There are some things in life that just shouldn’t be mixed. Eating out and human body parts are a good example.

When our daughter was little, we liked to eat at a certain Chinese buffet. The food was good and the ambiance was at least as nice as your average service station waiting room.

One night in May, we dropped in, took a seat under the Merry Christmas sign and noticed that the TV was turned up quite a bit. Just a commercial.

We got our food and began to eat when suddenly screams and howling came from the direction of the TV. We looked up, and “AAAAAUUUUUGH!!!” Someone was in a dentist’s chair with blood everywhere. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, and I suggest that you don’t, just a little imagination will tell you that this is not television to eat by.

We quickly changed seats so Catherine’s back was to the movie. The Chinese servers, who never had trouble with English before, were completely unable to understand everyone’s frantic pleas to “Change the Channel!” possibly because the pleas were drowned out by the agonized screaming in the background.

“Chalk this one up to experience,” we thought, averting our eyes and slurping down our noodles in record time.

Not long after we had another experience. This time it was an American buffet, and as we were looking for a seat we noticed that some of the tables had questionnaires on them.

“What fun,” I thought. I’m one of those people who will cheerfully tell perfect strangers anything (just in case you were wondering, I am fond of blue cheese dressing and I like to sleep with one pillow). All of the questionnaire tables were full, so we found another booth and began to eat.

After a while, in came a well-dressed, intelligent-looking man carrying, of all things, a life-sized model of a human spinal cord complete with attached pelvis. This was something I, personally, had never thought to take along on an evening out.

He took this object to a table of diners and asked if anyone was suffering? Someone was.

“Well, you might be out of alignment here,” and gave his friend, the spine, a crick. Now the spine was bent in a sort of friendly fashion. In fact, for something that had no facial features, it was remarkably, well, human.

The good doctor and his spine visited many tables, asking if people suffered from stress or lower back pain. This was in the happy days before I understood what chronic back pain felt like, and I wasn’t stressed until I began to worry about what I would say if he came to our table.

I was seized by an unholy desire to invent an imaginary complaint and announce in a loud voice that, “No, I didn’t have back pain, but could he do something about my contagious festering boils?”

Dr. Spinal Column never did come around to our booth, but that doesn’t mean he had no influence. The more I watched and listened, the more I began to realize that my own bones were painfully out of order.

Dave and Catherine were also becoming aware for the first time that their backs weren’t limber and carefree as they had always believed, but instead were put together like badly stacked building blocks. We hobbled crookedly out of the restaurant.

I think I can do the doctor one better though. His stuff was fake. Mine will be real. Somewhere I have a jar with my old tonsils to show, Dave still has his wisdom teeth and mom’s jar of 97 gallstones is probably around. I even have some random animal hides.

I’m sure I can do a presentation and call it “Our Amazing Insides” or something like that. I’ll bet people would gladly pay.

Of course, they’d be paying to get me to leave, but money’s money. And it makes a change from balloon animals.

Anneli Byrd is an academic adviser in Weber State University’s Student Success Center.