What Jonathan Van Ness Can’t Live Without

I’ll play with my Nintendo Switch at home with certain friends, but for the most part, I use it when I’m traveling and when I’m on a plane. I mostly stick to Mario Brothers and Mario Kart because that’s what I played as a kid. I don’t play Zelda so much. But I should, oh my gosh, I should try. I just hate learning new games. New ones stress me out.

My really good friend and makeup artist started using one of these easels for their iPhone and I was like, “oh my gosh, that’s so silly.” And then, within a day, I was like, “I need one.” It’s the most amazing thing. It frees up your hands so you don’t have to hold your phone so much. If I’m eating at the table, like at home eating, I’ll put my phone on it while I’m reading the news so I can eat and use both hands.

I love these. After you blow-dry your hair or after you do your style, you kind of smooth your little flyaways down and use these clips to keep your hair in place until right before you walk out of the door. They’re so convenient.

I just adore the Dyson blow dryer. It doesn’t overheat your hair, and it’s so compact and light. She’s also really durable and dries your hair a lot quicker than other hair dryers.

I use Spotify a lot. I listen to The Daily on there, I listen to all my podcasts on there (except now that I think about it, I also listen to them on Apple — don’t aggravate the podcast gods). And I use it to listen to a ton of songs. I like the mixes they put together and I also have my little “getting ready” playlist that I’ve been assembling over like, the last year and a half. Whenever I like a song I just throw it on there — that’s what I listen to mostly.

The Litter-Robot changed my life. She’s a little bit pricey, but I like it because you really can’t smell your cats — and I have four cats, so that’s important. It has a motion detector in it, so after the cat jumps out of there, it waits a minute and then it rotates and all the clumps of cat waste get sifted into this drawer underneath the Litter-Robot. Then the clean litter just kind of sifts back through. So it cleans the poo like every time the cat goes in and out of it.

I always felt a kinship with Mr. Peanut because we both have really aggressive handlebar mustaches. So getting to work with Planters, especially for Movember, is important to me. I think that some of the pressures that men face, it can add an extra layer of difficulty — historically it’s not been dinner-table conversation to talk about our testicular health or our prostate health. But as we’ve seen in the last ten, 20 years, it’s ever-more increasingly important to talk about our reproductive health, for men as well. I think any way that we can help talk about men’s health, I’m down to talk about it. And I’ve always loved a little peanut afternoon snack because it’s just kind of easy and gets me a little protein and gives me a little bit of energy. These gorgeous smoked peanuts are just like, why are they so tasty? I don’t know who gave them permission to be.