Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

sumo wrestler came into the room, diapered and oiled, and started tossing all of us against the walls? It’s not a particularly funny thought in retrospect. It’s a little violent, in fact. But at the time, it must have broken the tension for me. Because I chuckle for real.

A young adult novelist catches me chuckling, and she starts laughing. And I start laughing harder. And we look at each other. And then I am really laughing. A bladder-straining bout of laughter, the kind I’d get in high school assembly during, say, the singing of a Thanksgiving song, and which I tried to contain by thinking of my grandparents’ funerals and my own eventual decomposing corpse. But here I don’t need to contain it.

Ho, ho, ho, ha, ha, ha!

Eingorn wraps the class up: “The goal of the laughter movement is world peace. I know it’s corny. But we believe that if you’re laughing you can’t be angry. And if everyone laughed, they’d stop being so angry. So let’s take a moment of silence to say a prayer or a meditation and just think about world peace.” I close my eyes. Someone titters, which I figure is okay.

I walk home, flushed, a bit elated, like I just had two Amstel Lights, but also relieved not to have to laugh on command.

Julie arrives home the same time as me. She’d taken a friend to a play called The Scottsboro Boys for the friend’s fortieth birthday.

“How was the show?” I ask.

“I really liked it,” she says.

“Yeah, I heard it got good notices,” I say.

Good notices? Who talks like that anymore? I sound like I’m in a Damon Runyon story. I wonder to myself where that phrase came from.

Julie, God bless her, isn’t going to let this slide.

“Yes, it got good notices,” she says, laughing. “The press agents were very happy.”

Now I’m laughing, too. It’s not an explosive laugh or a sumo laugh, but it’s a good laugh. She doesn’t let it drop, mentioning the Stork Club, Walter Winchell, and J. J. Hunsecker. Julie beats the joke right into the ground. For that, I love her. No one can make me laugh like Julie can, not even Eingorn.

Magical Thinking

There’s a great quote I once read, but I can’t figure out who said it, despite intensive Googling. It’s from a celebrity who was asked as he got off a plane, “How was your flight?” To which he replied: “Terrible. I’m exhausted from keeping the damn plane in the air with my worrying.”

That’s how I feel a lot of the time. I’m a master of magical thinking.

My general feeling is: If I fret long and hard enough about X, then X will not occur. If I don’t fret, if I go about happily reading my American Way and chuckling at the Nicolas Cage movie, I’ll be punished for my insouciance. As will everyone on the flight. In this horrible perversion of the Puritan work ethic, it’s my duty to fret.

To properly engage in magical thinking, I find you have to think of every possible ghastly scenario. That’s the only way you outsmart fate.

This ritual can be tremendously time-consuming. The other night, Julie went to a movie with her mom. Three hours later, she still wasn’t home. Three hours and twenty minutes—nothing. I called her cell phone. No answer. I checked the movie length. Just an hour and twenty minutes.

I had my work cut out for me.

Maybe she was killed.

Maybe she had an ischemic stroke.

Maybe there was a bioterror attack at the theater.

You have to be thorough and cover even the most unlikely of scenarios.

Maybe she met another guy. Probably an old boyfriend—she went on a lot of blind dates back in the day.

Choked on the Twizzlers.

Fell on the third rail on the C-line.

I searched the Internet for New York crime stories. Nothing about Julie or a nerve gas explosion at the Loews cineplex.

Finally, three hours and forty minutes later, I hear the latch on the door click. I’m flooded with relief. But also a sense of victory that I got her home safely. Thank God I outwitted fate yet again.

Turns out the movie’s star—Juliette Lewis—showed up unexpectedly at the end of the movie to do a Q&A with the audience. Some kind of buzz-marketing campaign. That was the big delay.

I know my worries were illogical and unhealthy. Stinkin’ thinking, as the professionals say. But my brain adores anxiety and clings to it hard.

A couple of weeks ago, I got some help from a reader named Bella from Portland. She e-mailed me that she’d read an article I wrote in Esquire magazine about outsourcing my life. I’d hired a team of people in Bangalore, India, to answer my phones and return my e-mails.

She wrote: “I was wondering if I could outsource some of my worry to you. You see, I am a high school senior, and I am working on applying to college. I’ve been stressed about where I will or will not get in, and how much financial aid I will receive. I ask because you said it was very comforting to have someone to worry for you. I thought it might calm me down to have someone worry my worries. Now, I have no money to pay you for my worries, but maybe we could make an exchange. I could worry about something for you, and you could worry about college for me. I’m a very good worrier! Almost too good . . .”

She’d worry for me? That’s a great idea. I e-mailed her that she had a deal.

The next day I worried for her about the admissions guy at Vassar, one of the schools to which she applied. What if he had a bad chicken salad sandwich before reading her application? What if he had a fight with his wife? These things are so arbitrary.

She e-mailed me that she was worrying about the looming deadline for my health book.

“Today I worried about the length of February, in terms of how many days you have.