The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment Read online

  ALSO BY A. J. JACOBS

  The Know-It-All

  The Year of Living Biblically

  The Guinea Pig Diaries

  My Life as an Experiment

  A. J. Jacobs

  Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 2009 by A. J. Jacobs

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition September 2009

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases,

  please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at

  1-866-506-1949 or [email protected].

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors

  to your live event. For more information or to book an event

  contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at

  1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Designed by Davina Mock-Maniscalco

  Versions of some of these chapters appeared in Esquire magazine.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jacobs, A. J., 1968-

  The guinea pig diaries : my life as an experiment / A. J. Jacobs.

  p. cm.

  1. Conduct of life—Humor. 2. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Humor. I. Title.

  PN6231.6142J33 2009

  814’.54—dc22

  2009024129

  ISBN 978-1-4165-9906-7

  ISBN 978-1-4391-1014-0 (ebook)

  To Julie

  (and also Courtney Holt)

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  My Life as a Beautiful Woman

  Chapter Two

  My Outsourced Life

  Chapter Three

  I Think You’re Fat

  Chapter Four

  240 Minutes of Fame

  Chapter Five

  The Rationality Project

  Chapter Six

  The Truth About Nakedness

  Chapter Seven

  What Would GeorgeWashington Do?

  Chapter Eight

  The Unitasker

  Chapter Nine

  Whipped

  Author’s Note

  Appendix A

  Appendix B

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Over the years, I’ve gotten a lot of suggestions.

  Some are intriguing. My brother-in-law suggested I spend a year growing my own food in my Manhattan apartment.

  Some are intriguing, but possibly come with a hidden agenda. A friend—at least I think he’s a friend—told me I should spend a year without human contact.

  Some definitely come with an agenda. My wife keeps suggesting that I spend a year giving her foot massages. I usually counteroffer that we could try all the positions in the Kama Sutra. The subject is generally dropped after that.

  The suggestions come with the territory. For the last fifteen years, I’ve attempted to live my life as a human guinea pig. I’ve engaged in a series of experiments on my mind and body, some of which have been fruitful, some humiliating failures. I’ve tried to understand the world by immersing myself in extraordinary circumstances. I’ve also grown a tremendously unattractive beard.

  My career as a human guinea pig began with a piece of furniture. I was working at Entertainment Weekly magazine in the mid-1990s, and the La-Z-Boy company had just created the most pimped-out, excessive chair in the history of human seating. It pushed the concept of leisure—or sloth, if you are feeling moral—to unheard-of extremes. It had a butt massager, a heater, a built-in fridge for you to store beers and cheese sticks, a modem jack—everything but a toilet and an outboard motor.

  I figured the only way to address this magnificent monstrosity was to road test it. See how it held up under severe conditions. Being a committed journalist, I offered to spend twenty-four hours watching TV in this La-Z-Boy and then write about it.

  The experiment was actually a bit of a bust. Somewhere in the middle of a Law & Order marathon at 3 A.M., I fell asleep for five hours. But I glimpsed the possibilities this type of journalism offered. I was hooked. Since then, I’ve put myself (and my patient wife) through a battery of experiments, the highlights and lowlights of which are in this book.

  To understand the global phenomenon that is outsourcing, I outsourced everything in my life. I hired a team of people in Bangalore, India, to answer my phone, answer my e-mail, argue with my spouse for me. This, by the way, was probably the best month of my life.

  To explore the meaning of Truth, I decided to practice something called Radical Honesty. I spent a month without lying. But more than that, I vowed to say whatever popped into my head. No filter between the brain and the mouth. This, by the way, was probably the worst month of my life.

  To slow the descent of my rapidly plummeting IQ, I read the Encyclopædia Britannica from A to Z. To try to understand religion, I lived by the rules of the Bible, from the Ten Commandments all the way down to stoning adulterers.

  I’ve been told—many, many times—that there are easier ways to make a living.

  Which is true.

  But I’m addicted to these experiments. I’ve come to believe that if you really want to learn about a topic, you should get on-the-job training. You should dive in and try to live that topic. If you’re interested in Rome, you can look at maps and postcards and read census data. Or you can actually go to Italy and taste the pesto gnocchi. As the old saying goes: To understand the Italians, you must walk a mile in their loafers.

  You have to be interested in the topic. That’s rule number one. If you aren’t passionate, it shows. But if you are committed to the possibility of change, then there’s nothing like it. And these experiences have, in fact, transformed my life for good. I may not keep everything from each experiment—after my year of living biblically, I decided to shave my beard and hang up my robe and sandals. But I do still observe the Sabbath, I still say prayers of thanksgiving every day (even though I’m an agnostic, go figure), and I still try not to covet and gossip, with varying degrees of success.

  The goal is that you’re able to keep the good parts and not descend into insanity. That the pain of the experiment will end up making life better in the end. And that your spouse will forgive you. For, as I’ve been told many times, my wife is a saint. A saint, I might add, who doesn’t tolerate these experiments lying down. (With the encyclopedia project, for instance, she fined me a dollar for every irrelevant fact that I inserted into conversation.)

  Partly, of course, I’m drawn to these experiments because I’m a writer. And a writer who is cursed with a relatively uneventful upbringing. My dad was not a carny or a drunk or a spy, as far as I know. My ordinary life doesn’t merit a book. So I put myself into extraordinary situations, and see what happens.

  I’ve always loved the genre. One of my literary idols is George Plimpton. He’s the Dante of participatory journalism. For the sake of the story, he’s been sacked by a Detroit Lions defensive lineman and punched in the face by boxer Archie Moore. Before him was method writer John Howard Griffin, who chemically darkened his skin to see how it felt to be a black m
an in the 1950s South. And even before that came an amazing nineteenth-century journalist named Nellie Bly. Her experiments ranged from the madcap—when Jules Verne’s book Around the World in Eighty Days came out, she decided to try to replicate the stunt—to the serious—she had herself committed to an infamous New York insane asylum to expose the abuses there.

  And when I read the encyclopedia, I found a whole other breed of heroes who experimented on themselves for actual science—usually because no one else would volunteer. There’s a great nineteenth-century doctor named Jesse William Lazear, who allowed himself to be bitten by a yellow fever-infected mosquito to show that the insects were spreading the disease. He died proving himself right. And there’s Sasha Shulgin, the Thomas Edison of psychedelics. A true mad scientist based in Berkeley, California (of course), the eighty-four-year-old chemist has invented 230 different hallucinogenic drugs. He has ingested each of them himself. “It is like opening a door to a hallway that has unopened doors for its entire length, and beyond every door is a world with which you are totally unfamiliar.”

  I haven’t taken drugs since college. But I know exactly what he means about opening doors. That’s what I’ve tried to do in my career and in this book, The Guinea Pig Diaries. I hope you like what I’ve found behind them.

  PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY F. SCOTT SCHAFER

  Chapter One

  My Life as a Beautiful Woman

  I’ve been a beautiful woman for fifty days, and no one has compared me to a summer’s day. No one has said my lips are like rose blossoms or my throat is as smooth as alabaster.

  Men don’t have time for that anymore. We live in the age of transparency. Say what you mean and mean what you say. As in:

  “You are a very pretty lady.”

  “I think you are very attractive.”

  “You look hot.”

  I’ve been approached by more than six hundred men, and that’s one of the big themes I’ve discovered in their method: cut to the chase.

  The directness has its charms, but like everything else about being a beautiful woman, it has its dark side as well. One suitor tried to seduce me with this line: “I would like to stalk you.” Another said, “I am in a committed relationship but am looking for a girl on the side.” Are these guys honest? Sure. To the point? Yes. Creepy? As hell.

  I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up. I stumbled into this experiment as a hot woman. This one wasn’t premeditated. As a general rule, I dislike female impersonation. I have too many bad associations of men in skirts—Benny Hill, Uncle Miltie, Idi Amin. But sometimes there are good—or at least excusable—reasons to pose as a female.

  The reason in this case is my two-year-old son’s nanny, Michelle. She’s a stunning woman. Before my wife and I hired her, I thought that hot nannies existed only in vintage Penthouse Forum letters and Aaron Spelling dramas. But Michelle—though I’ve changed her name for this book—is real. She’s twenty-seven and looks like a normal-lipped Angelina Jolie. She’s sweet, funny, has a smile straight out of a cruise-line commercial, and wears adorable tank tops.

  No one can believe quite how beautiful my nanny is. Among our friends, my wife’s sanity is questioned about twice a week. Michelle is so enchanting, my wife has actually given me permission to have an affair with her, á la Curb Your Enthusiasm. Of course, she made the offer only because she knew there was no chance Michelle would ever be interested. Michelle is too sweet, too Catholic, too loyal, too young. It’s like giving me permission to become a linebacker for the Dolphins.

  In any case, Michelle remains bafflingly single. So my wife and I decided to help her find a boyfriend. How about Internet dating? we suggested. Michelle balked. She’s shy. She’s not a big fan of e-mail. Her Internet’s down. And aren’t all the guys on those sites the kind that have a drawerful of ball gags?

  We told her that’s an outdated stereotype. We’d help her out. Or I would, since my job is editing and writing. I’d sign her up for a dating site, create a profile, sift through her suitors, and cowrite her e-mails. I’d be her online bouncer, bodyguard, censor, and Cyrano. All she’d have to do is give me some input and allow a few guys to buy her lattes.

  She agreed. And even started to like the idea. She wrote her own introductory essay. (“I want someone who will make me laugh at the littlest thing.”) We clicked her preferences (fish and dogs are the best pets) and uploaded seven smiley, PG-rated photos with nothing more risqué than an exposed shoulder or two.

  At 8 P.M. on a Wednesday, a couple of hours after Michelle had gone home, her profile was approved and popped up online. I’d been anxious about this. What if it went unnoticed for weeks, gathering dust in an obscure corner of the Internet?

  No need to worry. Her profile was viewed within the first three minutes. Then again a minute later. The page-view counter shot up to eight, fourteen, twenty. Not quite Huffington Post numbers but brisk traffic. And then the e-mails started pinging in. A good dozen before I went to bed. I know that technically these guys aren’t e-mailing me. Still, it’s an exhilarating feeling to be so desired, if only by proxy. (And mind you, I did type in the essay and clean up her grammar.)

  :-D

  “Hey baby, tell me you’re coming to London,” reads my first e-mail, from a British guy who works in advertising. Michelle has given me permission to reject the guys who are clearly wrong. An ocean qualifies as a deal breaker. I zap him back, “Sorry guvnor, no plans to come over there.” I liked my response. Polite and firm—but a little flirty. I’m getting into character.

  The next day, I show Michelle a half-dozen men with potential. The cute scientist with the Prince Charles ears, the guy from Long Island with eight siblings. We respond: “How are you?” “How was your week?” We keep it light, noncommittal—and short. That’s an early lesson. I’ve always been the chaser, so I didn’t realize quite how radically the balance of power shifts when you’re the chasee. Michelle could have responded with a random string of letters and numbers, perhaps an umlaut and a backward slash, and these guys would be encouraged enough to ask her on a date.

  After forty-five minutes of boyfriend shopping, Michelle leaves with my son for a trip to the museum. I spend an hour crafting personal rejection notes to yesterday’s discard pile.

  Hello sexygentleman,

  Thanks for the email. I don’t think we’re quite the right match. But it was nice of you to contact me. Good luck in your search!

  Then I type:

  By the way—just a friendly tip: The username sexygentleman might turn some women off. Maybe too on the nose.

  Perhaps it isn’t my place to say so. But, I figured, it is Michelle’s. If a beautiful woman gave me advice—solid, well-intentioned advice—I’d pay attention.

  Originally, I planned to send a personal ding letter to each of the unsuitable guys. But the volume is overwhelming. By day four, we’ve gotten close to fifty approaches. I’m starting to become shockingly picky. I have a growing list of instant deal breakers:

  • If the guy uses the word lady or ladies in his opening e-mail

  • If the guy lists his best feature as “butt” (ironically or not)

  • If the guy uses more than two exclamation points in one sentence (One enthusiast wrote: “Hello there beautiful!!!!!!!!!!!!!”)

  • If the guy misspells the first word of his introductory essay. (“Chemestry is important.”) I don’t want to be a spelling snob, but the first word?

  • If the guy’s opening photo features a shot in which his head is tilted more than 20 degrees to the left or right

  • If the guy has a photo of his Jet-Ski or snowmobile on his page

  • If the guy is wearing sunglasses, any hat besides a baseball cap, or is bare-chested in his main photo

  • If the guy refers to female anatomy anywhere in his initial correspondence (e.g., “I’m not a professional gynecologist, but, uh, I’d be happy to take a look”)

  Never in my life have I had such power. It’s tremendous. Yes, at first I feel
guilty about failing to respond to 70 percent of these guys. But it’s just not possible. And in a way, it makes me feel better about my life as a single man. Maybe when my calls to beautiful women went unreturned, it wasn’t because I was hideous or the women were evil. It was just a matter of time management.

  ;-)

  I am rooting for one guy. He’s got a warm, unforced smile, and he’s humble, but not falsely humble. “I’m a geek, but a cool geek because I use a Mac,” he writes. Unfortunately, Michelle rejects him. He’s a drummer and music teacher. Her last boyfriend was a musician. She’s sworn off them.

  Michelle and I respond to a lot of the e-mails together. But just as often, she tells me to go ahead and reply myself while she’s away. It’s an amazing ego massage, sending e-mails as a beautiful woman. It’s so easy. I type one moderately witty thing—not even moderately witty—and suddenly I’m Stephen Colbert. I told one guy that Michelle/I hang out at the Museum of Natural History, where there are “more nannies per square inch than any other place in America,” and he responded that he was laughing uncontrollably at work. He said Michelle is “funny, intelligent, caring AND gorgeous.”

  It’s not always adulation, though. A few suitors take a snotty tone. One writes that he wants to know more about Michelle but adds, “I can tell from your profile that sometimes you’re a handful.”

  That’s annoying.

  I respond: “What gives you the idea that I’m sometimes a handful?”

  He responds: “I am so right!”

  Now the bastard has really pissed me off. I click on his profile. A John Turturro look-alike with a smug smile. His opening photo shows him with his arm around a pretty woman with large breasts, as if to say, “I hang around with hot, large-breasted women, so if you are a hot, large-breasted woman, you should also hang around with me.” He likes to “work hard and play harder.” He is “VERY spiritual.”