My teeth are too close together. I have an overbite, so the edges of my lower-jaw molars cut into my upper-jaw molars. This seems to concentrate the pressure and make it very uncomfortable to have my mouth shut. My lower jaw really feels squashed.

I went to Osco today, to spend far too much money on personal care products like deodorant and toothpaste. The bulk of the bill came from a bottle of vitamins I bought. I went to Osco with the intent of getting an iron supplement, as I've been getting headaches and I know my mom usually attributes headaches combined with fatigue to low iron. However, all the iron supplements at Osco contained 200 to 300 percent of the daily dietary requirement for iron, and I didn't want to poison myself if my iron wasn't really that low. So I moved on to the multivitamins, which unfortunately almost all seemed to contain that evil mineral, zinc.

See, I have a multivitamin already. It's currently sitting in the back of a drawer, and it's been sitting around my room since last year. Every time I take one of the pills, I get a violent stomachache that lasts about five to fifteen minutes. Sure, that's not terrible, but a multivitamin shouldn't be such a trial to take. Especially since that means I won't take it.

So why do I blame zinc, you ask? Well, once upon a time, I had a little cold. Probably it was a big cold, but that sounds less poetic. Anyway, at this time zinc lozenges were all the rage for curing colds. It was a miracle breakthrough treatment, it seemed. Since my mom had some lozenges sitting around the house, I took one. Did it cure my cold? Far from it -- I felt as bad as if I'd suddenly come down with the flu for the whole day. All kinds of nausea. It was awful. I swore I'd never take zinc again.

But alas, as fate would have it, vitamin makers consider zinc to be an essential nutrient. Almost every bottle had a full day's worth per serving -- it was sad. And the ones that didn't have zinc also didn't have iron. Lucky for me, as I was about to give up and buy children's chewable vitamins on the premise that they'd never made me sick before, I caught sight of a bottle marked "with iron." It turned out to be some sort of stress formula, which I considered an added bonus. Here at last was the remedy for what ailed me.

Unfortunately, upon examining the label after purchase, I found it contains 833 percent of the daily recommended dose of DNA-deforming vitamin C. Guess you can't win them all.