You might as well know this about me right now: I am a closet
pessimist. Unbelievable as it sounds, beneath my nonchalant,
laissez-faire exterior, I always expect the worst to happen. I am
exactly the type of person who will take an umbrella to the beach
on a hot summer day and who keeps a fire extinguisher in the
bathroom next to the shower.
You might as well know this about me right now: I am a closet pessimist. Unbelievable as it sounds, beneath my nonchalant, laissez-faire exterior, I always expect the worst to happen. I am exactly the type of person who will take an umbrella to the beach on a hot summer day and who keeps a fire extinguisher in the bathroom next to the shower.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not paranoid, afraid to leave the house or anything like that. I’m just pleasantly surprised when things go well.
So you can imagine how excited I was to get my hands on a copy of the new best-selling book, “The Worst-Case Scenario Handbook,” a manual that offers advice on overcoming almost every type of dire situation possible. OK, it’s not new. It’s six years old, and it’s now the first in a series of Worst-Case Scenario handbooks.
Anyway, I was thumbing through it the other day, after removing dust balls and a piece of what I think used to be licorice, and I realized how useful this book is, and how I’ve been playing with fire for the last six years, by not reading up on the type of crises that could befall me.
For instance, if one day, you should find yourself wandering through the grocery store parking lot trying to find your car, and suddenly get stuck in quicksand (and you know this could happen), you can save yourself by calmly floating on your back until a courtesy clerk spots you and pulls you out. Although this idea may seem ludicrous to you, let me tell you, it’s much better than my previous plan of simply waving my arms and yelling, “Heeeeeelp!”
And that’s not all. I no longer need to worry about flying anymore since there are step-by-step instructions on how to land a small plane in case the pilot has been knocked unconscious. According to Chapter 12, if I ever get my arm caught in an alligator’s mouth, all I need to do to extract it is to whack him on the nose with a newspaper really, really hard.
Where else can you get valuable information like this?
I must admit that, as a pessimist, one of the best things about the book is that it gives me even more things to worry about. Before reading the chapter on escape, I never knew that I might have a need to jump from a moving car onto a train, or that I have the chance of being killed by a constricting python. I can hardly believe I was so naive back then.
I remember when I first bought this book, thinking to myself that the authors missed some crucial elements. For example, while there is a whole section on how to defend yourself against killer sharks, mountain lions and charging bulls, but nowhere does it mention what to do if you are on your way to a family dinner at your in-laws’ house and the one binky you brought flies out of your infant’s mouth and gets wedged underneath the front seat of the car.
Or what to do if you are at the store and your kindergartner, a budding junior biologist, asks the woman standing in line in back of you if she has a uterus, what size it is, and if she could take a look at it.
So I think that’s how the book wound up hidden away for a couple months – yeah, months. I clean behind my refrigerator more than every six years. Really. Honest. Definitely. OK, maybe not.
Of course, as soon as I tossed the book aside, I vowed I’d come up with my own parenting worst-case scenario book, and of course, those jokers eventually beat me to it. I suppose one of these days, I should go get it, but then I figure, I don’t need to read it. I’m living it. So I think I’ll just finish their first Worst-Case Scenario book. Oh, I know that my life being what it is, I’ll probably never need to know how to wrestle an angry bear, or leap out of a moving car onto a train. After all, the most dangerous situation I’ve been in lately was trying to clean behind my refrigerator.
But, that’s OK. A person can dream, can’t she?
Debbie Farmer is a humorist and a mother holding down the fort in California, and the author of “Don’t Put Lipstick on the Cat.” You can reach her at
fa********@oa***************.com
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