These are blasting caps. Don’t touch them.
The post title is really only funny if you have seen my father perform a public service announcement from his childhood concerning the inadvisability of touching blasting caps on construction sites, imitating Willie Mays, with metacommentary by his schoolmates (”You could lose an arm or a leg… which you may need in later life. If you see them, call the police, or a fireman. Let HIM lose an arm or a leg… he doesn’t have as much later life coming to him as you do.”) Maybe someday we can put it on YouTube, along with my Scottish great-great(?)-grandfather’s admonishment that son, you’re going to college, and if you’re gonna drink, JOHNNY DEWAR.
However, the general thrust of the title does work with today’s topic, which is: Your Health & Safety.
1) Carry condoms. If there is any chance that you think you might be going to have sex with someone with whom you do not have a long-standing association, an explicit contraceptive arrangement, AND credible assurances of a clean bill of health, you should have condoms with you. Sometimes people do not want to admit they are planning to do something like this, because they think it is immoral, and people prefer not to plan behavior they think is bad even if they are likely to do it anyway, because they’d rather pretend they’re not. The morality of casual sex is basically your own concern,* but try to think about your past behavior (which is a way better predictor of future behavior than attitudes are) and just, you know, be prepared. Just because you have them doesn’t mean you have to use them. And you know, maybe someone ELSE will need one, and then they’ll owe you. Think of the backlog of favors you could accumulate. To this end, you might also want to carry around tampons, pain killers, and a hip flask.**
2) Wear a bicycle helmet, for the love of god. The other night I stopped at Trader Joe’s for a few odds and ends and the cashier, who I think was trying to be ingratiating, commented that, gee whiz, you don’t think about helmets and lights and stuff until you have a bike accident and then you sure realize that they’re a good thing to have! Actually, I have never been in a real bike wreck, various near-misses with idiotic motorists and that time I flipped over when I was 10 and still learning to use hand brakes notwithstanding. However, I do FEAR DEATH, and so I wear a bicycle helmet.*** Just recently frippy was in a bike wreck that cracked her helmet; as she remarked, she didn’t realize how bad it really was until she realized what it did to her helmet. She got off with a deep contusion in one leg, instead of a concussion or worse, because she was wearing a helmet. And of course there was that UW-Madison grad student who got hit by the UPS truck. As frippy points out, there are people who would never drive without a seat belt or stick their hands out of fast-moving passenger trains who blithely pedal around town with no helmet. BAD IDEA.
2b) If you are on a bike, do not ride the wrong damn direction in a bike lane. If there is any justice in the world, you will be hit by lightning, and also I will scream at you if you do it near me.
2c) If you are driving a car, follow the damn law and don’t try to turn left over bicyclists who have the fucking right of way because they are going straight through the intersection. I am talking to you, stupid woman at the intersection of Regent and Monroe with whom I had the misfortune to meet some time between 8:15 and 8:30 am on Friday, October 5th.
2d) But also, don’t try to politely yield the right of way to bicyclists when you have it. It makes me nervous, because you know, it’s never entirely clear if that’s what you’re doing or if you’re just momentarily distracted and about to hit the accelerator again and also, you do not control everyone else on the road! Just follow the law! We all (theoretically) know what it is, which cuts down on the potentially fatal misunderstandings, okay?
3) If you need help, do not be embarrassed to ask a stranger. Pretty much everyone would rather call 911 for you when you can still provide some relevant information than have to report finding your non-responsive or lifeless body. And in many situations, they may not realize you need help (and are not just, say, having an emotional meltdown in the ladies’ room) unless you tell them, so SAY SOMETHING. Embarrassment is generally not fatal.
4) Do not use Mr. Clean Magic Erasers on exposed skin, even if you are covered in pink stains. You will get a rash, which is arguably more unsightly than the pink stains and definitely more painful.
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*Readers, long-term and walk-through, may draw their own conclusions about my opinion on the subject.
**Remember when my flask saved the day at San Francisco Pride? Lousy over-priced under-boozed PrideFest “margaritas.” Jose Cuervo lemonade, more like it.+
***Okay, early indoctrination and my father’s clever technique of equating helmet use with intelligence, a quality highly salient to my sense of self–”People who don’t wear helmets have nothing to protect”–probably helped, too.
+Some local legal restrictions may apply.
October 9th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
The thing that keeps me wearing my helmet and wearing a seatbelt is the fear of being made an example of. You’d think fear of serious injury or death would be it, but no, it’s seeing the obituary in my head saying “…and she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt” and then, you know, becoming part of some sort of cheesey public service announcement. That’s what keeps the helmet on my head and the belt buckled. I think my priorities may be slightly askew.
October 9th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
I carried around condoms for years before I’d ever had sex, during times when I was completely sure I wasn’t going to. The fantasy I had was that some friend was going to be heading off on an exciting adventure, and I’d say “you be careful out there.” Then I’d wink and toss them a condom.
October 10th, 2007 at 6:07 am
You would be astounded (or maybe you wouldn’t, but you should be) how many apparently sensible parents, who are entirely pro-not-getting-pregnant, think that condom-carrying is a possible sign of moral depravity when done by their child’s new significant other, even when both the child and the significant other are over the age of consent.
Having been knocked off my bike, I wholeheartedly concur about helmets. On the other hand, I have been stopped and made to dismount by a policeman when riding a bike after dark with a front light the battery of which had just inconveniently died. (So has my granny, on the way home from an airmen’s dance in the blackout during WWII.)
October 10th, 2007 at 9:22 am
Gosh, so many things I want to comment on in this post.
a) You’re no doubt aware of the study (Lipsitz et al. 2003, a poster at the APA) showing that adolescents who took virginity pledges were no less likely to have sex before marriage than others, but significantly less likely to use a condom when they did. The wonders of “immorality” taboos.
b) I love to carry around useful stuff in case someone needs it. In Tucson, where many of the streets are dished in the middle instead of crowned, the occasional heavy rain turns main thoroughfares into rivers and intersections into lakes. Idiots drive through these too fast, and back in the 70s and 80s when I lived there, got water under their distributor caps. Any time I was driving somewhere after a big rain I would stop once or twice to spray WD-40 inside someone’s distributor cap, displacing the water and allowing them to start their car. And then I would feel self-righteous all day.
c) I also had a bike wreck in which I cracked my helmet, and I remember at the precise moment that my head was slamming into the pavement thinking “God, I’m glad I’m wearing a helmet.”
d) The whole “only yield if you’re supposed to” thing applies to 4-way stops as well as to interactions with bikes. Around here it tends to turn into this “After you, Alphonse” routine that delays getting through the intersection more than just going when it’s LEGALLY YOUR TURN.
October 11th, 2007 at 7:28 am
1) Yes. Excellent advice. Advice that I certainly do follow. Although probably more for Michael’s reason of being that cool friend with the Jimmy hats. Heh. I said “Jimmy hats.”
2) Have you seen the websites where bike “experts” attempt to justify that they don’t need to wear a helmet? Yuck. They use such logic as: “Well, when you wear a helmet you’re adding 2 inches to your height, which means that sometimes when you hit your helmet on, say, an overhead tree branch, it WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED if you were not wearing a helmet. So helmets make riding seem even more dangerous than it is, and are therefore a placebo.” Or the equally annoying “It only cracked your helmet because helmets are flimsy anyway.”
My pet peeve is cyclists who ride the wrong way down a one-way street. I always tell my friends, “When in doubt, ride like a car.”
October 11th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Adding to Darius K.’s comment, another excuse I’ve heard for not wearing a helmet is that drivers will see you wearing a helmet and assume you’re an expert cyclist and not swerve as much as they would if they saw you riding with an unprotected head and thus run a greater risk of knocking you over. I can’t remember where I saw these findings, but it did generate a small buzz.
I still wore my helmet. I mean, my accident had nothing to do with motorists. I lost control going downhill and hit a parked car with no one in it. There’s enough potential hazards on the ground to necessitate a helmet even if the street was blocked off to all motor vehicles.
I still hate BICYCLISTS ON THE SIDEWALK. One problem with this, aside from running down pedestrians, is that when motorists see a good number of bicycles on the sidewalk, they think you, the law-abiding bicyclist in the street, are the one disobeying bicycle safety rules and they honk at you to get out of the street.
October 13th, 2007 at 10:05 am
I might add, along with the condoms, if you’re at all able, carry around a small packet of condom safe lube. You greatly reduce your risk of disease by using a lube, condom tearing and tissue damage are less likely. Also, please ask your partner about latex allergies or sensitivity, inflamed tissues are infectable tissues. Also, carry around condoms if you plan on using toys, for easier clean up at the very least, put a clean condom on for every person who will be on the receiving end of the toy.
Really, I’m not a complete freak, I’m just very serious about safe sex.
Hearing about the hell that cyclists and motorcyclists have to deal with on the road has put me right off the idea of taking up biking as my main mode of transport. People only get one lesson in sharing the road with cyclists, that’s when they apply for their first driver’s license (well, in the US anyway). Folks have a vague idea of who is the at fault party in a cyclist accident (almost 100% of the time it will be the car driver) but they know exactly who the at fault party is in a pedestrian accident. I’d rather walk everywhere, even if that means having to walk really really far to get groceries.
October 15th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
well, grad students should wear bike helmets…they have more invested up there than undergrads.