I'll Tell You This For Free: Never Get The First Vitamin They Tell You To Buy

Elsewhere: I wrote about visiting gay bathhouses for Coyote last week. You should go sometime!

Ordinarily I dislike standing in line. You might as well advertise that here’s something you need but don’t have yet. I will do almost anything to avoid it. You can easily see how unpleasant and narcissistic this sort of self-conscious discomfort with acknowledging desire can become. Never in my life have I walked past a person waiting in line and thought twice about it, but I cannot bring myself to believe that anyone could ignore the sight of me waiting in line. But I liked this line…

The bathhouse provides you with a towel, which you may choose to either wear or carry. But you had better hang onto it because there is nothing to visually distinguish your towel from anybody else’s. So even if you think “I’m sure I’ll remember which towel is mine. I’m standing right next to the towel rack,” you’d better be sure you have a bulletproof memory, because five minutes later you will have no idea which one of them is yours. You must provide your own shower shoes, and woe betide you if you forget them. That’s the uniform.

Every once in a while you’ll see someone add a hat to the ensemble, but I do not consider this to be advisable. It brings nothing to the table. There is no rule against wearing hats, at least not that I could see, but between the darkness and the humidity there is no reason to wear one.

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Previously in kitchen coverage: Don’t use your freezer too much, you’ll get complacent and forget about the food you’ve got in there.

How to win the battle against objects: “Find at least two things to blame besides yourself after an avoidable domestic accident.”

Point/Counterpoint: Point: Look at that. I want it. Counterpoint: But there’s already so much food at home that you hate.

Buy more canned potatoes: “Weeknight dinners are always ‘coming together,’ like nation-states after a tragedy.”

Never soak a pan for longer than twenty minutes: “Fifteen minutes is plenty long enough. Set a timer and clean something else in the kitchen so your body knows it has not yet exited Chore Mode, and then when the timer goes off, go and scrub.”

Always buy a can of condensed milk when you buy a can of evaporated milk and vice versa: “They’re always right next to each other in the same aisle, no matter which grocery store you go to, so it’s no extra trouble. They both last forever, and the difference is pretty clear once you open the can (the condensed stuff having the consistency of wallpaper-paste and the evaporated stuff having the consistency of light cream), so the only real problem is the risk of coming home with the wrong one and not the other, which I have just handily eliminated at no additional cost to you, the thrifty consumer.”

They’re always telling you to get a new kind of vitamin (you know how they are!), these days. And it’s easy enough to fall into a vitamin-chasing cycle, because you don’t need a prescription to pick them up at the drugstore and maybe you won’t end up having to see a doctor if you just find the right vitamin.

But more fool you if you run out and buy whatever kind of vitamin is supposed to cure your ailments. The very minute that you do, you’re going to find out that the regular, factory-standard-issue version of the vitamin in question doesn’t do a damn thing, that it either needs some secondary vitamin in order to activate the salient properties or there’s some further subgenre of vitamin, and only that one works.

Let us say that you’re a little tired. And who among us isn’t? The truth is that you’re probably supposed to be a little tired. You’re supposed to get tired every single day so that you will become willing to fall asleep. But maybe your tiredness has become inveterate, so you decide you might be deficient in Vitamin D.

Like a rube you purchase a bottle of Vitamin D at the supermarket, and only then do you discover that Vitamin D by itself will do nothing and also kill you. You were the only person in the world who had never heard about the synergistic interplay between Vitamin D and Vitamin K, and now you’re down twenty dollars in exchange for a bottle of poison that is also useless.

Or let us say, conversely, that you suffer from being insufficiently tired, at which point a podcast will find you and see to it that you order melatonin (melatonin is a vitamin); only after you made a substantial purchase will you learn that you need a comically small dose of melatonin in order for it to work, that you should be taking homeopathic quantities of melatonin, that homeopathy is in fact legitimate in this case. Worse, you might try magnesium to increase your sleepiness, but woe betide you if you only bought “magnesium,” because the only good kind of magnesium is magnesium glycinate, and if you buy magnesium with any other surname you’ve just paid to give yourself diarrhea.

And it’s no good trying to find out the trick before you buy the vitamin. They’ll just release a new update as soon as you’ve parted with some cash, and besides which you’re only going to get tired again tomorrow. No point in trying to fight it.

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