STRANGER THAN FICTION: TO ERR IS HUMAN, ESPECIALLY IF YOU'RE ME

They say the only people who don't make mistakes are dead. I don't find that comforting.

If you read the newspaper Sunday, you may have noticed my before-and-after fat statistics. We're running my measurements once in awhile to show that anyone can lose weight. And we mean ANYONE.

But imagine my surprise when I picked up the newspaper that morning to find my percentage of body fat jumped from 43.1 percent to 63.7 percent. What a story! Harvard scientists descended upon Cape Girardeau to determine how anyone -- even me -- could put on that much fat in just three short weeks and still lose 13 pounds.

Of course, the number was supposed to be 36.7 percent instead of 63.7, which represents a pretty good drop. With a mere slip of the finger, I had become The World's Most Flabby Woman.

My first instinct was to take a lesson from some disgruntled postal workers, but then I started to reflect. This whole incident gave me some insight into how other people feel when reporters make mistakes handling facts about them. They probably want some satisfaction in the way of bloodletting, too.

Good thing we have codes and secret handshakes to get inside the newsroom.

I thought about other things too. We all make mistakes -- in our jobs, in our lives, in our relationships, in our eating habits. What if someone went off on me every time I messed up?

Consider the two wedding engagements made and broken before The Other Half came into my life. You could say it was a mistake to think I had a future with a 28-year-old recovering drug abuser who lived in his parents' attic. Those bedroom posters of Alfred E. Newman that I found so amusing actually represented severe mental disturbance.

And what about Jojo, the 40-year-old, twice-divorced, naturalized citizen my parents couldn't understand? Did I mention he had five kids between the two wives?

Then there are the variety of bad clothing choices I've made over the years. Remember the baby-doll shirts over tights? Beautiful on a petite woman, horrible on an Amazon woman. I also own two pairs of stretch pants and a teddy that makes Mr. Half cringe in fear.

He and I both had the misfortune of believing we could trim our own hair. He noticed a couple stray hairs on his forehead that didn't seem to blend with his general hair population, so he did the logical thing and SHAVED HIS UPPER FOREHEAD.

Ladies, remember when you wanted to shave your legs and your mom said, "Once you start, you can't stop"? It's the same thing with foreheads.

I tried cutting my own hair when I was in high school. There was one clump of hair curling outward in a bizarre fashion, and it needed to be cut off. But once I cut that off, I noticed the bangs weren't even, so I trimmed them. Then they looked out of place with the sides, so I trimmed them.

The next thing I knew, I was sitting in my stylist's chair begging her to save me.

There have been a variety of smaller mistakes, like paying good money to see "Striptease." For my $5.25, I had the pleasure of watching my husband drool over Demi Moore's sizable bosom. The dialogue and plot stank.

But the all-time, worst mistake of my life involved the popular beverage Sunny Delight.

The year was 1994, and a bunch of my friends got together to play Trivial Pursuit. As everyone knows, Trivial Pursuit can be boring without the intake of several adult beverages, so we drank a few screwdrivers, which consist of vodka and orange juice.

The orange juice ran out, so a couple in the group walked -- okay, STAGGERED -- to the corner store. Instead of orange juice, they returned with Sunny Delight.

Never, EVER think Sunny Delight fruit-containing beverage is the same thing as orange juice, especially when mixing it with alcohol. I spent much of the evening and the majority of the next day worshiping the porcelain god, something that never happened with genuine orange juice.

So the moral of the story is this: Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

I'm ducking, just in case.

~Heidi Nieland is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.