That’s a pretty accurate description of fishing for deep-dwelling fish with weighted lures. A giant pain in the ass. Great exercise though.
Go to a strip club. Went once during a friend’s bachelor party. One of the most unerotic and depressing experiences I’ve ever had. Can’t imagine how much more terrible it would have been if I were sober at the time.
Jesus, somebody had one of those in our hotel and I thought someone had discovered a well-aged corpse.
Can’t imagine getting close enough to actually eat one.
I have to agree with you on both of these. On the second one, I was in a small private plane so there was enough room, but my partner was the pilot so I was pretty nervous. I’m sure autopilot out over the ocean is perfectly safe, but…
My niece is in Indonesia right now (long story) and durian is one of the things (I hesitate to call it food, based on what I’ve heard about it) she wants to try while she’s there. I have a feeling that it’s going to be something she too will only do once. :o
They do sell them here, but they are in the deep freeze, and STILL smell like dirty sweat socks.
A little bit of training and I think I could do one pass, maybe two (on a good day). And I’d need a pretty full day to do it. All five looks nasty. But even if you can’t do it again, you already done it. Congrats.
Have you considered RAMROD?
I don’t think “fainting” is an accurate description. What commonly happens to novice jumpers – and I experienced this myself in the handful of jumps that I did – is just that a powerful mental block kicks in where, after the fact, you simply do not recall the free-fall portion of the jump. If you had really fainted you wouldn’t magically wake up just as the chute opens, yet everyone remembers their early jumps just fine from the point where they’re descending under an open chute.
It’s a fascinating phenomenon. It’s your brain basically going “I can’t deal with the recollection that I was plummeting to the ground from a height of 3000 feet. This did NOT happen.” But it doesn’t really say very much about what you could or could not have managed to do during a free-fall emergency. When I jumped, the protocol was that newbies were absolutely not trusted to open their own main, so we were attached to static lines. But we were taught and expected to pull the reserve if the main chute malfunctioned, which is not really all that uncommon an occurrence. I strongly suspect that most of us would, in fact, quickly realize that something was wrong and pull the reserve ripcord, even though afterwards we might not remember a damn thing.
Never been to the Indy 500, but a business associate once gifted me a ticket to the annual Indy car race in Toronto. Boring doesn’t begin to describe it.
Toronto’s race is run on streets in and around the Exhibition grounds, and our seats were near an S-curve. Sounds great, but you’d get “vroom-vroo-vroom–vroo-vroom” as the cars went by. Then nothing for five minutes. Then “vroom-vroo-vroom–vroo-vroom” all over again, followed by yet another five minutes of nothing. Lather, rinse, and repeat, for three hours. I found myself wishing I had brought something–a newspaper, a crossword puzzle, a book–to occupy my time between “vrooms” that we could see.
So, I’ve been to one car race. I don’t need to see another.
Joined the military.
Interesting. I’ve never skydived, but I have “blacked out” twice when unexpectedly falling from a minor height. I remember grappling with a fellow day camp counselor on a bridge that was about 6 feet above a stream. I remember the wrestling and getting close to the edge, and I remember being in the water. I have absolutely no recollection of the actual drop. Similarly, on another camping trip, I slipped and slid down a steep slope that ended in a cliff about 10 feet above a soft muddy stream bank. I remember sliding uncontrollably to the lip, and I remember bouncing off the mud and telling every one “I’m OK I’m OK”. Do not remember falling at all. However, I’ve gone cliff diving in Hawaii, jumping about 15-20 feet into the ocean, and remember that fine. Probably because I made a conscious decision to jump.
More things I’ll never do again… See The Clash or The Ramones in concert. Not my choice or desire, but neither is ever happening a second time. 
If he were still around, I know how David Foster Wallace would answer the question 
The Tower of Terror at Disney World. I don’t do well at falling type rides, but got talked into it by my (grown) kids. One, at least, won’t be urging me to try again. I was nervous enough during loading that I missed where the handholds were. My youngest son was sitting next to me. When the first drop started I reflexively grabbed for his leg. He was wearing shorts. I got a handful of leg hair and the hem of his shorts in a death grip that lasted the whole ride.
I’m never going to do it again and he’s never going to try to talk me into doing it again.
Ah, yes. I’ve been to one strip club in my life, and that was enough. It’s interesting and arousing for maybe the first two minutes, and after that it’s awkward and boring. At least I found it so.
“Yes, hello, this is your Captain speaking. I hope you enjoyed your flight!”
“I thought he was offering PEANUTS…”
I felt that way about a Chippendales show. And it went on for THREE HOURS!
It was kind of funny to see all the elderly women in attendance, and their husbands out in the hall, waiting for the show to be over. 
Another thing I will (probably) never do again: take a statistics class. (vomit smiley) I considered getting a MPH (master’s of public health) degree, until I found out that it’s basically a health statistics degree.
I have a friend whose degree is in social work, and she referred to it as “sadistics”. 
Visited Moldova.
I’m sure I’ve got plenty, but I’ll add another movie. I’ll never watch Grave of the Fireflies again, and I own the thing on DVD. When I saw the schedule for this year’s Ghiblifest, I looked and said “There’s 8 bucks I’m saving myself that month.”
Watched Tarkovsky’s Solaris. Excellent movie, but once was enough.
I’ll never try Marmite again. I actually like the taste but it’s so salty I could hear my kidneys scream.
I’ve seen Morrisey live in concert. Biggest dissappointment in rock history.
OD on caffeine.
One summer when I was a paperboy, my weekday deliveries were in the evening and the weekend ones were in the morning. The weekend papers were dropped off at 2 AM, so many times I would get up and deliver at that time. To help me do this, I would take No-Doz tablets, which are 100 mg of caffeine, about the same as a cup of coffee.
So one day, having friends in my bedroom, one of them noticed my box of No-Doz. He asked what they were for, and I told him. He was excited, and wanted to try one. I said go ahead, they’re relatively harmless. He turned it around and dared me to take the last 3 that were in the box. “No big deal,” I thought, and took them.
Then he notice that I had another unopened box, which had 15 pills. So, another stupid dare, and I downed that entire box. 1800 mg of caffeine as basically a single dose.
I didn’t notice any real ill effects for the rest of the evening. I hung out with my friends the rest of the evening, then went home. That’s when the troubles started.
Needless to say, I couldn’t sleep that night. My mind was racing, my pulse too. I had to pee quite a bit, and I ended up being dehydrated by morning. What time I did spend on my bed, I sweated up a storm, with restless twitching. I was also extremely nauseated, and had dry heaves.
In the morning, my dad “woke” me up (having not actually slept that night), and directed me to mow the lawn before it got too hot. So I did, with the mower’s sound compounding what could best be typified as a hangover. After doing my chores, I was still alert, but tired as all else. I couldn’t even take a nap.
That afternoon, I delivered my papers, and was just starting to feel like I might be able to sleep, when my mom reminded me that it was my sister’s birthday, and we were going to her favorite Italian restaurant for dinner.
I had no appetite, but I managed to eat a little spaghetti for appearances. Upon getting home, I went and threw up.
I did get to sleep that second night. But it was a Friday, so I needed to get up early (not 2 AM, though) and deliver newspapers.
The stimulation is not like a cocaine high (so I’m told), so it wasn’t a euphoric experience. Later, I learned that every drug has an LD50, even OTC ones like caffeine. For my weight at the time, that was 7500-10,000 mg. I was below that, but at around 20-25% the lower end of that range, I sure was risking some serious health problems. I guess being in my prime probably helped me through it all.
Yep. That’s a car race. The people I went with were aficionados, who insisted on going to watch the race AGAIN, on TV after we saw the vroom-vroom-vroom version, so they could see the bird’s eye view. Apparently they did this every year. I was trying so hard to be polite, because this was by best friend’s family, and they had given me a ticket in a really expensive section, but my brain was getting mushier by the minute.
I have no regrets about having been in the military, and I’m proud that I completed Basic with high standards, and have an honorable discharge, but I would never want to go through it a second time either.
I’ll second this too. I was the projectionist for a run of Solaris. Watched it once. Read a book the rest of the time. Except when my friends stopped by and we chatted in the hall. When I was a projectionist, there were plenty of movies I watched only once, but not that many I vowed never to watch again, and then, usually the “Never again” ones were movies I hated (like* The English Patient*). But there were a few like *Solaris *that I loved, and yet said “Never again.”