I DON'T WANT TO CHEW MY VITAMIN

Thorny

"Thorny"

The alternative title for this post was The Noise My Nose Makes, because, holy goats, I kid you not, the other night it sounded like someone was dialing a rotary phone inside my right nostril every time I inhaled. The next night, as I rolled over onto my other side, I felt all the snot in my face shift over to the new side. It made the kind of sound that I image glaciers make as they gouge their way slowly across the earth. I am currently breathing through one nostril. That's actually progress. Wednesday morning I woke up with a sore throat and my right ear aching. I spent the day on the couch mindlessly watching TV. Thursday morning, I got up thinking I might go to work, only to have my body slam back into bed and declare otherwise. Friday morning, I got up, showered and dressed for work only to have my body slam me back down into bed again and say "Not yet." 

So for three days in a row, it has been just me on the couch with sometimes the dog, sometimes the cat or sometimes the cat and dog. I'm kicking myself now for not setting up a camera to do a time lapse. I'm sure it would look very cinematic with me laying in the same spot with the same blank stare while the animals moved around me. Sounds like a scene from a depressing Bridgette Jones kind of movie.  I've been watching a lot of TV. A lot of TV. In three days, I've watched the series finale of Mad Men (Which I don't recommend watching on the anniversary of your husband's death just because of that scene with Birdie and Don talking on the phone about her cancer), five movies, all of season one of the Lizzie Borden Chronicles, and a partial Designing Women marathon on LogoTV. I have also witnessed countless of ads for all of the things a person doesn't even know they need. For some reason the ads for adult gummy vitamins seems to have made the most impression (implantation?). 

Now, when I was a kid, I had Flintstone chewable vitamins like most children of the 80s. I ate them by the handful like candy because they were delicious. When Mom realized we were going through a jar of vitamins a week, she got a bit more diligent on monitoring my vitamin intake. But for a while there, I was eating a handful of sweet tarty yummy multi-vitamin goodness with my breakfast every morning. Ten million strong and growing. What did they expect? The Bayer company made them taste like candy and for a kid who didn't get candy unless it was a holiday, they might as well have just declared a serving size of ten or twenty. One vitamin. Ha! What a joke. Then I grew up. I learned to respect and appreciate my parents decision to limit our candy exposure. Thanks to them, I am not a big candy eater. I eat a bite of candy, think "Oh that's lovely." and then set it aside and forget about it for a month or so.

While I was growing up, I also learned to swallow pills and take grown up vitamins. I have been happily swallowing my multi-vitamin ever since. Not to long ago, I ran out of vitamins. I went to the vitamin section of Target and in the one hundred days (or so) since I last purchased vitamins, things on that isle had completely changed. All of the usual pill form vitamins had been replaced with gummy vitamins. Rows and rows of bright colorful gummy vitamins. It was like some Twilight Zone geriatric candy shop. I did not want a gummy vitamin. I take my vitamins in the morning. Gummy fruit flavors do not mix with toothpaste. I don't need to chew my vitamin. I don't need my vitamins to be gooey and stick in my teeth, but there's a little more to this than just eating a vitamin.

Gummy vitamins feel slightly insulting.  Kids get gummy vitamins because they're kids. They like eating chicken pressed into the shape of tiny dinosaurs.  Broccoli is a spoon for cheese or ranch dressing. Kids have to be tricked and bribed into eating things that are good for them. For God sake, they put yogurt in tubes with crazy colors because kids think that its fun to slurp their yogurt and as parents we totally buy into it because it's hard enough getting them to eat anything. I am not a child. I don't need to be tricked or bribed to take a multi-vitamin. I don't need my vitamin to be hip, cool, or sexy. I just need to take a multi-vitamin, preferably one I don't have to chew. I know. I sound curmudgeonry. Like maybe taking a bright pink chewy vitamin would make me less cranky. 

Breathing out of both sides of my nose would make me less cranky.