The plan is to improve myself by going through this book of 52 ways to improve myself. I’ll probably half-ass some of it and screw up the rest in a well-meaning way, but if just one of these things stick, I’m pretty much guaranteed to be a better man. Right?
So the first thing this book says to do is drink plenty of water.
I should probably use a moment to clarify that I’m not actually reading what this book says, for the most part. Because why? It says drink water, I get it. How hard can it be? What’s to know?
Okay, I did look at how much water I should drink a day. Because I’m dumb like everyone and figure that someone else probably knows the key to my health. I’d rather listen to a total stranger with a book than my own body. This is the core of self-help. The self part is all the stuff you do, but the help part is that someone else tells you to do the stuff. The dash in the middle, I don’t know what that’s all about.
We all start at the baseline of 8 glasses a day, a glass being 8 ounces. Even though a soda can is 12 and a beer is 12, we’ve somehow decided that one unit of water is 8 ounces, probably because it’s just confusing that way. Water is special and gets its own amount. But complaints about ounces aside, we’re looking at a standard 64 ounces per day, according to this book.
However, the book has some additions to make.
IF you drink alcohol or coffee or soda, add an equivalent water for each.
IF you exercise, for every 20 minutes add a water.
IF you’re Peter, everything there is means you have to drink more water.
In addition, I live in a dry-ass climate, so I figure that’s worth an extra glass.
So let’s take 64 ounces, add in all that shit, and I’ll replace boring you with the math by just asking you to trust me, and trust me when I say I come up with about 128 ounces of water per day. Which is 16 glasses or 6.4 bottles in a day.
Now, emotionally, that’s going to be tough for me. That’s a lot of drinking, and even moreso, that’s a lot of peeing. Nobody seems to talk about the penis, and how the more you drink, the more you pee, the more your penis is unsheathed from clothing and vulnerable to attack. I don’t know what the attack is, which is precisely what makes it so dangerous. I’ll never see it coming.
Now I will say, when I drink NONE water I can tell. If I go for a sprightly jog around the block, which I do, it’s less sprightly and more Sprite-ly, by which I mean my body is like a horrific sludge of chemical.
The only thing to do was try and drink a bunch of water.
I kicked the day off by getting on the internet to prove that water was pointless. So as far as surrendering myself to the process, it’s going bad.
I DID drink water while I looked, however.
It turns out, according to one scientist, there has been no peer-reviewed study regarding the health effects of 64 ounces of “nature’s pee” per day. So that was good news, although if you want to turn to the internet to find a kook who disagrees with another kook, you could really build yourself a nice little online life. (http://geiselmed.dartmouth.edu/news/2002_h2/08aug2002_water.shtml)
And so, thus far I’ve managed to spend the time I could have spent DOING a thing by justifying NOT doing the thing.
Nothing for it. Time to drink.
~
It’s sort of amazing, but I kind of suspect a nice bottled water might actually taste better than that swill nature provides. Some bottled waters are oily almost, which I’m told is impossible by a Metallica cover song, which also adds in that involving a magnet makes things even more complicated. But most bottled waters are pretty nice. It’s really a wonder of technology and bravery that the invented versions of things taste better than the real versions. The first time I ate a cherry, I expected it to taste like the many cherry candies I’d experienced. My money was on cherry DumDum. And you know what? It tasted nothing like DumDum. It tasted like shit. Good one, nature.
I will say this, though. After all the pees, you can’t help but ask why we haven’t come up with some kind of drug or medicine that reduces the human need to use the bathroom and does so in a healthy way.
And can I say something?
Whenever I have an idea like a pill, almost a birth control except the birth is feces, when I have an idea for that pill, people really get a nice kick out of explaining to me how that’s stupid because here’s how the human body works. Which I find interesting because those people often wear corrective lenses, which DEFY the way your body works and improves it so that we can all get along in modern life. As does basically every form of dentistry. So when I say “someone should invent a medicine so that I shit once every three days at exactly the same time” I understand that it’s not an easy row to hoe here. It’s a row filled with logs of shit. I understand that. I expect there will be setbacks. Stuff that’s easy, we have it. You know what was easy? The chair. And now we have fucking chairs everywhere.
I drank water today. I would say it was fine, although this isn’t exactly a life-changing thing here. Nor is it something I couldn’t have come up with on my own. I will rate my health as being improved 0% so far. Here’s to hoping there’s better stuff in the 51 remaining tips.