duck-shaped pain

This particular supplement was recommended to me by a combination of friends, herbalists, books and the Internet. I'm not going to tell you what it's supposed to help, because some things are better left unsaid. [2]

I fear for my future now. Will it stop here, or will I eventually become one of those people who has bottles of little herb pills all over my house? I hope not, but this is one powerful slippery slope.

I've known a lot of people who liked to aquire lots of lots of herbs. The guy I work for off and on is one of them. Every cabinet and shelf in his house is filled with bottles and bottles of pills and herbs and vitamins. He has ten different types of vitamin C alone.

Just to let you know, I'm certainly not against nutrition. But there are certain qualities I attribute, rightly or wrongly, to members of the Supplement Crowd. They're obsessive about their diets. They're vaguely paranoid about things. They have an herb for every problem, and are not past getting you to try them, too.

I had a teacher in high school like this. She was the last and least of my three journalism teachers, and we didn't get along very well. No one I knew got along with her.

She was kind of granola-y, a young woman from the East Coast who decided to go to school in Boulder, which should send off alarm bells in your head. She was into things which I think are interesting now, but got nothing but scorn from me back then: yoga, long skirts, sandals, etc. (This has nothing to do with why none of us liked here, by the way. We didn't like her because she was sort of an idiot.)

One night, some other students and I were working late, finishing up the paper. Our teacher was there and she told us that she was going out for a bit, and did we want her to bring us anything to eat?

Of course, we said yes, thinking we were going to get Taco Bell or something similar. She returned about thirty minutes later with a big pile of nutrition bars for us, which no one was glad to see. "I thought you guys needed something healthy," she said. This was greeted with one long, simultaneous eyeroll, for we all lived on air and cigarette smoke and tacos back then and felt perfectly fine. [3]

The year went downhill from there, reaching its nadir when she hauled me to the office one day for DEFACING THE YEARBOOK. [4]

So maybe I'll just become healthy in secret. I'll hide all my nutritional supplements in empty beer cans, strewn about the house. People will come over, wonder how I manage to stay so healthy while living in such a dump, and then go home and quietly re-evaluate their lives.

[1] Hint: algae.

[2] My liver.

[3] I actually now enjoy nutrition bars , but those were still the worst ones I've ever eaten.

[4] I drew a comic strip for my high school newspaper (which, in retrospect, was pretty bad), and one day, the two yearbook editors asked me if I would draw a little picture of my main character so they could put it in the book. So I did, and they showed me a half-completed page, and told me to the drawing on there anywhere I wanted.

A couple of days later, I get hauled to the office. Turns out the girl who was in charge of these pages had a fit (she was a pretty unstable person, all around) and claimed I had ruined her page.

So we all had a little chat with the vice-principal, where I was asked to do this by the editors, who I assumed had final say over the page, and so I didn't think I had done anything wrong. I got yelled at a lot, the girl whose page it was cried for thirty minutes straight, and in the end, the vice-principal agreed with me. Victory.