I just watched a horrifying episode of the show, Autopsy. A woman went to a medical examiner to prove that she wasn’t the cause of death for three of her children. She lost a baby daughter to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) while sleeping with her. Two years later, she had twin boys. She got drunk with a friend one night and went to sleep with the babies. 
They died of SIDS. Of course, the cops and society interrogated her and made it out like she killed them. The medical examiner did autopsies and found out there is no genetic proof that the babies died in any other way than by her rolling over in her sleep and accidentally suffocating them. I feel horrible for the woman! But I do wonder why she slept with the twins after having lost a child in the same way. The truth it, people just shouldn’t sleep with their babies. Check this out and learn the facts if you have an infant or plan on ever having children. Don’t ever keep stuffed animals or pillows or blankets near the infant’s face while they sleep. And babies should sleep on their backs! Sleeping with your baby can be a bonding/comforting experience, but it’s not worth it!
We all have psychological disorders on some level. Lots of little kids have weird OCD tendencies but they disappear for most kids as soon as they get older and get made fun of. For others, unfortunately, the disorder is innate (genetically?) and they can’t consciously “quit” their ticks. Some count their steps or tap something with their right hand if they tap that something first with their left hand, to “even it out.” OCD is an anxiety disorder. You can say, “Joe, just stop turning the door knob 15 times! How about once?” or “Allison, just STOP washing your hands! It’s not that hard! Just don’t do it!” It’s not that easy. On the same level, you can’t just tell an anorexic to just “eat something, for god’s sake” or tell somebody who is morbidly obese to just lay off the calories. For some, it’s impossible.
Is cracking your knuckles a form of OCD? Biting your nails? OCD is an anxiety disorder. If Joe turns the doorknob 14 times, he feels incredibly anxious. He just has to turn it the 15th time. What if he doesn’t? He will! Because it’s the only relief for this horribly crippling anxiety! Is smoking an anxiety disorder? Drug addiction? Alcoholism? I think so. Try telling a smoker to just “stop smoking then! If you hate it, then just don’t have another one!” Good luck with that. (Although you may have better luck now since the price of cigarettes in Suffolk County, Long Island just got raised to $6.50 and $8.50 in NYC.)
One of the most strange and fascinating disorders is hoarding. For those of you who don’t know about it, hoarding is a form of OCD where somebody has intense anxiety about their possessions and they collect a ton of shit and never throw any of it out. What many people don’t know about is animal hoarding. When my 7th grade science teacher got busted for having tons of animals (dead, alive, and some barely alive) in his house and living in feces, I thought he was just being cruel to animals. I cannot believe there’s more than one person out there who has that disease! I guess I should have figured there was a relationship between Mr. Balsamo and the crazy cat ladies you see on the news who won’t let the authorities take away their precious cats.
There’s a fine line between abnormal and normal. Check the DSM-IV-TR. It’s a clinical guide to psychological disorders. You’re in there.
Aww!! I don’t think we’d ever eat a baby chick. But chickens are okay because they’re ugly. Are they really ugly? Or do we just pretend all the animals we eat are 
the ugly elite so we feel better about ourselves for eating them? Before we started eating chickens, were chicks still naturally inclined to become ugly? Which came first?
Listen. I don’t criticize anybody for eating meat. Eat dog shit for all I care! I feel bad for the environment and for suffering animals that you eat meat, but there’s nothing I can do about it and I can’t judge. I would love to be vegan for the sake of animals and the environment, but I don’t think I could ever, in my life, give up ice cream. Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream drenched in chocolate syrup and peanut butter sauce with Reese’s Pieces just does the trick for me. Plus, if I were vegan, it would be such a pain in the ass to do anything food-related because I’d have to search the ingredients of everything with a magnifying glass. You’d be surprised how much packaged food has “beef” in the fine print of the ingredients. Especially on Long Island, living vegan would be obnoxious as hell. Restaurants and family parties would be out of the question. I’d be dining alone for every meal and ridiculed for it, I’m sure. Not to mention, healthy food is expensive.
Anyway, like I said, I wouldn’t want to give up chocolate and lots of other goodies that come from eggs and dairy. So I understand that you can’t give up meat, because you think chicken is so damn good. My point is, stop acting like I’m protesting against you just because I turn down a steak! So many people, when they discover I’m vegetarian because I refuse to eat a “vegetarian” salad drenched in bacon bits, think I’m personally attacking them. My theory is that all people feel guilty (especially after seeing those sad videos about chickens being debeaked and other animals being forced into tiny cages and pumped with hormones that allow them to grow abnormally large…) and the guilt causes cognitive dissonance. The ego cannot bear to feel that he or she is doing something morally wrong just because he or she cannot give up that chicken. Instead, the ego justifies immoral actions by thinking things such as: vegetarians are ridiculous, I am right/They are wrong, humans are made to eat meat, vegetarians are unhealthy and pale, you can’t get protein on a vegetarian diet, the animals are going to be conceived and slaughtered anyway- I’ll do my part and eat them so they don’t go to waste. Do you really believe these things, or is your ego playing a trick on you? If you still believe all these statements (and probably more), I encourage you to read this…. Although I know your ego will come up with ways to contradict the statistics.
