Read My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places Online
Authors: Mary Roach
My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places
A READER’S DIGEST BOOK
Copyright © 2013 The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.
All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction, in any manner, is prohibited.
Reader’s Digest is a registered trademark of The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roach, Mary. My planet : exploring the world with family, friends, and dental floss / Mary Roach. pages cm ISBN 978-1-62145-071-9 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-62145-072-6 (epub) 1. American wit and humor. 2. United States--Social life and customs--Humor. I. Title. PN6165.R635 2013 818’.602--dc23 2012044977
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Introduction
To describe iconic American author Mary Roach is to understand the most genius of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde complexes. Take science and imbue it with sarcasm. Create a social commentary and add sentimentality. Detail death and layer on wit. Are you chuckling while reading a story about a funeral? Then you’re doing exactly what Roach intended. She lifted the gauze on mortality with
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,
questioned life after death in
Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife,
experimented with love and the lab for the sake of
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex,
and dove into disturbing aspects of space travel in
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void.
While her books focus on science and the supernatural, Roach’s column in Reader’s Digest zeroed in on the wonders of the everyday. When “My Planet” first appeared in our July 2002 issue, we knew that we had something special. As an institution that prides itself in handpicking moving stories that will make you smile and see the world a little bit differently, we were thrilled to add a writer with both abilities to our treasure trove of authors. Editors eagerly flipped to Roach’s column after receiving their first-bound copies of the issue and readers, too, took notice. Three years after it’s debut, Roach’s column was runner-up in the humor category of the National Press Club awards. Here, you can read her entire collection in one laugh-out-loud volume.
What you can expect from Roach is a curious curation and condensation of life’s little mishaps—all of which are filigreed with her humor. She details first dates, rants about marital differences, and dissects (as she is wont to do) the stellar process that is getting older (or, as Roach puts it, entering “the Age of Skirted Swimwear”). She breaks down her hypochondriac tendencies and divulges her uncanny desire to make lists for absolutely everything. In lieu of the latter, here are a few more things she’ll tell you about: Accompanying spouses to container outlets (“These stores cast a spell on people”), theories on compromising (“Like any normal couple, we refused to accept each other’s differences and did whatever we could to annoy the other person”), and the trials and tribulations of real estate (“The other day—true story—we saw a listing that said ‘yard, complete with outhouse’ ”). Serving as the nucleus to these funny anecdotes is her husband, Ed, who makes appearances as both a funny adversary and a worthy teammate.
In a piece called “Best Cheap Fun!” Roach details free ways to get the most out of life. The list (of course it’s a list) includes rooting for the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium and trying to sneak a bottle of water onto a plane, proving once again that humor is worth a potential black eye. Beyond that, Roach prompts us to find wonder in the smaller, simpler moments, leading us to a reader’s paradise of which we’ll never tire.
—The Editors of Reader’s Digest
Soap Opera
It was our first date together.
The man who was to become my husband, the man I call Ed, got up from the table within minutes of his arrival and excused himself to go wash his hands. I found this adorable. He was like a little raccoon, leaning over the stream to tidy himself before eating. At the same time I found it odd, as it typically would not occur to me to wash my own hands before a meal, unless I’d spent the afternoon coal mining, say, or running an offset printing press.
It was at this same dinner that I made the unfortunate decision to share my philosophy of bath towels, which holds that you needn’t wash them very often because you’re clean when you use them.
We both sensed something of a hygiene gap, and, not wanting to alarm one another, spent our first six months trying to hide our true selves. Ed didn’t tell me how he’d replace the toilet seat whenever he moved into a new place, on the grounds that he “didn’t know who’d been sitting on it.” He said nothing when I used the Designated Countertop Sponge to wash the dishes and the Designated Dishwashing Sponge to clean the bathtub, an act I now know to be tantamount to a bioterror attack. For my part, when I dropped food on the floor I’d throw it away instead of picking it up and eating it, and I’d clean the spot where it landed, albeit with the wrong sponge.
As time went by, we reverted to our true selves and the Hygiene War commenced. More than anything else, it was a war of perception. Ed has crud vision, and I don’t. I don’t notice filth. Ed sees it everywhere. I am reasonably convinced that Ed can actually
see
bacteria. Like any normal couple, we refused to accept each other’s differences and did whatever we could to annoy the other person. I flossed my teeth in bed and drank from the OJ container. Ed insisted on moving our vitamins out of the bathroom and into the kitchen, where the germs are apparently less savage. He confessed he didn’t like me using his bathrobe because I’d wear it while sitting on the toilet.
“It’s not like it goes in the water,” I protested, though if you counted the sash as part of the robe, this wasn’t strictly true.
“Doesn’t matter,” Ed said. Ed has a theory that anything that touches the toilet, even the top of the closed lid—which I pretty much use as a dressing table in the mornings—is unclean and subject to the sanitary laws of Leviticus.
Things came to a head one evening at a local eatery. When Ed returned to the table after washing his hands, I told him there was no rational reason to do that unless he was planning to handle his food and then leave it sitting out at room temperature for three or four hours before eating it. This reminded me of something I had recently learned in the course of my work, which was
not even raccoons wash up before eating
. Yes, according to wildlife expert David McCullough, of Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, raccoons are not washing, but merely handling their food. They do it even when there’s no water around. “It’s a tactile thing,” he told me. “They have extremely sensitive hands, and one idea is that they are just fulfilling a need to feel food moving around in their paws.”
I told this to Ed. He looked like he wanted to strangle me, and Professor McCullough too. I followed his gaze to the true source of his emotion: the restaurant’s cook. The man had his right hand tucked in his left armpit and was absently massaging the flesh as he read our dinner order and prepared to contaminate Ed’s halibut.
“Big deal,” I said. “He’s wearing a shirt. Maybe he has extremely sensitive hands and it fulfills a need.”
Ed called me insane. I called him abnormal. He was right, I was right. We decided we canceled each other out and that together we made one sane, normal entity, at least compared to, I don’t know, raccoons. Then Ed did something very touching. He reached over and kissed my hand, which we both knew hadn’t been washed since the night before.
To Do
or
Not to Do
There are three kinds of people
in this world: 1) People who make lists, 2) People who don’t make lists, and 3) People who carve tiny Nativity scenes out of pecan hulls. I’m sorry, there isn’t really a third category; it’s just that a workable list needs a minimum of three items, I feel. I am, as you might have guessed, a person who makes lists: daily To Do lists, long-term To Do lists, shopping lists, packing lists. I am married to a man whose idea of a list is a corner torn off a newspaper page, covered with words too hastily written to later decipher, and soon misplaced or dropped on the floor. Every now and then I’ll discover one of Ed’s lists in some forgotten corner of the house:
Rescrangen polfiter,
it will say. Pick up
grellion. Bregoo!
underlined twice.
It isn’t entirely accurate to say that Ed has no formal To Do list. He does. It’s just that it isn’t Ed that makes it, it’s me. It’s easy enough, as the same 10 or 12 items, mostly involving home-repair projects abandoned midterm, have been on it for years. I once wrote it out for him and put it on the side of the fridge. When I glanced at it some months later, nothing had been crossed off, though he’d added a few of his own:
Make violin. Cure diabetes. Split atom.
I make lists to keep my anxiety level down. If I write down 15 things to be done, I lose that vague, nagging sense that there are an overwhelming number of things to be done, all of which are on the brink of being forgotten. Ed, on the other hand, controls his anxiety precisely by forgetting them. If they’re not there on some numbered piece of paper, they don’t exist. So there’s no reason why he shouldn’t come directly home and turn on the game. People like me really gum up the works for people like Ed by calling them during the day to see if they’ve gotten around to any of the things on the To Do list we’re secretly keeping for them.
Here’s the sick thing: I don’t really care whether Ed has done the things on this list. I just want to be able to cross them off. My friend Jeff best summed up the joy of crossing off: “No matter how unproductive my week has been, I have a sense of accomplishment.” Jeff actually tried to convince me that the adjective
listless
derived from the literal definition “having no lists.”
It is possible, I’ll admit, to go overboard. Ed once caught me crossing an errand off my list—just for the satisfaction. I have a list of party guests in my desk drawer that dates from around 1997. Every so often I take it out and add the people we’ve met, cross off the couples that have moved away, and then put it back in my drawer. I long ago came to accept that we’re never actually going to have this party; we’re just going to keep updating the list—which, for people like me, is a party all by itself.
My husband is the first person I ever met who doesn’t even make a shopping list. Ed prefers to go up and down all the aisles, figuring he’ll see all the things we need. The problem is that he has no idea whether we actually need them that week, and so it is that we have six cans of water chestnuts and enough Tabasco sauce to sober up the population of Patoka, Indiana, on any given New Year’s Day. It seems to be a male pride thing. “Men don’t want to admit that they can’t remember everything,” says my friend Ron. It’s the same reason, he says, that men carry their groceries in their arms: “We’re too proud to use a cart.” Ron finds shopping lists limiting. “Take M&M’s,” he says. “Those are never going to be on the list.”
Ed agrees. He says the things on lists are always chores and downers. Ed wants a To Do list that says, 1) Giants game, 2) Nap, 3) Try new cheese-steak place. Meanwhile, the
polfiter
sits
unscrangened.
42 Minutes and Holding . . .
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The Way I Can’t See It
This is a story of loss and denial.
It begins in Colorado, on the freeway. I am looking for an exit called Drake Way. I notice I am hunched forward, squinting, barely going 40. All around me, drivers beam hate rays into my car. At precisely the moment at which it is too late to veer out of the exit lane, I note that the sign above me does not say Drake Way; it says Homer P. Gravenstein Memorial Highway. This is not good.
I go to my optometrist, who hesitates to up my prescription. She says that with a stronger distance correction, I’m going to start having trouble with what she calls “close work.” Apparently she has mistaken me for one of her patients who assemble microchips or tat antimacassars by firelight. I tell her she should go ahead and change the prescription because I don’t do close work.
“Do you look things up in phone books?” she asks. “Use maps?” She means, Do I read small print? She means I’m going to have trouble with small print. That I’m suddenly, without warning, old and enfeebled. Nonsense, I insist.
She shrugs and gives me a pair of stronger lenses to try. Then she hands me a bottle of lens drops, points to the label and asks me to read it. This puzzles me, for any fool can see there’s nothing written on that label, just tiny lines of decorative filigree. I study it harder. It
is
writing. “Do not use while operating heavy machinery?” I am guessing. “Now with more real fruit? Homer P. Gravenstein Memorial Highway?” I hang my head. It’s time to read the handwriting on the wall, which I can most assuredly do—provided it is neatly spaced and billboard-sized. I am old and my eyesight is going. She says to cheer up, that I don’t have to get bifocals, “just a pair of reading glasses.” In my book, reading glasses are not cause for cheer. They are cause for depression, or regression, or diphtheria, I don’t know exactly, because I can no longer read what’s in my book.
There was a time when I wanted to wear half-glasses, the way young children want to have crutches or braces until the day they actually need them. Today I do not want to wear reading glasses, not at all. Reluctantly, I wander over to the local drugstore.
The packaging on the reading glasses shows kindly white-haired people in business suits. The eyeglass company has gone out of their way to dress the models like functioning adults, as though people who need reading glasses can still contribute to society, when everyone knows they just sit at home tatting and reading telephone books. I can’t go through with it. There has to be another way.
At home, I do an Internet search for “presbyopia.” This is a mistake. The websites that turn up have names like SeniorJournal or Friendly4Seniors.com. One site informs me that “presbyopia” comes from the Greek for “elder eye.” I don’t appreciate this, not one bit. I’m not elderly. I’m 43. Besides, I know some Greek (spanakopita, Onassis, that word you say when the appetizer ignites), and “presbyopia” doesn’t sound like any of it. I believe someone made up this “elder eye” business, someone cruel and youthful, with four-point lettering on his business card. I look up the etymology of “presbyopia” in my dictionary, but alas, someone has replaced the words with lines of decorative filigree.
