My mother's been worried sick about me ever since I started taking a daily nap in the middle of the day, which has been like six years now. At first, she was mostly bitching about how I lost three or four hours of productivity every day to the sweet confines of sleep, but then I got a blood test and found out that I had mono, and now Mom's afraid that I've got lupus or ebola or chronic fatigue something. I wanted to calm her nerves and get her to stop telling me all these Epstein-Barr horror stories where poor kids who never got their mono fully treated wound up in an iron lung, so we went to the doctor.

I guess I've stumped the doctor, because the best advice she could give me involved the old standards, exercise and healthy eating (ha!), and a wacky New Age idea: stop hedonistically doing my work in bed. Whatever freaky metabolism's happening to me probably doesn't care how much time I spend awake on my matress.

Totally irrelevant, but it turns out that I've got high cholesterol, pretty much like the rest of America. Which explains why the doctor gave me a totally condescending, clip art-filled pamphlet with the title Understanding Fats & Cholesterol and maybe a third-grade reading level. First of all, who the hell is there in America who needs to learn about cholesterol from a freaking pamphlet? Thank God I got this photocopied fat summary because I've never seen a local news broadcast or a Lipitor commercial or read Parade magazine or been in a bookstore.

Surprisingly, this pamphlet recommends that I exercise and that I aim for a "healthy weight." I'm glad a tree died for that advice. The pamphlet also shills for Benecol and Eggbeaters and other mutant foods cooked up in a lab. I'm not even going to count the number of times I Can't Believe It's Not Butter puts in an appearance as a cholesterol fighter. And of course, the "Food Pyramid," which recommends I eat a minimum of 15 servings of food a day.