What is the most dangerous thing you have ever done?

Answering my wife’s question, “Do I look fat in this?” without thinking through the ramifications of my actions :-)

Playing Sardines.

While there was a cobra in the yard.

(I guess that doesn’t count, since we all went inside once the cobra was spotted.)

Me and a buddy somehow got onto the roof of the ARCO Building in Los Angeles and crawled to the edge for a peek 50+ stories down. High winds, no safety rails. That was really stupid.

Whoa! Wait a minute. A cobra? A real one? What the heck is sardines?
@ pup I bet is was exhilharating though.
@googly You do know how to live dangerously!

Substitute teaching. Really! You never know what the day will bring.

climbing a 20 foot wall and jumping. I walked away with bruises, but my bones were unharmed. I don’t know how I did it.

@googlybear…you just made me snort! That was funny!

Skydiving – it was wonderful!

Jumping off a cliff into a spring… It was a really tall cliff, and jumping was not allowed. I plan to do more. :) I like to live on the edge. ;-)

Get married. Have children.

When I was 15, a friend and I walked down the center of a partially frozen river for about 2 miles. The river was about a quarter mile accross. Only parts of it were frozen with lots of rushing water in between the frozen strips.

Dumb.

…I once swung a knife at someone. Does that qualify me as a crazy redhead?

I ate that questionable seahorse. Bareback horseback riding and then riding while standing on the horse’s hips with no help on my fifth birthday (Successfully! I should totes join the circus.). Oh, and I regularly walk alone in the woods in the middle of the night even though I’ve been held at gunpoint. Apparently, I didn’t learn my lesson about dangerous people.

@SoapChef
Yes. A real cobra. This was in Singapore, at a birthday party full of six- and seven-year olds. My friend would get cobras in his yard on a semi-regular basis. The family would let their golden retriever out, and she would kill them. I had a lot of respect for that dog (…but I still wanted a mongoose).

Sardines is like hide-and-seek, but backwards. One person hides, and then everyone else tries to find them so that they can join the hider. Last person looking is the new hider. Lots of people end up getting packed into the hiding place, hence the name.

Ok, fess up, who lurved me for attempted manslaughter? And side note, what is wrong with you?!

:D

@aug: I see you!

@asmonet: Me, of course. Another crazy redhead! and you were held at gunpoint?!?

I grew up in a city, and routinely snuck out of my house as a young teenager, and walked the streets alone at 3 AM. I was never scared, and nothing ever happened to me there.

most dangerous thing I ever did was sleep with your mom

@aug: Got mugged. :)

@skabeep: BUUUUURN.

She says with a smile!

When I was 13, I crossed a residential street. A car whipped around the corner, ran me over, and popped my foot off. I can’t remember the thread name where I mentioned it before, but you can see a more detailed answer there if you remember the thread name…

@aug: Basically, my manager (28) was giving me a ride home when I was 18 and working at a movie theater, we got to her car and two men ran up, one with a gun one without. The guy I got lucky me had the gun and she got the spanish guy who just yelled at her ‘menacingly’ eye roll Long story short, guy yells for my valuables, my wallet, my purse, my wallet again, my cash, and everything else without making up his mind and just being repetitive so I of course responded as I should in this situation. With an incredulous “Are you fucking kidding me?” He did not like that. So I shoved my purse at him rolled my eyes and told him to take it already.

This is the funny part, he puts the purse on the ground, rifles through it with what I can only assume was his distorted sense of manners and then handed it back to me nicely. wtf?

They run off after the other guy got my managers stuff and then I talked her through our next steps, grabbed my phone out of my pocket, called the on duty manager to lock all doors, throw on the marquee lights, got my manager to drive us to the front, walked in canceled her cards for her and my own, called the police and waited. All the while my manager could literally not stop hyperventilating and crying, then I went home, fell asleep, told my family I got mugged at gunpoint as I went out the door for work the next day.

It occurred to me in hindsight that I managed that suspiciously well. Like, sociopath detachment well.

That’s pretty dangerous actually, asking a man with a gun shoved up against you’re eye if he’s feeling humorous.

On the plus side, I now know I am excellent in survival situations bring it on zombies!, and I have fantastic interview answers when people ask if I can maintain composure during emergencies. That story actually got me my current job.

@katawa: Your fucking foot ‘popped off’?!

@asmonet: When my best friend was mugged (just a knife though) she said exactly the same thing to the guy “Are you fucking kidding me?” You’re both damn lucky to be alive! Glad you are, though!

Yeah, the police agree with you. When I told them what happened, one of the cops actually asked me ‘Why the fuck did you say that to him?’ And I was <<shrugs>> ‘Seemed like a good enough response at the time.’ Then I got weird looks for about half an hour as she told all the other officers and I giggled at their reactions. And my family thought I was insane, cause I just mentioned it between the stairs and the front door and then I was gone. :-p

Dude, a knife is far more terrifying in my opinion, you can torture with a knife, far more effectively than shooting a kneecap or something. Plus, there’s the ripping and the slicing, I mean, a paper cut kills. And I had a butcher knife through my heel once, it is so much more painful than I imagine a gunshot would be, which seems more like a sharp pain with instant pressure, that hurts like fuck but is a solid very painful ache. I could be all wrong but the knife freaks me out way more. You can run out of bullets, knives are never ending. Plus, the kind of people who would use a knife by choice, not just necessity or lack of a better weapon seem far more unbalanced. And way more interested in your pain and their pleasure.

Had brain surgery.

Slept in a bus station with all my worldly possessions and all the money I had to my name on me.

Drove 3,000 miles all by myself in a 30-year-old car that I’d only had for a couple of weeks and bought from a random person I’d never met before.

Jumped off a waterfall.

Chased a black bear off my front porch.

I’m sure there are more. My friends always tease me that in a horror movie, I’d be the first idiot to die because I’d go investigate some strange noise or other with nothing but a 4D Mag-Lite. And it’s true. I do that quite often and I live 5–10 miles from a maximum security prison that’s had a breakout or two in my time.

@Mac: I learned not to go looking the hard way. When I was 13 years old, I ‘investigated’ in the middle of the night in nothing but a ‘baby doll’ nightie. I interrupted a man in the process of breaking in to our apartment through the sliding glass door. My very loud screaming not only drove him away, but woke every one in about 6 apartment buildings! Cops caught the guy…and it turned out to be my next door neighbor! After that, I stopped looking ; )

Clearing IEDs in Iraq. running into housefires is kind of exciting too…plus I have a redheaded daughter.

@jholler: Yeah, thems bitches is crazy. Not that your daughter is a bitch. o.0

Skydiving, gliding, hotair ballooning and water skiing (in Scotland!)

Well I jumped off a very high cliff into the water in Tahiti because it seemed like the thing to do, I also jumped into a pen with some 7–9 sharks in Mexico (nurse) and attempted to hold on to one; brought to the surface by a very genial local who assured me that “they were not hungry…don’t worry”. While scuba diving I swam right into the center of a enormous group of barracuda because they were captivating in their beauty. Then there was the time I decided to go up with an acrobatics pilot in an open cock-pit plane over Puget Sound…and I wasn’t even tipsy for that trip! If I tell you more you might question my sanity… currently I’m a bit boring!! :)

Riding really fast on a motorcycle with no helmet on a really crappy road. I won’t be doing that again. My boyfriend crashed his bike shortly after and broke his back. It was really stupid. I also use to hitchhike everywhere when I was in highschool. That was prety dangerous and stupid.

I semi-hitched a ride to my best friend’s college town from the airport. There were a lot of factors that made me willing to trust the family that gave me a ride (near the holidays, offered because I was stranded, she was in college, I was able to call my friend and tell me when to expect me and how I was getting there, etc) but I took a ride from a total stranger. I’m very thankful to that family as I would have been stranded without them.

I also took the night train from Prague to Budapest with just another female friend.

@asmonet: Yep. Had a dislocated ankle. I was lying on the ground, looked down the length of my body and, lo and behold, there was my foot lying parallel to my leg. It was still attached, but just by some veins and some skin that stretched. We’re all very surprised that I still have it.

-Broke up a dog fight.
-Wrestled around with an amateur MMA fighter (he almost broke my arm…twice)
-Jumped on the back of a moving car and got thrown off when the driver slammed on the brakes. It was probly going 20–25 (just a guess).
-Oh and I’ve almost been run over at least 5 times…my driveway is very long and elevated and as a kid I would always ride my bike into the street full speed.

@KatawaGrey: Holy crap, that’d be surreal. Glad to know it’s still on there. :)

elcho..ARMBARRED!!

to answer the question, either smoking or trying to knock myself out with chloroform.

Unprotected sex with strangers…yeah, that was pretty stupid and dangerous in retrospect. Came out of it unscathed though, thankfully.

Being the only whiteboy in the black ghetto at night buying dope. I don’t do that anymore though.

Or being the only yellowboy in the black ghetto at 3am and wait for the night bus to go home all because of a double feature.

That was gonna be my answer, @buster! Well, tossup between that and driving too fast on a freeway covered in black ice. Something caught my left front wheel and spun my car towards the right-hand guardrail, which was also the edge of an overpass. I saw the Wrangler that used to be in my rearview mirror face-to-face in front of my windshield, and then my car completed its spin and I drove off. No joke, I should definitely be dead or in jail right now.

Cliff Diving