Or at least that’s what I told myself when I canceled my gym membership and the woman on the phone told me I was making a terrible mistake. Maybe one day, Sheri from LA Fitness will read this chapter and understand that she saved herself a lawsuit. You hear that, Sheri? YOU TRIED TO SHAME ME FOR NOT JOINING YOUR FUCKING GYM, BUT I PROBABLY WOULD’VE DIED THERE.

You’re welcome, Sheri. And you’re welcome, body.

ON NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES, OR THAT TIME I CHOKED ON A TAQUITO

Braces are an abomination. I know this is an obvious observation to most people, but I had braces for six painful, raw-gummed, swollen-tongued years, so I feel particularly entitled to complain about this one, and I’d like anybody who never suffered, or who didn’t suffer as awfully as I did, to understand the agony I endured for more than half a decade. Because six years is an abnormally long time to have braces, especially when the entire journey fucked up my relationship with food forever. But let’s start at the beginning.

Braces are barbaric. They are the only means of medieval torture that have carried over into common application today, presumably because they keep teenagers from giving enjoyable blow jobs until they’re at least eighteen. (Which has less to do with the fact that your teeth feel like knives and more to do with the fact that, whenever you smile or speak, you look like the Terminator registering his next mortal enemy.) You’d think, surely, that dental science and engineering would have, since biblical times, advanced beyond installing an entire airplane hangar worth of sheet metal inside a child’s mouth. But you’d be wrong. If anything, the dental profession has regressed even further, and I’m predicting that full-body metal braces that tie around the back of your scalp will be making a comeback in the next five years.

(Actually, I don’t even know if kids still get braces these days, or if everybody has those invisible braces that go right over your teeth, or if robots just replace your teeth with better teeth while you sleep. But in my day, we had metal-as-fuck braces, and they were the worst.)