts to teach babies about colors and spatial relationships and other vital educational things. Our baby ignores them. He could not be less interested in spatial relationships. The only toy he really likes is an extremely tacky plastic Wonder Bread wrapper, which he stares at happily for long periods. I’m growing fond of it myself.

  Suet Won’t Do It

  Many years ago, practically nobody in America had a weight problem, because almost everybody was an Indian, and all there was to eat was bison. The Indians had bison for breakfast, bison for lunch, and bison for supper. After a few thousand years of this, they mostly just picked at their food. Then along came the early white settlers. They didn’t have a weight problem either, because they were engaged in Westward Expansion, which consumes a great many calories. Also, the pioneers rarely got a chance to eat. Oh, they tried: they’d be crossing the Great Plains, and the wagon master would yell: “OK, everyone, let’s form the wagons into a circle for a snack.” But before they could even get out the plates, the Indians, desperate for nonbison food, would attack. If the pioneers had been more thoughtful, they could have carried extra snacks, but they brought only enough for themselves, so unfortunately they had to kill the vast majority of the Indians.