What Water Do You Drink, How Do You Drink It?
I asked a few humans about their water drinking habits.
I try to wait till I get to the office because of the FREE SELTZER, which I drink every day. (Uh, every day that I go to the office.) But other than that I keep a stockpile of seltzer in the house, which I feel bad about ecologically, but I feel good about, mouth-wise. When I go out I also order seltzer, and about 50% of the time, maybe even more, bartenders give me that for freeeee. They just don’t care. Then I tip them whatever I was going to pay anyway. One thing I have noticed is that the price of mocktails is starting to approach the price of cocktails in Brooklyn. That is probably because they’re all made of some artisanal bullshit, so it’s not like you’re just paying for “nothing minus the alcohol.” But still. Seems kinda crazy. Anyway I am addicted to seltzer to the point that I can’t even really drink flat water. This is why I’m going to die first when the world blows up.
In my fridge live a half-dozen pleasantly thick glass bottles that once carried milk from the produce stand near my house but now carry cold tap water for me to glug down every second of the work-at-home day. A Brita filter (that hasn’t been changed in a long time) also lives in the fridge but is currently out of the rotation because it can’t keep up with my summer hydration needs. In general I drink so much water that my preferred vessels are weird oversize ones: ex-milk liter bottles, mason jars, flower vases from IKEA (not a joke). My biggest water-related vice is the sweet nectar of Vita Coco, which is not technically water but is water-adjacent and far too expensive for what it is, except it’s not because it’s everything and I’m going to go spend $3 on one right now because I’m hungover.
I drink tap water at home with ice made from tap water, and at work I drink water from the water cooler thing. Sometimes it’s a bad day so I go into the office kitchen and fill my cup with water from the water cooler, which is in a nice dark corner, and while the cup is filling I lean with the bottom of my forearm pressed against the wall and my body bent at the waist and my eyes closed and I just listen to the water filling the cup and I think about how it could be a trickling stream and I could be far from the office, far from Manhattan, fishing with my dad on the Androscoggin River instead.
I only buy water when I’m a girl on the go and need some, or if I get a headache and need to medicate immediately but am not at home or at work. And for hot yoga I buy those big bottles that are the size of your thigh. I pay $2 each bottle I buy, and I get them from the little bodega tucked into the tiles of the Delancey-Essex subway station.
At home we have a Brita pitcher that we keep filled extremely regularly, with a filter that we swap out only semi-regularly. (Mostly it’s for having cold water around rather than cold water of high quality, although with the weird black mold that appears on the kitchen faucet’s aerator, it’s probably good that we filter.) When I’m out for the day, if I am very thirsty and not within reasonable reach of a place (coffee shop, friend’s house, lunch place) with cups and a faucet, I will buy a $1 bottle of Poland Springs from a street cart and then feel bad about it. Buying anything fancier strikes me as horrifying decadent — it’s just water!
Megan Frost:
I try not to buy water. I feel foolish when I do. I was given a huge tervis tumbler as a gift and I keep it in my office. It has really helped my water consumption. But we have one of those fancy water dispensers at work. I don’t know if it is filtered, doubt it. But the water is cold.
If I’m out and am parched or at lunch where bottled beverages are the only choice, I’ll get a tea or something else, just so I don’t buy water.
However, that being said, sometimes I forget my Nalgene when I go to the gym, then I suck it up and spend $1.50 on water. But I HATE doing it. I probably spend less than $5 a month buying water.
I generally just drink water from the tap, but I let it run until it gets cold. Which is partially a temperature thing, and partially a habit I picked up from my dad running the tap for a while in the morning, to get the lead out of the pipes for the coffee water, or to not use water that had been sitting in the pipes overnight. Or whatever it was. Haha. Hmm.
Photo by sean macentee
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